Special Educational Needs Dail Éireann — 2021-11-23 ============================================================ Josepha Madigan (FG), Dublin Rathdown I commend the school on taking the initiative to contact the NCSE in the first instance. If the NCSE agrees in future to open a special class, if there is demand, it and the Department give funding either to reconfigure accommodation or to provide new accommodation. It is also important to stress that when a school is opening a special class, there are additional grants. There is a start-up grant of about €6,500, there is an ICT grant that I think is €6,700, and there are a number of other grants as well. We are always encouraging schools to open special classes. All new schools from this year will automatically provide SEN facilities, so we will not be having a conversation like this in years to come. It will be automatically worked out. A better forecasting model is now in place so we can see where the future demographic growth will be and where that demand will arise in future. --- 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/2021-11-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:51+00:00 Sitting date: 2021-11-23