Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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I might deal with the budget issue first. At the forefront of my mind is places for children this September. All Departments are starting the Estimates process dealing with the Department of public expenditure and reform. As the Deputy knows, a third of the budget, €2.7 billion, goes towards special education. I want to get an increase in funding in the upcoming budget to make sure we are continuing the investment in this area.

The Deputy mentioned NEPS. We are increasing the number there by 54 this year. She also spoke about supports for special education. As she will be aware, the Taoiseach has a particular interest in this and he set up a Cabinet committee to make sure that rather than Departments working in silos, we are all working towards ensuring we are catering for the needs of children with additional needs and disabilities. The Departments of Health, Education, public expenditure and reform, and disabilities are all sitting at the table with the Taoiseach and Tánaiste to ensure we are setting up a structure to ensure we meet the needs of, from my perspective, children with additional needs or adults with additional needs.

In the few weeks I have been in the Department, I found that the NCSE was allocated funding for 39 speech and language therapists and occupational therapists, but not many of them were hired. When I asked why, I was told that they did not have permanent contracts. Working with my colleague the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, I have secured 44 therapists, comprising 19 speech and language therapists, another 19 occupational therapists and five behavioural therapists, who will be employed on a permanent basis by the NCSE. They will go into schools to work with teachers to build the capacity of teachers. This was done on a pilot basis in 75 schools around the country. It is all about an evidence-based policy.

I know we also have the community side of this which is the responsibility of the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte. All of this feeds into helping children with additional needs. One of the findings from those pilots was that the teachers felt more equipped working in the collaboration with the therapists in the classroom. The learning outcomes of the children improved. The need for more SNAs and extra resources decreased as result of these therapists coming in and collaborating with teachers. We can see the benefits of that. In the upcoming budget I want to increase that and roll this out to a greater extent.

The Deputy mentioned the summer programme. The numbers have increased again. A total of 13,000 children availing of the summer programme in 2019. That has risen to 50,000 children, which shows the interest in the programme, and I want to keep encouraging more schools to take that on board. Again, we reached out to schools asking them what the barriers to engaging with the summer programme were and one of the key barriers was pay for teachers and SNAs so we increased that. The number of schools has increased by 300.

The Deputy also mentioned the transition issue and I will let Mr. Doody come in on that. There have been 20 pilots across the country. She is absolutely correct that for parents and for students themselves there is sometimes a gap between going from early years services into primary level, from primary level to secondary level and from secondary level to further education or employment. Whatever that transition is there needs to be work happening in that space so it is seamless. I will ask Mr. Doody to comment.