A brief history of SET Hours for Children with Down’s Syndrome
I was asked by a parent of a child with Down’s Syndrome (DS) whether I knew the history of the supports given. I thought it might be useful to share that information because I forget that a long time has passed and the majority of people working in primary education probably weren’t in employment, and the majority of parents today probably didn’t have children! In other words, I’m getting old!
I should add that my knowledge only goes back twenty years so those who are even older than me will be able to go back further. However, for the purposes of this article, I’m going to start around 2004 when children with additional needs were given resource hours. Resource Hours were extra hours of support in school based on a diagnosis. For example, a child with a diagnosis of autism received an extra 5 hours of resource teaching per week. The school also received 5 hours per week for every mainstream class they had.
Specifically for DS, back in the early days, DS was not given any resources. Children with DS had to have another diagnosed condition such as a moderate learning disability to qualify for any learning support / resource hours.
After a long campaign, around 2011 a diagnosis of DS got children 3 hours of support per week. This compared to autism at 5 hours per week, no matter how mild. However, it was something and widely welcomed.
Around 2012, in the depths of the recession, Ruairi Quinn made a 15% cut across the board to all resource hours. This meant children with DS ended up with 15% less support.
In 2017, the government decided to scrap learning support and resource hours under the guise that parents were paying private psychologists for assessments and those that couldn’t afford the assessments were losing out.
This led to SET Allocation Hours which was sold as a “better, fairer way,” but was widely presumed to be a cut by stealth. There was little opposition to it so all schools were profiled based on some mysterious algorithm and lo and behold, most schools ended up with around the same hours as they were getting before. What an amazing algorithm! The algorithm is protected from FoI requests. In effect, the 15% reduction was cemented into these new hours.
Every two years, schools are re-profiled for hours but it became clear that the re-profiling was junk. Developing schools, for example, were highly affected averaging 15% fewer support hours for children despite growing by an average of 30% every year. By contrast despite losing numbers, non-developing schools remained somewhat the same, with minor increases.
The algorithm was developed using a few criteria — enrollment, standardised test results (though it was promised these would never be used for anything other than statistical purposes), disadvantage, gender and complex needs. The latter were granted through CDNT information. This may have helped children with DS but given CDNT information was unreliable, it’s hard to tell.
For the 2024–25 allocations the Department removed gender (rightly) and complex needs as a criteria. This has resulted in huge swathes of cuts to schools where there are a lot of children with complex needs. Children with DS are likely to have suffered more as a result.
While this article focuses on Down’s Syndrome, you could replace this with any condition or disability or need. It’s a sad state of affairs when we cut resources from the people who benefit from them the most.
