Children with special needs must have equal access to pre-school scheme – Doherty

Fine Gael TD for Meath East, Regina Doherty, has today (Wednesday) urged the Minister for Health, Leo Varadkar TD, to consider implementing a standardised national scheme to ensure equal access for children with special needs to the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Scheme, which provides a free year of early childhood care and education for children of pre-school age.

“Meath is unique; the HSE Meath Disability Services has been funding a pre-school assistance subsidy over eight years and is therefore is on the road to having one hundred percent accessibility for children with special needs. This subsidy has been used to support children with a disability in their preschool educational placement for up to two years. There is no standardised national scheme in place to fund this subsidy as is done in Meath and I urge the Minister for Health to look at this model as a solution to a national problem. 

“Should a child living with a disability attend pre-school or an ECCE year, they could require a Special Needs Assistant (SNA) or medical assistant in order to do so.  

“People who have children with disabilities have often said the ECCE year is difficult to access if the support services are not available to these children, by this I mean special needs assistants or other support or resource hours teachers.  This is the biggest criticism of the ECCE scheme is on the part of parents of children with disabilities and this measure would make a big difference.”