Support for children with special educational needs (SEN) in Northern Ireland is “weak” and risks limiting their potential in life after school, fear educators with expertise in the sector.
Their concerns about SEN support include funding, staffing, access and a failure to diagnose pupils early enough.
These issues were raised at a Policy Forum for Northern Ireland event this month, “Priorities for SEN provision in NI”, where speakers shared a sense of urgency about the situation.
Mairead Tracey, a teacher at Foundation Stage (the first two years of primary school) and a special educational needs and disability coordinator (Sendco), called for more early intervention before children start nursery or P1 because many are starting school with “unmet needs”.
There were also clear signs, she said, that parents needed more targeted support and a better understanding of how to help their child develop fundamental skills. Dr Tracey had seen, for example, “an increase in children starting mainstream school who lack basic self-help skills such as toileting”.
Finding classroom assistants was becoming increasingly difficult, she added. Factors including “challenging working conditions” and low salaries meant that “some of the most exceptional classroom assistants” were leaving their jobs for more secure work with “less stress and a better rate of pay”.
SEN support overstretched
Meanwhile, workload and paperwork was “absolutely unsurmountable” for Sendcos, Dr Tracey said. She saw an urgent need to address the volume of work done by Sendcos outside of their contracted hours.
She was also concerned that Northern Irish schools were being given an “impossible task” because of a limited number of educational psychologists.
“This means that we’re not able to cater for all of the children who would benefit from an assessment,” said Dr Tracey. “For example, children who present with dyslexia often do not get seen by the educational psychologist due to pressures within the system, and therefore they don’t receive their diagnosis.”
Stephen McCartney, head of student experience at Northern Regional College, said that many young people coming into further education are doing so “because school hasn’t been a great experience for them”. He warned that “tinkering around the edges of our current system will not fix it” and that it is “limping along”.
Mr McCartney, who trained and worked as a primary school teacher in mainstream and special schools, added: “I understand how difficult it is to have 30 young people in a room with you, trying to differentiate the curriculum to them every day - are Sencos given the time to work through the process to help children get the help they need?
“My worry is that the foundations are weak [and] it does not bode well for their future either in college, university or the world of work.”
James Curran, principal at Harberton Special School, in Belfast, was blunt in his assessment: “There’s not enough money in the system.”
He added that while mainstream school headteachers had “control over the entire budget for their school”, special school heads had less control. He called for change, as “we are best placed to manage the money as effectively as possible...as opposed to having to wait on somebody else making a decision about what is best for our school”.
Christine Kearney, director of development at Autism NI, raised concerns about “inconsistent support, especially in the transition from primary to secondary school”.
She called for mandatory autism training for school staff to help schools make best use of the resources available to them.
Primary to secondary transition was also a big issue for Dr Tracey, who said that students who were clearly dyslexic had started secondary school with no official diagnosis.
“We feel like we’re failing them,” she said. “Many of those children need to be told that, ‘You know, you’re not stupid. You just have a condition and there should be things in place to meet your needs.’”
Dr Tracey highlighted the impact of the shock announcement in March about the end of Healthy Happy Minds funding, which provided a broad range of therapeutic interventions, including counselling - mostly to primary pupils - that she described as “absolutely vital”.
Healthy Happy Minds had “stopped our children from reaching that crisis point”, said Dr Tracey.
