Episode 2: Soft Barriers

In this episode I explore the role of the National Council for Special Education (NCSE), a quango responsible for organising resources for special education. I trace the NCSE's establishment in 2003 and its subsequent decline in effectiveness, particularly since the detrimental effects of budget cuts since 2008. The NCSE's lack of adequate support, arbitrary allocation of resources, and controversial response to government cuts are all scrutinised. I argue that despite the increasing number of children with special needs, support has been reduced, leading to a progressively worse situation for these children. And when schools spoke out against the cuts, it was the NCSE, not the government that said schools were putting in soft barriers to stop children accessing support.

Welcome to access the collapse of special education, a special podcast from Unsha.net.

this is Simon Lewis, a teacher and principal for over 20 years.

In this series I'm going to look back over the short history of how children with additional needs have slowly but surely been cast aside the education system.

I argue that much like the crimes of the Catholic Church on children, where the scandal of the 20th century, that how the state is treating children with additional needs will be the scandal of the 21st.

And there's one agency that you're going to be hearing a lot about over the next short while.

They were the ones who coined a phrase.

You're going to hear a lot those with the greatest need.

But before we get into that, let's find out who these people are and where did they come from.

Many people working in schools might be surprised to hear that few people have heard of the NCSE, and many people not working in schools might be surprised to hear a considerable number of school staff who dont know what the NCSE is either.

However, if you have any involvement with children with additional needs, either as a family member or as a member of staff in a school, there is no doubt you know exactly who they are.

So who are the NCSC, what do they do?

And why am I more interested in them rather than the ministers responsible for special education?

You're going to hear a lot of repeated imagery throughout this podcast about tangled Christmas decorations, and it almost seems appropriate to have a particular piece of music playing in the background.

Whatever time of the year you're listening to this, whatever time of the day.

The NCSC is, is the National Council for Special Education and is one of a number of agencies that are state funded or partially state funded.

It can officially be called a quango because it is a quango, a quasi non government organization.

In other words, it's an organization that the government has devolved its power but still finances it.

The word quango is used almost always in a defamatory way in general anyway, and I want to be open with you from the very start.

I have almost nothing good to say about the NCSE, although it didn't start that way.

If you're listening to this as it comes out, and not that long, and it formally came about as part of the Epson act, which we'll discuss again at a later stage.

For now, all you need to know is it stands for the education of persons with special needs act and it was supposed to ensure that every child would receive an inclusive education.

Most importantly, it has yet to be fully implemented by the government as of today.

Now I should say before I start that in this podcast I will be interchanging between the terms special educational needs and additional educational needs.

The termspecial educational needs is going out of fashion at the moment, so please don't take offense if you're listening to this in the future.

And I'm using special educational needs rather than additional educational needs.

It's not through any malintention, it's just the language we're using currently in schools.

At some point it is likely these terms will become outdated.

So as of today, please forgive me if these terms have gone out of date.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's find out what the NCSE is, why it's there, and what it's supposed to be doing.

I always think the best place to start when finding out about an organization is to go to their website and find their about us page.

And if you go to the NCSE webpage NCSE ie, you will see the following and this is what they say about themselves the National Council for Special Education was set up to improve the delivery of education services to persons with special educational needs arising from disabilities, with particular emphasis on children.

The council was first established as an independent statutory body.

Bye.

It goes on.

Our local service is delivered through our national network of special educational needs organisers who interact with parents and schools and liaise with the HSE in providing resources to support children with special educational needs.

So far, that sounds very nice.

And in my view, for what its worth, it did initially.

To be fair, at that time in classrooms there simply werent as many children in mainstream classes with diagnosed additional needs.

And when I think of my first few years as a primary teacher, I had an SNA in every class that I ever taught.

I remember the children that had an SNA.

It was an SNA that was assigned to them because back in that day, snas were assigned to just one pupil.

I remember some of my colleagues having more than one SNA in their classroom, and I can honestly say, without a word of exaggeration, none of the children that I had in my classroom would get SNA support today.

Essentially, once a psychological report recommended an SNA, a child would get an SNA.

The person that would organize that SNA was called the Seno.

Remember that from the description from the NCSE, the special education needs organizer.

The most important letter in that acronym, Seno, is O, and that stands for organizer, not decision maker organizer.

Her job, mainly it was a.

Her job was to take your paperwork and organise for the resources recommended to be provided.

And that's how things worked.

If you had a child with a diagnosis of autism and a recommendation for a full time SNA, you would send the psychological report to the CNO and the CINO would organize for five teaching hours for this child and a full time SNA to start in the school.

It was as simple as that.

The CINO's job wasn't really to make decisions, it was to organize the resources that the children were entitled to based on a psychological report.

Now, I've got a lot to go through in this episode, so I won't go through what diagnoses received, what allocation of hours, but I'll leave the link to them.

In the show notes.

I mentioned, by the way, that autism diagnoses received five teaching hours a week.

Other diagnoses received other numbers of hours of additional support from a support teacher based on their diagnosis.

However, what made this allocation system more robust was not only did children with diagnoses receive support, a system which was called general allocation was also in place on top of these resource hours.

So depending on the size of your school, a baseline of support hours was also implemented, and the Department of Education reasons this.

The general allocation scheme is designed to ensure that all pupils have enough resource teaching hours to meet the immediate needs of pupils with high incident special educational needs and those who require learning support.

It reflects the fact that most schools would have children with these needs.

So ultimately, this basically meant that for every five classes a school had, permanent full time support teacher was hired, 5 hours per class teacher.

So taking a school with 100 pupils, six with a diagnosis of autism, and four class teachers, this would equate to 30 hours plus 20 hours.

That's 50 hours or two support teachers.

If half of the children with the diagnosis need a full time SNA, well, you guessed it, there would have been three snas hired.

It was simple and it was actually reasonably effective.

I also worked in a school that was one of the first in the country to have special classes, and I remember that the setup of the classes was exactly the same as it is today.

One teacher and at least two snas.

When I say at least two snas, there may have been the same argument that people have today for a third SNA in the class and there would be six children in the class maximum.

One of the children integrated into my class for an hour or so a few times a week.

Again, back in those days, just having a diagnosis of autism was enough to warrant a place in a special class.

That's no longer the case today.

But today that child who integrated for just about an hour for a day in my class, it's very unlikely he would have been eligible for a special class.

So what was wrong with this system?

How did the NCSE feel there was a need for change?

Well, maybe one or two things.

I dont think anyone felt the baseline general allocation model was a bad idea at that time.

It seemed like one support teacher for every five class teachers was something if not enough, it was at least something that you knew was going to help.

And when it was combined with the resource hours for children with diagnoses, given that about ten to 20% of most classrooms had a child with diagnosis, you were generally looking at at least another support teacher and probably an SNA or two in a school of that size.

However, the first issue with this allocation of support hours was in fairness, they were fairly arbitrary.

For example, an autistic child always got 5 hours a week of resource hours whether they needed them or not.

And this kind of situation where different diagnoses received different arbitrary amounts of hours led to two possible scenarios.

Firstly, a parent might find a psychologist who would be happy to diagnose autism to a child with adhd, or perhaps nothing.

Why would any parent do something like that?

You might ask, why would any psychologist be as corrupt as that?

You might ask.

Well, both existed.

The better question might have been why parents were sending their children to private psychologists.

So the reality was we never actually had enough public psychologists that would work with children to give non biased diagnoses.

The service that could have and should have been better resourced in order to perform these diagnoses is called NEPs, the National Educational Psychologists Service.

And again, well get back to them later.

A second problem was that if you were a family who couldnt afford a private assessment from a psychologist, you werent going to get a diagnosis and therefore you werent going to get support for your child.

And I know youre probably thinking it and youre right.

Funnily enough, the solution to problem number two is also neps.

But as I said, well come back to that later.

Supported by representative bodies, they are all responsible for the 21st century's greatest scandal in education.

It's a time we'd all like to forget.

A time when almost every single person in Ireland felt the pinch of Fianna Fall's reckless control of the economy as house prices crumbled, wages were sliced and almost every public service had to make what the government called adjustments.

For many of us, the decade or so of what was known as the emergency is a horrible memory.

But for children with additional needs, the recession never ended.

And in fact it's getting worse and worse every year since.

Now, even in those dark times in the depths of the recession, nobody in Ireland could defend any government who would target their cuts to the most vulnerable people in society.

Firstly, they said goodbye to the resource teacher for travellers, claiming the resource teacher for travellers didn't want to exist in the first place and it should have been a sign of things to come.

Next they hit the English as additional language teachers.

That's the teacher for children with English as a second language or a third language than that spoken at home.

The government used to provide a teacher for every certain number of children.

I think at the beginning was around twelve, and then they cut the number of teachers for the deaf, visually impaired and then they kept cutting and cutting and cutting.

However, I feel one of the most awful cuts of all because it affected so many children, and maybe it's no worse than the previous ones I've mentioned, was a 15% reduction in resource hours to children with additional needs.

Overnight, children who were receiving a certain number of hours per week were cut by 15%.

Rory Quinn, the minister for education at the time, tried to even reduce it to a further 25% a little later, but thankfully didnt succeed.

The thing is, im not interested in Rory Quinn.

I dont even blame him.

I dont think he was even making the decisions.

I dont think ministers for education really make too many decisions.

As I mentioned in the previous episode, ive learned that people who dont work directly in education, dont understand anything to do with special education.

And poor Rory Quinn was probably fed some lovely spin that this wasnt a cut at all and in effect the number of resource hours being allocated was in fact the same.

It just had to be shared out among more children.

And thats exactly what he said.

And he went further to say sure its only six minutes less an hour per child, no big deal, and maybe you won't understand why.

I don't blame Rory Quinn, but I've also learned, as I said, that ministers for education tend to be told what to say 90% of the time and they react to things that happen from what they say.

As I said, Rory Quinn tried to him personally tried to further cut special education hours by to 25% but because of the public outcry they stuck to the 15%.

What I am interested in is the NCSE's reaction, the government will do what they get away with.

What I'm interested in is how people react to it.

And the NCSC's vision, as we heard, was to improve the services for children with additional needs.

And you know this is the thing that we said, they need to make sure that they would improve the delivery of educational services to people and with the emphasis on children.

Sorry, I'm just quoting it there.

So here's another quote for you.

After Rory Quinn announced the 15% cut to resource hours for children with additional needs, this is what the NCSE said.

They released a statement and they don't actually refer at the all to the 15% cut.

Instead, the CEO at the time, Theresa Griffin, stated, and I'm quoting Miss Theresa Griffin, CEO of the NCSE, said that despite the difficult economic climate, the NCSE is very pleased that there is continuing government commitment to supporting special educational needs as it goes on.

The NCSE supports an inclusive education system that enables children and adults with special needs to achieve their potential.

We believe that these supports are vital so that children with additional needs can receive an appropriate education.

Now, im only few sentences into this statement and if youd skipped the last few minutes you might be wondering what the problem is with phrases like the highest levels ever and 38% and 24% increase.

There isnt a single mention that there had been a 15% cut to the resource hours.

She didn't just welcome it, she very much welcomed it.

There wasn't one word about the 15% cut.

Not one word.

In fact, in the appendix to the press release, the NCSE made a couple of lists and they were really pointed in how they were presented.

There was a list of the number of snas in Ireland and a list of the number of resource teachers that had been employed in Ireland.

So they went from 20 06, 20 07, 20 08 all the way up.

And in each year it showed an increase of SNA allocation, as you would expect.

They skipped the years in between, basically whitewashing the cuts that have been imposed before then.

It's only when you look at these things on, in black and white on paper there that you can see how blatant this was.

But the question remained, why were they spinning this?

Why were they spinning these lies?

It was left to schools to try and explain this 15% cut to resource hours and it was they that had to tell families, im sorry, we just cant give your child the hours they used to be entitled to.

They began saying to families, we just simply cant get an SNA for your child because of the cuts.

And many parents found themselves in situations where even though their child had a report which stated they required SNA support, they just weren't getting it.

The parents were left in a position where they had to decide whether to send their child into a school without the supports they needed.

And when parents started kicking up a fuss, Rory Quinn was again able to rely on the NCSE for a response.

And that response was, well, the NCSE hit out at the schools.

They began to blame the schools, claiming they were actually creating soft barriers to families.

And all schools were actually fully funded, apparently, and I quote, we are fully funded and resourced to provide an educational services to all children.

It was an astounding claim.

Why would the NCSE accept a 15% cut to services for children with additional needs and then turn on the schools claiming they were to blame?

With Rory Quinn, various options were put to us, but on reflection and following the cabinet subcommittee that met yesterday.

In the light of concerns that parents were expressing and the fact that I had a contingency reserve of 500 teachers in anticipation of extra demand coming in towards the autumn of the season, we decided to do three things.

First and foremost, to implement speedily the recommendation from the NCSE to look for a new model of allocation.

This has been recommended for some time now because the allocation of resources is uneven and somewhat arbitrary across the country.

They're going to give me an interim report by September of this year.

It's being chaired by the chairman of the NCSE, Mister Eamonn Stack, who's also a former chief inspector with the department, very well respected and known in educational circles.

Could it be that the NCSE decided that in order to get their new model for SCT allocation to happen, they needed to play ball and not criticise the cuts made by the governments?

I dont know the answer to that question, but that is exactly what happened over the coming few years when the NCSE decided they were going to introduce a new model for allocating supports for children with additional needs, and in doing so began a series of steps that has effectively made the NCSE a bloated, top heavy quongo where the needs of children have disimproved and the only soft barriers in place now are created by them.

Where around 92% of schools say that when they apply for resources they are unsuccessful despite the NCSE never seeing child.

And that's where we'll travel to next to the set allocation model, where the NCSE began their steps of withdrawing from their initial mission to provide an appropriate education for children with additional education needs.

Within a few years of this new model, the NCSE had almost no data on the needs of a single child attending a mainstream class and simply told schools to allocate an ever diminishing number of supports to the greatest level of the onsharnet.

The Onshod.net podcast is written and produced by me, Simon Lewis.

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Until next time, thanks so much for listening.

Goodbye.