Sir, -The row over Department of Education “overspending” is grossly simplistic. Other departments have been asked to make up for education’s apparent excess.
With an appearance of fiscal caution, this framing might have political force, but it is a dangerously narrow way to understand what is happening in Irish schools.
The department’s 2026 funding pressures, formalised through a €646 million adjustment, have been widely linked to special education, school transport and payroll demands. While the Oireachtas Committee on Budgetary Oversight is right to ask why funding beyond expectation has become routine, the better question would be to ask why that expectation is so badly wrong.
For years, Ireland has planned for additional educational needs using assumptions that no longer match the children in classrooms. The department relies heavily on a 2011 Economic and Social Research Institute statistic, which suggested that one in four pupils had additional educational needs. Budgeting for our school system in 2026 and into the future is being made by reference to people born in the 1990s, who are now adults.
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Since then, the understanding and identification of autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, communication differences and other forms of need have radically changed. Scotland’s government, using a comparable additional support needs framework, now identifies 43 per cent of pupils as having additional support needs. It is implausible that the true level of need has remained fixed at 25 per cent in Ireland, while every domestic indicator points in the other direction.
Budget 2026 provided more than €3 billion for “special” education, almost 24,900 special needs assistants (SNAs) and more than 46,500 dedicated staff supporting children with educational needs. The demand for “special” classes and special school places expands every year. This demand is not an accounting fiction – it is visible in the school attendance crisis and in the chronic waiting times for assessments and therapies.
Calling this merely “overspending” risks mistaking delayed recognition for fiscal indiscipline. A child who needs support does not become cheaper because a budget line failed to anticipate them. The cost is simply displaced on to families paying privately, on to teachers improvising without adequate capacity, on to waiting lists, and ultimately on to children whose education breaks down.
Scrutiny over public spending should distinguish between waste and unmet statutory need. Education is not a discretionary programme that can be trimmed down; rather, it is a constitutional, social and rights-based obligation.
When children require support to access learning, the question is not whether spending has exceeded an artificial ceiling; it is whether that ceiling was actually credible.
The deeper failure is a structural one, in that our Government departments budget separately for education, health and services for the same child. A pupil may need an educational plan, SNA support, speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and psychological assessment, yet no single budget considers the child’s needs holistically. The Department of Education’s accounts reveal a pressure that is having a profound impact upon our children.
Until the State gathers and publishes annual pupil-level data on additional needs and adopts a whole-child budget that follows children across departmental boundaries, departments will continue to be surprised by needs that parents, teachers and children have been describing for years. – Yours, etc,
NESSA HILL,
Chief executive,
Neurodiversity Ireland,
Sandymount,
Dublin 4.
