Special Educational Needs
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-19
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Michael Moynihan (FF), Cork North-West

A script will be handed around, but I will deal with the issue without the script. I thank all Members for their engagement and the seriousness with which they are treating this issue. I take on board all of the matters that have been raised.
I will talk about the policy first. Since the 2014 document, more than 12,000 extra SNAs have been recruited and are working in the system. We have expanded considerably. There is a view going around that we have gone back to the 2014 document and that this is where the cuts are coming from. However, the SNA workforce has expanded considerably over the period since 2014.
I take the concerns of parents, schools and children on board. I understand full well the importance of SNAs. In every school community that I go into, I have said that we have built special education on the backs of SNAs. I acknowledge the enormous work they do. We have increased the SNA population by 45%, to 25,000, in recent years. The SNA workforce is hugely valued.
I am constantly asked this week, "What is the pause?". The pause means that we have stopped in relation to the decisions that were taken and communicated to schools last week. To be fair to everybody, we have stopped all of it. In May or June, information on the allocation of SNAs would normally go out to schools. We brought that back this year because I firmly believe that we need to have earlier communication. We brought back the notification for families with additional educational needs to October. I firmly believe that we need to bring communication back to earlier in the school cycle. We want to communicate earlier, but we are pausing what was being done because we are looking at the totality of the issue of special education assistance.
To speak to the Deputy's point, we do not want the schools to be in limbo. We want to make sure that they have certainty as soon as possible. We have had a number of intensive engagements over the past 24 to 48 hours in relation to this issue. We will continue to engage over the coming days. We will be bringing clarity as early as possible as to the steps forward. I take on board what the Deputies said.
Deputy Boyd Barrett mentioned Johnstown and the cliff edge of the five SNAs being taken out of it. We cannot have that. We have to have a continuous enrolment and we have to ensure that the value that we have in the SNAs is following the children. We must ensure that the children with the greatest need and those who require the help have the SNAs. If they have the SNAs, it will allow them to flourish and grow within their school communities and to have better outcomes in life as well. Many people would not be able to attend school unless they had the SNAs.
We need everybody on board. We need the Department, the school communities, parents, and unions on board and we need to have a system that everybody has faith in. One of the challenges that we are now tackling is the reviews. We should have been doing reviews every second year or every year so that schools would understand the role of the NCSE, there would be interaction with the school communities and families so that they would have better information. We have to make sure that we have confidence in what we are doing. Families and school principals have contacted me, and I have spoken to many of them in the past week in particular. I assure them that we will do the right thing by them and particularly by the children who need the support in schools.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-19