2026-02-19

The very angry and shocked protests of my former primary school helped to highlight the severity of the impact of the SNA cuts that the Government was planning. The Minister of State may have seen the protest by Johnstown National School on Tuesday evening on RTÉ. Of course, it was just one of many schools that experienced these attacks. Fair play to the teachers, SNAs, and parents who came out and protested. In that school alone, the number of SNAs was going to drop from nine to fewer than four. I met with all of the teachers, parents, SNAs and the principal of my former school this week. They were absolutely gutted and shocked. They could not believe that this would be even considered. They want to know what will happen now. Pauses are all very well, but these people are now in limbo, waiting to know whether the Government is going to abandon these cuts, which would be very severe, damaging and detrimental to the welfare of children with special needs, other children in their classes, SNAs and teachers. They all want to know that the Government is going to abandon these cuts.

I welcome the pause, but, obviously, a pause is not a permanent solution. It is not a binding decision and everybody in this House is going to be watching with interest what happens over the next few weeks. We in Fianna Fáil have always prided ourselves on being the party of education. The number of SNAs in the country has increased by 45% since I became a TD. That is a good story but in the past week we have somehow upscuttled a lot of that progress and good work. I join Deputy Boyd Barrett in calling for a cessation of any cuts in this academic year. One thing I learned as a teacher was that SENOs always did reviews, and they were always ongoing. They were annual in nature, so nobody faced a cliff edge in terms of cuts to services. We have to go back to a scenario where the reviews are ongoing. Diagnosis takes place at various times throughout the year. The needs of a school change over the course of a year and we need to have built-in headroom in terms of the allocation of resources going forward.

This is the second time today that I have spoken about SNA reviews. I raised the matter earlier with the Tánaiste on Leaders' Questions. The Minister of State knows that this is the most pressing issue right now. It is going to affect so many students across the country. I have lost count of the number of schools that have contacted me. Later, I will be meeting online with parents, students, principals, SNAs and members of trade unions in relation to what this SNA cut involves and what the pause actually means. We do not know what the pause means. Leaving people in some sort of limbo is not acceptable because it allows a dark cloud to remain over schools. Those who have received letters saying that they are going to get increases do not know whether they will go ahead and those who received letters saying they were going to lose SNAs do not know if they will actually lose them. The Minister of State is the line Minister, but there is also a senior Minister who has a budget for this. Is the senior Minister pulling her weight in respect of this issue?

The protest organised by parents for next Wednesday at 5 p.m. outside the Dáil is going ahead because they do not just want a pause; they want the cuts to stop. They want proper support for their kids. The other point I want to make is that this matter is being treated as if the cuts have come out of nowhere. The Government is shocked to hear that all of these SNAs are being cut, but this is the outworking of the policy. Ms Ciara Reilly has written really excellent pieces on her Substack outlining that effectively since 2024 the policy has been to move away from a model where the SNA's job is to facilitate children being included in education towards more of a healthcare assistance model. As a result, entitlement is being based pretty much only on significant primary needs or, basically, medical needs. All of the other stuff, like being unable to cope in a classroom, being autistic or being overwhelmed in a classroom, is not being counted. The fundamental issue here is the policy. The cuts need to be reversed but the policy also needs to be reversed.

A script will be handed around, but I will deal with the issue without the script. I thank all Members for their engagement and the seriousness with which they are treating this issue. I take on board all of the matters that have been raised. I will talk about the policy first. Since the 2014 document, more than 12,000 extra SNAs have been recruited and are working in the system. We have expanded considerably. There is a view going around that we have gone back to the 2014 document and that this is where the cuts are coming from. However, the SNA workforce has expanded considerably over the period since 2014. I take the concerns of parents, schools and children on board. I understand full well the importance of SNAs. In every school community that I go into, I have said that we have built special education on the backs of SNAs. I acknowledge the enormous work they do. We have increased the SNA population by 45%, to 25,000, in recent years. The SNA workforce is hugely valued. I am constantly asked this week, "What is the pause?". The pause means that we have stopped in relation to the decisions that were taken and communicated to schools last week. To be fair to everybody, we have stopped all of it. In May or June, information on the allocation of SNAs would normally go out to schools. We brought that back this year because I firmly believe that we need to have earlier communication. We brought back the notification for families with additional educational needs to October. I firmly believe that we need to bring communication back to earlier in the school cycle. We want to communicate earlier, but we are pausing what was being done because we are looking at the totality of the issue of special education assistance. To speak to the Deputy's point, we do not want the schools to be in limbo. We want to make sure that they have certainty as soon as possible. We have had a number of intensive engagements over the past 24 to 48 hours in relation to this issue. We will continue to engage over the coming days. We will be bringing clarity as early as possible as to the steps forward. I take on board what the Deputies said. Deputy Boyd Barrett mentioned Johnstown and the cliff edge of the five SNAs being taken out of it. We cannot have that. We have to have a continuous enrolment and we have to ensure that the value that we have in the SNAs is following the children. We must ensure that the children with the greatest need and those who require the help have the SNAs. If they have the SNAs, it will allow them to flourish and grow within their school communities and to have better outcomes in life as well. Many people would not be able to attend school unless they had the SNAs. We need everybody on board. We need the Department, the school communities, parents, and unions on board and we need to have a system that everybody has faith in. One of the challenges that we are now tackling is the reviews. We should have been doing reviews every second year or every year so that schools would understand the role of the NCSE, there would be interaction with the school communities and families so that they would have better information. We have to make sure that we have confidence in what we are doing. Families and school principals have contacted me, and I have spoken to many of them in the past week in particular. I assure them that we will do the right thing by them and particularly by the children who need the support in schools.

It is really not clear, but it seems as if the SNAs and, therefore, the children for whom they provide support and, consequently, all of the other children in their classes and all of the teachers, are still in the crosshairs. All we have is a pause because people expressed such outrage, anger and shock. I should mention another school in my area. All Saints, a small school in Blackrock, has lost its only SNA. There will be no SNA there at all now. That is absolutely unacceptable. The care needs of the children have not changed. They need the same support they had previously and we need that commitment from the Government.

I will leave the Minister of State with three points because I know he will be engaging with the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and his senior Minister in the next few days. First, the cliff edge that I have spoken to him about regularly cannot be the reality. The review I spoke to him about which happened every year needs to be consistent so we do not face this cliff edge in the future. At this point, the loss of any SNA is not tenable given the climate and context of what has happened and the lack of trust and the anxiety created. There were always minor movements in the number of SNAs over the years but given the gravity of what has happened and the scale of some of the drops, it is not tenable. I spoke privately to the Minister of State about the lack of a requirement of a diagnosis. That will create problems down the line. We need something clinical and that can generate statistics in order that people can be guided in making these decisions, particularly the SENOs.

I concur with all of my colleagues who have spoken. I presume the engagements involve the Minister of State, the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and the Minister for education. If there is somebody else involved, I would appreciate if we were informed of that. In that meeting tonight, can I inform parents, SNAs, teachers and students that for now, this pause will be lifted in the coming weeks? Can I also confirm that the schools that received sanction of new SNAs will get those SNAs?

It is a funny sort of pause because the cuts were not going to come into place until September anyway. The Minister of State said it is a review of suspending it but it is not like there were going to be cuts and now they are paused. Some of these schools may still face the same cuts come September. The Minister of State is not giving any guarantee that will not happen. Can the schools that went through the wringer in this very difficult environment and were granted an extra SNA now plan on the basis that they will get an extra SNAs or two or whatever or can they not be guaranteed that at this stage? In the pause and the review of the process, is the fundamental toolkit, the basis on which the allocations will be made, being looked at or is it just the individual schools?

The basis on which we are delivering special needs assistants is under the 2014 circular, which has allowed us to grow the SNA workforce by nearly 60%. It is a whole-of-government approach. It is a very serious issue for families and school communities. We are all engaged. The Minister, Deputy Naughton, and I have had multiple conversations and meetings over the past number of days and weeks, right over the weekend. We are engaging extremely carefully as to how we will proceed. We had a number of meetings this morning as well. The Deputy asked me to clarify a few points in relation to his meeting tonight. If a school has gone through an SNA assessment or gone through with the SENOs and it was clearly demonstrated that additional care was needed in that school, that has to be stood over. If the school demonstrates additional care is needed, we are about ensuring the SNAs are working towards that care that is needed. There was never any discussion that a school would lose its SNA immediately; it was always going to happen from 1 September, not now or at Easter or whatever. It was always within the school year 2026. That was very clear at all times. We are pausing it because there has been so much concern about the process. We have to be extremely confident in the process we put in place such that all school communities and education partners have confidence in it and that we can go forward with confidence in it. There was mention of the removal of diagnosis. We cannot remove that unless we have a robust process in place in which all education partners are confident. We are working on that currently. It will take some time to make sure we have a robust system in place. This is a significant policy change. We have to make sure we get it right. I assure the House and all Members that we are working extremely carefully with the National Council for Special Education, us as elected members and Department officials. We have seen a number of attacks of various different types over the past couple of days. I assure the Deputies that when we have this done, we will have it right. We take everything seriously. We understand the special needs assistants, the children, the families and schools.