SEVERAL SCHOOLS, including many in the fee-paying sector, are refusing to enrol pupils with special needs, the Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI) said yesterday.
The union is calling on Minister for Education Mary Hanafin to publish the results of a department audit of admission policies in schools.
This was completed re- cently but has still to be published.
The union's assistant general secretary John Mac Gabhann yesterday accused Ms Hanafin of allowing a policy of educational apartheid. "Certain schools continue to discriminate against students with special educational needs by not allowing them the right to be educated with their siblings, friends and neighbours. The corollary of this is that other schools with open admissions policies continue to act as magnets for pupils with special education needs, despite a chronic lack of resources."
He said the Minister had signalled her intention to carry out an audit of the number of students with special needs in schools two years ago but this information has yet to be presented despite several requests from the TUI.
The department's inertia in dealing with these issues was already having catastrophic results for some schools, he said.
This included "haemorrhage from the school's cohort of students who do not have special educational needs, teacher burnout and insupportable administrative burdens. It is painfully ironic that those schools which respect and apply principles of equity and inclusion should have their viability threatened so that other schools may continue their immoral selective practices."
Ms Hanafin's inaction had long since been unacceptable, he said. The TUI was aware that a significant minority of second-level schools did not take any students with special needs. "We are also aware that a significant number of schools take only a small cohort of such students, more as a cosmetic exercise than any real acknowledgment of their responsibilities under legislation.
School management, aided by the department's inertia, can no longer be allowed to propagate a sinister brand of academic apartheid in terms of students admitted, or to put it more accurately, excluded.
