Special Educational Needs Dail Éireann — 2025-12-11 ============================================================ Jen Cummins (SD), Dublin South-Central The plan is that the Department will allocate places over the next few days. If it then realises that there is further capacity, is the Department going to reopen the portal so that all of those late applications will be able to be considered as well? We are in one process currently, but an announcement has just been made that will affect the school year after next. It is important not to confuse the two issues because there is huge confusion and fear out there with regard to that. Will the Department be able to open up the portal again so that it can have a true vision of what is actually needed? If an assessment of need is no longer needed, how will schools know what needs a child has? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-11