An attempt to explain Special Education in Ireland

Over the last couple of months, I’ve found myself speaking with journalists about Special Education. When you are in a system, you forget how much you take for granted. For example, if you are a primary school teacher, the following acronyms make complete sense to you: SENO, SET, SSP, SSE, SESE, SPHE and so on. When I was talking to the journalist about the set up of special education, I was speaking about Special Class Teachers who are not the same as Special Education Teachers who are also not the same as Special Needs Assistants; I spoke about special classes not being the same as special schools; and I realised how confusing the whole thing was!

Maybe the first place to start when it comes to special education is to clear up the structure of primary education, (taking out all the religious, gender and language stuff), and essentially explain the three types of schools that exist for children of primary school age.

There are three main options:

• Mainstream schools
• Mainstream school with special classes attached
• Special schools

Special schools are different to the other two types of schools because all children that go to special schools have to have a diagnosis of a special educational need. These schools contain teachers and special needs assistants in the main.

Mainstream schools generally have class teachers, special education teachers and special needs assistants. Class teachers and special education teachers have the same qualifications but their roles are different. Class teachers are responsible for a whole class. Special education teachers have a caseload of children on their timetable. They used to be known as resource teachers or learning support teachers or, if you are very old, remedial teachers.

Adding in special classes, you also have special class teachers and their job is to teach the special classes attached to mainstream classes. They have the same qualifications as regular teachers and special education teachers.

Does that make sense? 😂

The journalist also asked me about teaching assistants in Irish schools. Get ready for a headmelt. If I remember correctly, all primary school teachers’ official title is Assistant Teacher. However, the term isn’t used very much in day-to-day speak. However, a teaching assistant is a job…except not in Ireland. Teaching Assistants don’t exist in Irish primary classrooms. (Oddly, if you google Teaching Assistant Ireland, you’ll find a number of Irish colleges offering a qualification.) Teaching Assistants in the UK are not qualified teachers; they are a helper in a classroom for the classroom teacher.

However, I think that when the journalist said teaching assistant, he probably meant special education teacher, because many people outside education seem to think a special education teacher is the same as a teaching assistant in the UK. Often they think a special education teacher is either less qualified than a classroom teacher, or they are someone with a different qualification to a classroom teacher.

All teachers, whether special education teachers, special class teachers or classroom teachers all have the same qualifications. They can be allocated to any of these roles and don’t require a different qualification. However, there is no such thing as a teaching assistant.

Some people might mix up a special needs assistant with a teaching assistant. Special Needs Assistants do have a separate qualification and it’s a completely different job to a teacher of any sort. However, it is also completely different to a teaching assistant (if such a job existed in Ireland in the first place!)

A special needs assistant looks after the care needs of children with significant additional needs, that is children that have care needs, such as toileting or being a flight risk. Back in the olden days of the 1990s, Special Needs Assistants had a lot more duties than they do today, and in some cases, they did some of the role of a teaching assistant but that doesn’t happen anymore.

Special Needs Assistants work in two capacities in mainstream schools. They can either work in a Special Class where there will be either two or three of them in a classroom with a Special Class Teacher; or they will work in mainstream classes, often assigned to a number of children, depending on the care needs of a child. Often you will hear things like — “Oh that’s Johnny’s SNA” — but SNAs are not assigned to children (anymore) they are allocated to a school and they are more often than not assigned to a number of children.

Now, you might be wondering how all these positions get allocated?

In this unnecessarily complicated system, the most straightforward allocation of teachers is your mainstream class teachers. Essentially, depending on how many children enrol in your school, you are allocated a number of teachers. It isn’t as simple as that in reality but for the purposes of this article, in the main, that’s how it works.

SET teachers are allocated by the Department of Education based on the SET Allocations Model which has been around since 2017. It uses a mystery algorithm that uses a number of variables plus some manual tweaking to allocate teachers. Until this year, there were five variables — enrollment numbers, literacy and numeracy scores, gender, complex needs data, and DEIS status. Using these figures, a school would be allocated a certain number of hours per week. 25 hours = 1 full time position. In 2024–25, the Department has cut gender and complex needs from the variables. However, if a school is set to lose hours, perhaps because of falling enrollments, sometimes (and there is no transparent reason) they will keep the hours they have. There is no rhyme or reason or pattern so it’s impossible to understand how a school gets its hours. The data is not only junk — it’s inaccurate in lots of cases. 91% of schools would have received more hours in 2007 than they did in 2017. In any case, that’s how SET teachers get allocated.

Teachers and SNAs in special classes and allocated in a very straightforward system. For every class that opens, you get one teacher and two SNAs. On the other hand, SNAs in mainstream classes are allocated using something called a frontloading model which began, in all but name, around 2019–20. Essentially, whatever allocation of SNAs you had around COVID times, that was your allocation. It didn’t really matter whether this was the correct allocation, what needs the children in the school had, or any other data a school might have — that was your allocation, like it or lump it. Since then, the allocation a school has had in 2020 remains the same. For schools with falling numbers, this is great news. For growing schools, it’s yet another cut by stealth. One can appeal one’s SNA allocation but between 84–92% of appeals have been rejected without a single child being seen.

As you can see, staffing special education in Ireland is almost impossible to understand. It relies on junk data and doesn’t fulfil the needs of the children in many schools. The purpose of sharing this blog post is to highlight how difficult it is to explain the system and perhaps why it’s so easy for the Department of Education to bamboozle those reporting on the system.