The mid-west has the lowest allocation of school psychological services, with just 29 per cent of primary and post-primary schools catered for, compared to 94 per cent of schools in the eastern region (east coast area).
More psychological resources have been targeted at particular schools in deprived areas of the south-western region of the Eastern Regional Health Authority, but overall only 69 per cent of schools are served.
These statistics are contained in the report of the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, which investigated the National Educational Psychological Service (NEPS).
The report gives insights into the huge backlog of cases arising from the shortage of psychologists that has kept thousands of children waiting for assessment.
The report says there was no anticipation of the level of demand that would occur when, in the autumn of 1998, the Minister for Education and Science announced an automatic entitlement to psychological services for primary school children with special needs.
"Almost immediately there was a noticeable increase in the number of referrals for individual assessment," the report says.
There are 123 psychologists employed by the NEPS, as opposed to an original target of 184.
Private psychologists have been paid €2 million in the past 18 months in an attempt to deal with the backlog of assessments.
The Department has not had the resources to produce a financial management system capable of yielding an authoritative unit cost per assessment.
It intends to redirect resources by eliminating the need for individual assessments.
The Department has developed a weighting database to help determine the best way of deploying psychologists.
The system takes into account the levels of children with special needs, the level of disadvantage and the size of the school.
Getting psychologists to work for the Department has been a huge problem.
The accounting officer of the Department of Education and Science told the Auditor General that the difficulty of recruiting psychologists to work in the mid-west was of particular concern to the Department.
The NEPS undertook 4,536 assessments in the 2001-2002 school year. However, the Auditor General noted that a report by the planning group in 1998 had cautioned that casework narrowed the focus and limited the usefulness of the psychologist's intervention.