Special schools forced to navigate a confusing 'quagmire' for in-school supports
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Like all mothers, Orlaith Kerrigan has ambitions for her children’s education.
Her eight-year-old son Luke is a student at Kolbe Special School. The school in Laois specifically caters for children within the severe to profound learning disability spectrum.
Luke, who has autism, an intellectual disability, and ADHD, has attended a special school since the age of five.
“I have the same literacy and numeracy aspirations for Luke as I do for all my children,” Orlaith said. “I hope that he can live up to his potential. In Luke’s case, I think that would be recognising his name. He can count to 10. They sound like little things, but actually they are huge. He can make choices, and that’s all really important for things like self-advocacy.”
Luke needed a lot of therapeutic support to get to this stage, she added.
“It’s only now we can tend to his education.
Orlaith will be among the parents, principals, special needs assistants (SNAs), and teachers who today travel to Leinster House to highlight the impact that the removal of therapists from special schools has had on education.
Special schools across the country have seen their access to essential in-school supports for their students — such as speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, and physiotherapy — severely curtailed and restricted in recent years.
Overlapping with the closure of schools during the pandemic, the issue stems from the introduction of the HSE’s Progressing Disabilities Services (PDS) model for children and young people. Under the model, services were reconfigured and clinicians were relocated from their special schools and onto Children’s Disability Network Teams (CDNTs).
These teams, which are managed by the HSE and voluntary disability organisations, have faced their own set of challenges. Significant staff vacancies coupled with increasing referrals mean caseloads have grown.
Responsibility in this area is also seemingly spilt — with some overlap between departments, different agencies, and Government ministers.
The HSE says “on occasion” it may see the children it supports in their school or pre-school. It points the responsibility for education services “including supports for children with special educational needs” towards the Department of Education and the National Council for Special Education (NCSE).
The Department of Education says the provision of therapy supports for individual children, whether in mainstream or special schools, is a “matter for the HSE”.
Separately, the Department of Children and Disability is responsible for “policy, legislation, investment, and oversight of specialist services” for disabled people.
Through the years, there have been pledges that therapists will be returned to special schools — the most recent of which came last month. While some services have been reinstated and some pilot projects have been announced, overall progress has been slow as it has been affected by the shortage of health and social care professionals.
Succinctly, Ms Kerrigan describes the background to all this as a confusing “quagmire”.
Meanwhile, in the middle of it all are the children who need a huge amount of support to get them into the right frame to learn. In-school support is essential for children with cognitive impairments as they are typically dealing with a level of dysregulation, she explained.
“That can be sensory; The environment around you is too bright, too loud, too quiet, you need to move a lot. It can also be a kind of anxiety through not communicating through speech; You’re not able to get your meaning across.
“You need a speech therapist, not even to teach you how to speak but to put in place a communication system for you or to help you make choices, or even help you to realise that you can affect change in your environment by holding up cards or visuals or things like that.
“Children who are operating on that level, I’m not sure how they are supposed to access an education when their challenges are coming before they can sit down and learn.”
She said parents of children in special schools are allowed to have academic aspirations for their children.
“The teacher and the SNA who are there to support [Luke’s] learning, because there is no therapeutic support in the school, their role is really managing Luke and helping him with his regulation when their role really should be helping him with the numeracy and literacy targets we have for him.”
Luke is in a class of six students. “There are six children at that same level of need and at that same level of cognitive impairment. They need the same level of regulation. The teacher is doing this by six, the SNAs are doing this by six. What comes at the cost of that then is education.”
Sue Lenihan is the principal at St Killian’s in Cork, Munster’s largest special school. The school has had to fight to secure short-term access to in-school therapists.
Ms Lenihan will be among the group addressing TDs on Tuesday.
“The work for a school is to get the child into a place where they are able to learn. Being able to learn means that you feel comfortable, you feel safe, you feel understood, that you feel that you can communicate what you need, and that you can explain how you feel, however that might be.
“All of these things are very important — the level of security, care, and attention — otherwise you couldn’t learn.
“Some children settle into new settings a lot quicker than others, some children take a lot more time. It just depends on the level of need.”
She said every child is different.
“The therapeutic piece is vital in terms of settling a child and making sure they feel happy in their body, that they can regulate themselves, and that they can be safe.
“When they are more themselves, when they are not highly anxious, they are not highly escalated, learning can happen then. Part of learning is learning to regulate.”
Caroline Kelly is the deputy principal at the Offaly School of Special Education. The school has seen a dramatic reduction in regular visits from therapists following the introduction of the network teams.
When Ms Kelly first started teaching at the school 15 years ago, two physiotherapists visited the school’s class for students with a profound disability on a weekly basis.
“They would also visit the wider school community as well, but their main focus every Thursday would be for the blue class as we call it.”
About three years ago, and as part of the formation of the teams, these two physios were moved from the school.
They had been in place for about 10 years prior on an ad-hoc basis. The school was told they would be replaced, but they have not yet seen the same level of regular support restored. She describes it as a “broken cycle”.
“It’s so sad for our children to not have these things in place that make such a big difference; To us as teachers, to their families, but then more importantly to them.
The school has seen a deterioration in the health of some of its students who no longer receive regular support from physiotherapists.
“We have seen an increase in hospitalisations, and a lot of it is respiratory problems. When you read up about the impact physio can have, it definitely has an impact on their chest and on their muscle tone and on relieving pain.
“They are coming in to school now and they are typically just sitting in their chairs for up to eight hours, where they used to maybe get into a walker, a stander, or get out onto a waterbed.
“They are not accessing the programmes.”