TUI conference: Second-level schools will be met with an avalanche of students with special needs in coming years and they won't have the resources to deal with them, the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI)warned yesterday.
A policy of integrating students with special needs into mainstream primary schools was introduced in 1997 and these students are now reaching post-primary schools.
John MacGabhann, the union's new assistant general secretary, said primary school teachers had warned their second-level counterparts that there would be a huge increase in numbers of students needing extra support in the next three or four years.
However, post-primary schools were already struggling to provide support to current students, he said.
The National Educational Psychological Service only had 122 educational psychologists for the entire State.
Students faced long delays in getting assessed by a psychologist and, without this assessment, extra resources could not be granted.
He was speaking at the TUI congress yesterday as the union published a new study on support services in public schools.
The study, by UCC's Dr Pat Naughton, highlighted the lack of psychological supports to manage troubled or disruptive students.
The study examined six unnamed schools in the Cork area.
One school reported that only 4 per cent of its first-year students were reading at the appropriate level, while 72 per cent were more than two years behind.
Some 90 per cent of its students came from seriously disadvantaged backgrounds and one in five had special needs.
The principal said at least 24 children were in the queue for assessments and without assessments the school could not get extra resources.
Another teacher was quoted as saying that he had given up on supports from the psychological services. "They take so long to access that we just don't bother."
He pointed to one case involving a troubled boy. "After months of pursuing supports [ the] psychiatrist stated he was a danger to the others in his class. We knew that from the start but we had to await the report."
Two schools in less disadvantaged areas reported that marriage break-up, and not poverty, was the biggest factor when children got into difficulty.
The study found that schools making use of curricular supports such as the leaving certificate applied programme and the school completion programme were more successful in engaging students and improving attendance.
The report recommends that "significant improvement in the resourcing of psychological supports is an obvious urgent need".
Dr Naughton called for legislative back-up to help schools manage serious discipline problems.
Earlier, the TUI warned that it would ballot for industrial action if lecturers in Institutes of Technology (ITs) lost any of their conditions of service when the ITs were moved under the aegis of the Higher Education Authority.
Currently, lecturers cannot be dismissed without the sanction of the Minister for Education.
Ms Hanafin has assured TUI members that there will be no change in terms of employment for current lecturers but the union has sought the same protection for future employees.