To ask the Minister of Education what steps his Department is taking to ensure that all children with special educational needs requiring placements in (i) pre-school, (ii) Primary 1; and (iii) Year 8 for the academic year 24/25, will receive a placement in a setting appropriate to their needs before the end of the current academic year.

Children on the Special Educational Needs (SEN) register but without a statement of SEN (63% of all children with SEN) are admitted to schools in line with the general schools admissions process and, therefore, should receive notification of their school placement at key transition points at the same time as their peers without SEN. These timescales are published on my Department’s website (DE Circular 2023/12).

Children with a statement of SEN (37% of all children with SEN) follow a different process for admission to schools, which seeks to ensure that their school placement is appropriate to meet the needs set out in their statement and subject to any change at the annual review of their statement. There is a continual flow of children being referred for SEN assessment, which creates challenges in aligning placement of all children with the general schools admissions process.

There has been a significant increase in recent years in the number of children with a statement of SEN and in those requiring specialist education provision – either in special schools or specialist education provision classes within our mainstream schools, which provide smaller classes with targeted support to ensure that children’s needs can be met. Meeting this increased demand has been and remains challenging as our special schools are operating at full, and in many cases over, capacity and there is a rising need for more specialist provision in our mainstream schools.

My Department is collaborating with the Education Authority (EA) to work towards ensuring that the majority of children with SEN receive notification of an appropriate school place at the same time as their peers. The EA is working at pace to create additional capacity across the education system and to ensure that new specialist education provision is resourced with well qualified, capable and competent staff. There is a significant programme of work ongoing to establish more places in special schools and to create more specialist provision in mainstream schools for the 2024/25 academic year.

In order to create this much needed additional capacity within the system, the Department, working closely with the EA, has tested and agreed a new process to provide a more flexible and agile system to effect changes in the creation of specialist provision in mainstream school settings without the requirement for a Development Proposal (DP). Work is also ongoing to consider if this arrangement can be extended to streamline the process for changes in relation to special school provision.