Special Needs Assistants: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-24
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Hildegarde Naughton (FG), Galway West

I fully appreciate and endorse the need to ensure all special education policies are child-centred and designed to assist young people thrive in school and help them to reach their full potential. That is why the Government has provided more special education teachers and more SNAs, doubled the number of special classes, opened 16 new special schools in the last five years and massively increased investment in the summer programme, which has seen a threefold increase in its budget. To say that the Government is not funding resources for children with special educational needs is a mistruth. To say that the Government was proposing to make hundreds of SNAs redundant is simply wrong. To be clear, there are currently 23,179 SNAs working in schools across the country. Last year, there were 21,579. Next September, there will be 24,896 SNAs. Clearly, there was no proposal to make SNAs redundant. It is disingenuous of any party in this House to say so.
It is useful to speak to the role of the National Council for Special Education in this area. The NCSE has responsibility for co-ordinating and advising on the education provision and care support for children and young people with special educational needs in our schools. This includes the allocation of special needs assistant support to schools. I fully support the NCSE in its work. It is important to give some context on how the NCSE reviews take place. Special educational needs organisers, SENOs, are from various professional backgrounds and include occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, school principals, special education teachers, early intervention specialists, SNAs and mainstream class teachers. These SENOs undertake school reviews. The NCSE has always undertaken SNA reviews. In the 2024-2025 school year, around 1,400 reviews were conducted. In the current school year, some 1,000 reviews were completed.
Schools are notified in advance of a review, and the NCSE undertakes a robust process to ensure that reviews are based on the care needs of an individual school because, as Members of the House are aware, SNAs are allocated to schools, and not individual children.

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Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-24