OCO report highlights scramble to find school places for children with Special Educational Needs

There is still a scramble every September to find appropriate school places for children with Special Educational Needs, despite progress made by Government in recent years to prioritise the issue. That’s according to Plan for Places, Two Years On from the Ombudsman for Children’s Office (OCO), which examines whether progress has been made on recommendations made in our previous Plan for Places report in 2022, on the Forward Planning for the Provision of School Places for Children with Special Educational Needs (SEN). Department of Education figures provided to the OCO on September 2nd show 126 children with SEN are currently without a school place this September.

The OCO welcomes several notable improvements since the report’s publication, including the enactment of the Education (Provision in Respect of Children with Special Educational Needs) Act 2022, the publication of National Council for Special Education (NCSE) Policy Advice on Special Schools and Classes, as well as the recent establishment of a Cabinet Committee on Children, Education and Disability. However, the unacceptable situation faced by children with SEN and their families in securing appropriate school places close to their homes, as is their right, has not gone away. There is still no comprehensive and coherent plan to ensure that every child with SEN has a school place locally in a timely manner. We are also concerned about insufficient data for both the planning for, and monitoring of, the quality of these school places.

Commenting on Plan for Places, Two Years On, the Ombudsman for Children, Dr Niall Muldoon, said:

“We are undoubtedly in a better place when it comes to prioritising the issue of school places for children with SEN than when our first Plan for Places report came out two years ago and we welcome steps taken by the Department of Education to get to grips with this issue. However, we are still seeing a scramble every year from June to September every year to find school places for children with SEN – particularly at second level – who have not been accounted for in the official forecasting. This is putting a huge amount of stress and strain on their families.

“We made a number of recommendations in our original report to address these issues, and while progress has been made, we are still not where we need to be, particularly when it comes to engaging with children with SEN and their families and including them in decisions that impact them.

“It is critical that we have the right data to enable sufficient forward planning for school places, but it is equally important to track the suitability and quality of the individual’s child journey through the school system.

“As we now begin another school year with reassurances from the Department that every child with SEN known to them has a school place, we also need to be confident that that place is appropriate for the child and is in their local area.

“We know for example, that in the 2023-24 school year 19,800 children with SEN had to use the School Transport Scheme to get to school, an increase of over 2,000 children since our last report was published.

“We also note that there was an increase in the number of children accessing the Home Tuition Grant scheme last year due to the lack of appropriate school places, rising from 69 to 135 on the previous school year. Our original report recommended that home tuition should be used only as it was intended- as a temporary emergency measure and tool of last resort. Therefore, this rise is extremely disappointing and shows once again the need to adequately address deficiencies in the Department’s current prediction model and move to comprehensive forward planning for children with SEN.

“Crucially, it is fundamental that there is a demonstrated move toward a fully inclusive education system. This is something that Ireland was pulled up on by two UN Committees (the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)) in their examinations of the State since our original report was published.

“We need to work towards a future where all children living within a community enter through the same school gate and are given an equal learning experience in an environment that accommodates their individual needs. Only then can we say we have a truly inclusive education system that every child is entitled to.”

ENDS

Read the report in full here.

• 4 September 2024
• Type: Press Release
• Topic: Education