We Care Collective calls for ringfenced Special Educational Needs (SEN) staffing, additional Covid staff cover for mainstream and SEN, and online/home tuition for SEN students, Friday 7th January 2022
Authored by Liz Kyte, on behalf of We Care Collective, www.wecarecollective.ie
As the schools reopened yesterday (6th January 2022), We Care Collective, a campaign and support group for parents and carers of children with additional needs, welcomes the Department of Education’s stated commitment to prioritising in-school learning for children with additional needs, younger children and exam students.
However, We Care Collective members were alarmed to hear the Irish Primary Principals’ Network (IPPN) President, Brian O’Doherty comment that given the anticipated shortage of substitute teachers, ‘schools need to be prepared to redeploy special-needs assistants [SNAs] and special needs teachers’ (Irish Times, 5th January 2022). The National Principals’ Forum confirmed from its own survey that this was indeed what happened, with 45 percent of schools polled using a member of SET (special education teachers) to cover a class (National Principals’ Forum, 6th January 2022).
Redeploying members of SET to cover Covid staffing shortfalls will in effect exclude the very children who are meant to be prioritised for in-school learning, because those children cannot safely or meaningfully engage with education without SEN resources. Some children are flight risks, need behavioural or social supports, or experience high levels of anxiety or sensory processing issues. These make the day to day experience of being in school a massive challenge without the specialist techniques, experience and care of our talented and dedicated SNAs and SETs. For children on reduced timetables of a few hours, a redeployment of their SNA or SET to cover a class will realistically result in their exclusion from school. One hopes that cover for the SNAs and SETS who will also be absent due to Covid will also be addressed and provision made for the SEN children who will have to learn from home if their classes are closed.
The Children’s Ombudsman has reported the disproportionate impact that school closures during successive lockdowns have had on vulnerable students and children with additional needs in particular. It is well understood now that children with additional needs find it harder to learn at home or online without the SEN supports they have in the classroom. It is fundamentally unsafe and unjust to remove SEN resources at the drop of a hat without consideration of the impact on vulnerable children or of alternative supports being put in place. This seems a particularly cruel blow given the excessive work and stress placed on parents who have often waited for years to get assessments and diagnoses for their children in order to access the most miserly supports currently available in schools and from the Children’s Disability Services.
As parents we set up We Care Collective in January 2021 in frustration at our children once again being denied SEN learning when the proposed earlier phased re-opening of schools during the second Covid wave was stymied by a lack of agreement between teaching unions and the Department of Education. During the first Covid wave there was neither SEN provision, nor children’s disability services. Parent and Cllr Carly Bailey, Social Democrat representative for Rathfarnham and Templeogue recently revealed in the Joint Committee on Disability Matters (23rd September 2021) that those staff were quietly seconded to track and trace duties. Our children’s needs were belatedly acknowledged when schools eventually re-opened for children with additional needs in late February/early March 2021 and a home tutor scheme was finally implemented after a year of the pandemic.
Removing resources from the most vulnerable students cannot be the default solution to Covid staffing shortages because it implies that the needs of children with additional needs aren’t really that important, that they are an inconvenient burden on an already overstretched education system, and that their supports are therefore dispensable. This should be unthinkable. Special educational needs resources are intended to support the most vulnerable children in our schools. They are invariably hard fought for by parents, and they are already woefully inadequate.
We feel compelled to speak out about this issue because it is morally repugnant that yet again the most vulnerable in our society take the hardest hit. As if to further underscore the subordination of children with additional needs to the typically developing population, a profit-driven economy and uncaring bureaucracy, Paul Reid, head of the HSE, yesterday evening apologised after high-risk children were passed over for vaccination due to a scheduling error (The Journal.ie, 6 January 2022). We can only conclude that both of these instances of carelessness reveal a thinly veiled and inconvenient truth in a country which perceives itself to have become more liberalising, tolerant and just; children with additional needs do not have the same rights to education and they are not afforded full human rights in Ireland.
We Care Collective is calling for:
· SEN resources to be ringfenced to protect our most vulnerable children
· Additional resources to provide pandemic cover for mainstream and SEN staff covid absenses
· More creative use of SEN resources such as home tuition and online SEN support.
Contact Details: http://wecarecollective.ie/#contact