My SET Allocation Experience
When I write about the primary education system, I try my best to keep it general. I discuss the systematic failures that people working in schools identify with, but aren’t particularly sexy enough to make the media headlines. Free school books, free school buses and free school meals are ready-made headline grabbers, but arguing that Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act is preventing teachers from diverse backgrounds from applying for jobs in schools doesn’t have the same ring to it.
When it comes to Special Education, the media tend to be interested in stories where families can’t get school places or staff are reporting getting assaulted. Local papers might report on a new special class opening in their area. However, they aren’t very interested when it comes to the algorithm that the NCSE uses to allocate resources to schools. Since 2018, I’ve been working with a wonderful lobby group, the National Principals’ Forum, trying to highlight the worsening conditions for schools, and most often, our reports have been about the provision of special education.
Here are some examples of their work:
I’d recommend you check out their web site https://www.principalsforum.org/ to read more of their work. Despite all of it, very little makes it into the public sphere. Statistics that mean very little to those outside of education don’t make for headlines. In fact, when we have approached journalists, they tend to tell us that they need a personal story.
I guess I’ll tell mine.
However, my story is not unique. My story is one that hundreds of primary school principals could tell. To me, if the education scandal of the 20th century was the systematic physical and sexual abuse of children by Church Leaders and the State, the 21st century scandal will be how we are failing children with additional needs. I am saying, without exaggeration, that I believe the NCSE, along with the people supporting them and staying quiet, will be judged in the same manner as Church leaders who made excuses, hid information, and turned a blind eye to the abuses that were happening under their watch. We will look back and wonder how they got away with denying children basic assistance in the classroom for all sorts of bizarre reasons all in the name of:
Pupils with the greatest levels of need should have access to the greatest level of support.
This is the line that is used by the NCSE, the Department of Education, and several stakeholders when talking about special education provision. If you flip it slightly, it reads: Pupils that don’t have the greatest levels of need (but have needs nonetheless) will not have access to support.
In time, we will hear their stories but for now, this is mine. It isn’t particularly exciting but it sums up exactly why we are going to look back on how we have neglected our children in our schools and I hope we will be ashamed of ourselves. This story is just one aspect of how children with additional needs are treated by the system.
My story starts at the end of the Celtic Tiger. My school has only opened a couple of years and the recession is biting. Children with additional needs are receiving resource hours depending on their diagnosis, so for example, an autistic child in a mainstream setting receives five hours of resource teaching every week. Here is the full table:
On top of that, schools received a baseline of hours per week because certain disabilities didn’t receive resource hours, for example, dyslexia. Sometimes children had needs but no diagnosis, so between the resource hours and the general allocation, schools received a reasonably accurate level of support for the needs that existed.
In 2011, the then Minister for Education, Ruairi Quinn cut 15% off the resource hours allocations, due to the recession and they never returned. In 2017, this cut was cemented by a new model for allocating Special Education Teaching hours. It was based on an algorithm, which took into account certain data — enrollment, gender, complex needs, literacy and numeracy scores, and DEIS status — but not, most importantly individual children. The NCSE moved away from a child-centred model to one which offered schools a number of hours based on these variables.
In 2017, my school was still in its developing stage so my allocation was based on the 2017 enrollment. The Complex Needs variable was difficult to understand but we were assured it came from data about children in the school with diagnoses. The NCSE had records of these children due to the older model but schools were told that they would no longer be needed. In total we were allocated 177.5 hours.
Within a year, the data was completely out of date.
My enrollments had risen. The needs and diagnoses of pupils coming to the school had increased. In the old system, it’s likely we would have been awarded an extra 15 resource hours. In this system we were allocated 3 hours. There was no rhyme or reason for these 3 hours. This was just the number of hours you got if you increased by one class. (Bizarrely if you increased by 2 classes in a year, it rose to 8 hours. And before you ask if you increased by 2 classes in 2 years, that was only 6 hours.)
In 2019, the allocations were recalculated, or more accurately, the allocations were frozen. Schools that were losing enrollments kept the hours they had and schools that were gaining enrolments were being given an inferior allocation. The same happened in 2021 and by 2023, the entire system was based on junk data.
For example, my school was allocated 192.5 because we had grown by 5 extra classes. For around 420 pupils, we were receiving 192.5 hours. Meanwhile, a very similar school in terms of context in 2017 had around 420 pupils and 235 hours per week. By 2021, their numbers had dropped considerably, and, you’ve guessed it, they remained on 235 hours.
Our school was full by 2022 so we were no longer getting these 3 hour additions so, as far as we were concerned, we were stuck on 192.5 hours.
However, the Department decided to make a new algorithm for the 2024–25 school year. This time they were going to remove the gender variable (rightly) and also the Complex Needs variable. Amazingly, this new algorithm made almost no difference to most schools. Despite having no access to any child’s information anymore, schools, in the main, remained on or close to their 2017 allocation. Whoever was coming up with this algorithm was either a genius, or clearly making things up.
In my school’s case, our allocation also was set to the 2017 allocation. We lost all 15 of the hours we gained by being a developing school. I am absolutely convinced that this was because we happened to stop developing in 2022. In general, in this new model, developing schools increased their allocations as the wrongs from the previous 5–6 years were somewhat corrected. Everyone else was roughly given their 2017 allocation unless their numbers decreased significantly. Nothing else had really changed.
A lot of schools lost “resource hours” and there were a number of newspaper articles about the variable of Complex Needs being removed. The Minister for Education, Norma Foley, conceded that a small number of schools could have been affected but she assured that they would receive indiviual attention through an appeals process.
The problem for us is that there were only 4 criteria for appealing and none of them were “because the Department of Education made a mistake.”
I decided the closest way we could appeal was on the basis that we had a significant increase in needs in the junior classes. (As an aside, if the algorithm isn’t completely based on junk data, the only relatively accurate data on children is their literacy and numeracy scores which don’t kick in until 2nd class.)
In most schools these days, 20 to 25% of children will have some sort of additional need, whether that’s literacy and numeracy, an emotional or social need, or some other need such as care, behavioural, anxiety-related, etc. (I should add exceptional ability is an additional need too and given the algorithm which only takes literacy and numeracy scores into account, you can imagine how that works!) I tell you this so you can see how many children in my school were supposed to receive adequate support from 7 and a bit teachers. In my case, it was 148. I know it was 148 because, the form I had to fill out asked me to profile what supports each of those 148 children were receiving in school.
The form took five days to fill out and consisted of 26 A4 pages. All of the SET team had to help with filling it out or it would have taken far longer. There were no guidelines as to how to fill out the appeal form and I had to anonymise the names of the children on the form, which meant that I had to have another form, which had all the children’s names in it with their codes in case I needed them.
I uploaded the form on the NCSE portal and waited for my promised individual support.
A few weeks later, along with hundreds of other schools, I received an email with a letter stating that the school had not been successful in providing enough evidence to show our allocation was insufficient. There was no reason. Instead, it stated that someone would be in touch to support the school. Oh, and the decision was final.
Needless to say, weeks later, there was no contact so I decided that I would contact the NCSE to see when this support would be arriving. I was told that it would be some time in the 2024–25 school year and I would be getting “information/invitation for Teacher Professional Learning” to support my school in relation to the “Deployment of SET Allocation.”
I wrote to TDs, which I fundamentally disagree with myself for doing, because that shouldn’t be how things get done, and I realise they are relatively powerless when it comes down to it. Only one came back to me and sent in a couple of PQs, which received the same template response.
I wrote back to the NCSE to state that their offer of sending information in early 2024–25 really wasn’t acceptable and I got a reply to tell me there would be a webinar. This was their idea of individual support? Red mist descended.
Given that correspondence from the NCSE is unsigned by anyone — all messages are signed by the NCSE SET Allocation Queries Team — I had nobody that I could address so I sent them an email, which contained the following paragraph:
While I don’t expect a single thing to be done about my school’s scandalous allocation, except to be strung along with gaslighting webinars and the ridiculous mantra of catering to children with the highest levels of need, perhaps this will reach somebody with a heart who might take the time to contact me and take our case with a scrap of seriousness. I understand that the system is designed to make it impossible, but I’ll try to use whatever influence I have to make sure the children in my care get the support they need.
You can imagine the rest of it. As I said, red mist had descended.
However, a few days later, I received a call from a member of the NCSE about my email. The person listened to me and agreed that my allocation was a little strange and she committed to speaking to the Department of Education about it to see if there was indeed a mix up.
The following week, on the last week of term, I got a call to say the Department were not budging but they were going to allow us have an exceptional SET review. In other words, my 26-page form-filling that had originally got me nowhere, now, somehow did. The review was to take place in the first week of the summer holidays and two members of the NCSE were going to come to the school.
I had to print out all of the support plans of the children from Junior Infants to Second Class who were receiving the highest level of support. I also had to print out all the support teachers’ timetables. I also had to get consent from all of their parents to share these reports with the NCSE advisors. I’m very lucky to have people in my school who worked tirelessly on this with me. Over the course of two days, we managed to print and get the consent forms out to the families and have them back. Once this was done, we printed what we could (not all came back understandably), which was another couple of days work. I took a photo of the floor of my office, which for obvious reasons I can’t share here, but many trees were sacrificed for the cause.
The advisors came along, as promised, and we had a nice conversation about the systematic issues. The next step was they were to take all of the (incomplete) paperwork and go through to it to see if we really did need more hours. The advisors didn’t see any of the children, because they weren’t there, (they don’t observe children for this process anyway,) and they didn’t want me or my SEN co-ordinator in with them. The paperwork was all they were going on. We told them that the paperwork was, at best, aspirational because, as much as we tried to timetable all of the children, the reality was that the “highest needs” often took much of this time. It didn’t matter, paperwork was king.
After they had spent an hour or two looking through the pages, they returned to tell me they would be making a recommendation to the Department of Education. I asked what that recommendation would be, which got the same reaction as when anybody asks a politician a question. I kept trying to get an answer unsuccessfully and one of them said that they hoped whatever happened that I wouldn’t be giving out about them on Twitter. You may be surprised how many times I hear that.
I politely explained that Twitter would be the least of their concern and that I intended to do whatever it took to ensure that the children in my school received the same level of under-resourcing as almost every other school and that we would build from there. I said that, at the very least, I expected us to return to the 192.5 hours for September and that I would then speak to the promised advisor about how we would then move to a more accurate level of resources for 2025–26. However, if that didn’t happen, I would indeed be doing everything in my power to let people know, and needless to say, because you are reading this, that’s what I am doing.
I have been telling anyone that will listen to me about this and they can’t believe it. Except, of course, other school principals that have gone through the same process. They believe it. I have spoken to over a dozen principals who told me that they lost a few hours this year and knew better than to appeal because they knew what they would have to go through and they knew, statistically that they had almost no chance of being successful. (About 8% of schools are successful with appeals.)
Anyway, that’s my story. You can probably see why, if you got this far, why the media aren’t going to cover something like this. It’s long, boring, and can easily be explained away because it’s so convoluted. Nobody is going to care that I wasted over ten days of my life on this or that I have printed out over 500 sheets of A4 paper for almost no good reason. However, most importantly, nobody is really going to care about the main victims in this, the children, who are going to be left floundering in a system without support.
They are nameless because we cannot name them. The NCSE won’t take their details and simply assign them a small pool of hours to share. When we appeal their allocations, the NCSE don’t want to see them and they don’t want to know their names. Like those children who were let down so badly by the system in the 20th century, some of these nameless children will emerge as adults and hopefully will take those who stood by the system to task.
The NCSE used to be an agency that supported families and children with additional needs but it has turned into a top-heavy bureaucratic behamoth. My favourite statistic about the NCSE is that in 2009, there were fewer than 10 administrative staff and roughly 70 front-facing SENOs working in the NCSE. By 2020, there were over 150 administrative staff, and you’ve guessed it, fewer SENOs. In some ways, it tells you everything you need to know.
What’s the solution? To me, we need to have a complete root and branch review of the NCSE. The NCSE need to stop with their algorithms and start allocating resources directly to children. Ireland is still a very small country so this is easily done. Work also has to happen on the ground. A very simple solution is to either extend the role of SNAs or to create a new position in schools — the Teaching Assistant — much like they have in most civilised countries. Every classroom in the country should have a teaching assistant.
We are currently using SET teachers and SNAs to perform tasks that are more suitable for a Teaching Assistant, and it’s a complete waste of money. A highly experienced teacher may find themselves walking corridors for much of their day to ensure a child doesn’t become dysregulated. Their wage would be possibly €80K+. If a classroom had a teaching assistant, this SET teacher could get on with working on the areas they are qualified to do — specialised teaching and learning. I would argue that if every classroom had a Teaching Assistant, while there would be an initially large outlay, it would pay for itself because teachers and SNAs could focus on their actual work, which would give the early intervention needed so when children grew up, they wouldn’t keep needing the same or extra levels of support.
Yes, there are systematic issues that are beyond special education. For example, there’s all those waiting lists for OT, SLT and other therapies. For example, it is difficult to plan for special education when we don’t know where children are going to school due to how we cling on to free school choice. However, even with this, it is possible to plan because it already happens at pre-school level and it’s what we used to do, not that long ago.
If we don’t start taking Special Education seriously, it’s going to cost us a lot more than the money we should be investing in the system. Politicians will have questions to answer. The NCSE will have to explain why they deemed it fit to leave children floundering in schools. However, those of us working in schools will also have to justify why we didn’t speak out. If we learned nothing else from the horrors of the 20th century, the need to speak out, even when it’s hard to do so, has never been more important. That’s what I’m doing now.
