Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I welcome Joanne Whyte, president of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT); Pauline Hurst, a member of the Ulster Teachers' Union (UTU); Maxine Murphy Higgins from the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) — apologies, I gave you the full title there, where it might have been easier to abbreviate — Bronagh Wright from the National Education Union (NEU); and Noreen Kelly, a member of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO). You are all very welcome to the Committee.

I will hand over straight away for opening remarks and presentations. Please bear in mind the timescales: you have up to 10 minutes for a presentation, and I will have to bring your remarks to a close if you go past that. Thank you.

Ms Maxine Murphy Higgins (National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers): Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. I am very conscious that we might overlap with some of the previous evidence that you have just heard. We want to raise a number of key concerns with you around the SEN regulations and essentially their implementation through the SEN reform agenda and the proposed enhanced support model.

While the Department of Education's reform agenda, which was published in February 2025, sets out an ambitious five-year vision for delivering the right support, there are significant concerns about how that vision will be achieved in practice. In particular, there is no clear road map that explains how we would move from the current system to the proposed end state. We see major structural changes being proposed, especially around the one-to-one support model, without any clear alternative frameworks being put in place.

Alongside that, the proposed timeline raises serious concerns. It is overly ambitious, particularly given the fact that schools are already managing multiple large-scale reforms, including TransformEd, the curriculum review and the workload agreements. There also appears to be no meaningful time built in for reviews, adjustments or feedback. It is important to note that the three-pathway model and the local impact teams (LITs) were introduced only in September 2025, and already we are seeing acknowledgement of over 1,400 combinations of need. That highlights the complexity of the system and raises questions about whether the current proposals are realistic or achievable.

We also have concerns about the survey, as many of the questions — you raised it in the previous session — are leading, limit meaningful consultation and are without further clarification on many key elements of the proposal. The consultation questions appear to lead respondents to agree to an ideal scenario model and risk destabilising the entire system before alternatives are fully resourced, established and available to all schools and pupils. At a recent meeting — as recent as yesterday — we were told that there have been 2,500, mainly positive, responses to the consultation, which highlights the issue that we have with the consultation questions, as we have discussed.

In summary, while the ambition is welcome — we cannot disagree that what we all want are interventions for children as early as possible — the lack of a clear and realistic implementation strategy is a significant concern.

I will pass over to Pauline.

Ms Pauline Hurst (Ulster Teachers' Union): We move now to evidence, capacity and workforce planning. A major concern is the lack of clear, practice-based evidence underpinning the reforms. There is no transparency around the outcomes of pilot projects and no clear indication of what will happen to existing pilots before a final model is implemented. We have not seen published evaluations, measurable outcomes or clear learning from those pilots. That makes it difficult to understand how they are informing the proposed direction of travel. We have limited evidence that the model has been tested successfully. Without robust, locally relevant evidence, there is a risk that reforms are being introduced without a full understanding of how they will operate in practice within our Northern Ireland school system.

At the same time, our system is already under significant strain: the Education Authority (EA) is unable to meet demand in key services, such as educational psychology, speech and language therapy and wider allied health support; and schools are experiencing long delays in accessing assessments and interventions, which is placing increased pressure on teachers and school leaders to manage complex needs without the necessary specialist input. Given that context, it is unclear how the system will cope with additional change, particularly when proposals suggest reducing or altering the one-to-one support model without a clearly defined and properly resourced alternative in place. For many children, one-to-one support is critical for them to access the curriculum and education in general. Any changes to that model must be supported by clear evidence and demonstrable capacity.

Workforce planning is another critical gap. There has been no detail provided on the number of specialists required, no clear recruitment timelines and no evidence that existing workforce data has been used to inform planning. There is no clarity on how current recruitment and retention challenges across education and allied health professions will be addressed to ensure the delivery of the reforms.

Importantly, while there has been a stated commitment to upskilling classroom assistants and teaching staff, there is currently no clear or detailed plan outlining how that will be achieved. There is no information on the nature of training, timelines for delivery, funding or how consistency and quality will be ensured across the system. There is an absence of clarity around how ongoing professional development will be embedded, how staff will be supported to adapt to new models of provision and how workload implications will be managed.

Overall, the reforms are being proposed without clear evidence, without sufficient capacity and without a comprehensive or actionable workforce plan to ensure delivery. Proceeding on that basis risks placing further strain on an already pressured system and undermining the effectiveness of support for children with special educational needs in our country.

Ms Noreen Kelly (Irish National Teachers' Organisation): Good afternoon. In addition to my role in the INTO, I am a full-time special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) and acting vice principal in my primary school. With that in mind, I am here to share with you the reality of what the SEN reform agenda and proposed enhanced support model looks like for us on the ground, dealing with its impact daily. The Education Committee has heard this time and time again, but my message to you is a simple one: schools and, in particular, those of us in the SENCO role are overwhelmed by the current pace of change. There are so many changes coming at us, and things are simply moving too fast.

To be clear, we support SEN reform. Reform is necessary, but I am pleading with you to do what you can in your role to slow the process down and to make sure that we get the reform right. There is no question about it: the enhanced support model will place significant additional responsibility on those of us in schools, including school leaders and SENCOs. We are expected to contribute to children's needs-focused statements, to complete requests for involvement and to design support packages within what are described as "minimum standards". However, there is no clarity on what those minimum standards actually involve or what resources will be available to help us meet them. At the same time, school SENCOs will be expected to monitor progress, evaluate impact and provide detailed data reporting. All of that is happening in the context where SENCOs already do not have sufficient time to meet our current statutory duties. The Committee is aware that SENCO workload and burnout is well documented.

Accountability is another major concern for us. If parents challenge the provision that is set out in the child's statement, the responsibility for responding may now shift directly to us in schools. Currently, that responsibility, including for tribunals, sits largely with the Education Authority. I currently have first-hand experience of that. Our very real concern is that the proposed changes represent a significant shift in workload and legal responsibility, without clear guidance and support. I will welcome questions later on how that will impact on schools like my own that have specialist provision in mainstream schools (SPiMS) classes.

We also have serious concerns about the resourcing and training that is needed to drive the reform. We do not yet know what resources will be provided, whether a workload impact assessment of the proposed changes has been carried out, whether staff will receive the necessary training, what that training will look like and whether staff will receive the necessary time to implement the changes effectively. We have very little confidence in how the changes that are associated with SEN reform and the proposed enhanced support model will be funded.

A case in point is that SENCOs were allocated two sub-funded days to attend the recent readiness for commencement of the new code of practice training, which was delivered by our SEN implementation and development team. I wish it to be noted on the record that that training was excellent. Our SENCOs need more of that face-to-face training by the SEN team. However, the funded day-2 training, which had initially been allocated to allow us time to assimilate the training that we received back in our schools, was pulled at the last minute. It hardly inspires confidence when investment for the people who are going to be tasked with enacting the changes just is not there. Cutting that vital funding is simply not good enough. It is disrespectful at best, and it sends the message that our role is not deemed worthy of the investment, which causes anger when you consider the immense expense of the Minister's transformation in education roadshow last week.

The same applies to school SEN budgets. Where is the ring-fenced time and funding to enable SENCOs to carry out their statutory duties? That lack of investment is simply not good enough, and it does not bode well for the future. The proposed reform agenda is like a car that the Department has designed and built, but parts of the car are still missing, and it has neglected to put fuel in it by not investing properly in the people whom it needs to drive it. While the model promotes a needs-led approach, schools are, understandably, concerned that they may be identifying needs for which no resources are available. We just need to look at the local impact teams, which are trying to operate without full staff capacity.

In school, we are asked to do significantly more without clarity and without the adequate resources and support in place. We must ask, therefore, for the SENCO role to be formally recognised as a strategic leadership position that requires ring-fenced funding and non-contact time. We also ask for the commissioning of a formal review of the SENCO role, its expectations and resourcing to reflect current realities; and for the provision of adequate resourcing, training and technical support for SEN digital systems to reduce unnecessary administrative burden.

Ms Bronagh Wright (National Education Union): I have 40 years' experience of education in Northern Ireland, with the past 15 years in education other than at school (EOTAS) support services. We want to highlight concerns regarding accountability, equity and funding.

There is a lack of clarity on what essential standards are going to be. It is not clear who will define those standards, how they will be applied or what happens if a school cannot provide the support outlined in them. That raises concerns about placing schools in what could only be described as legal straitjackets. They will have nowhere to go. There is also a risk that, if the proposed monitoring and benchmarking systems go ahead, there will be a league-table culture, whereby schools will be compared with each other on SEN outcomes without sufficient recognition of the complexity and diversity of need of each child.

Equity is another key issue. Local capacity varies greatly, particularly for small primary schools in rural areas. There is a risk that children will not receive consistent levels of support across regions.

From a financial perspective, while the reforms are presented as improving outcomes, and that is what we are told, there is a perception that they may be down to and driven by primarily cost considerations.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Could we just go quickly through the two remaining contributions? We are running short on time.

Ms Wright: OK. There is no clarity on funding. We are worried about workforce investment. There is no clear information for schools about the pots of funding that will be available and when they will be available. That is important for schools, and no information makes it difficult for them to plan, recruit and make decisions.

It is important to look at the use of AI. It is a brilliant tool, but caution is required. Internationally, there are ongoing concerns about technology, particularly for children with SEN. We need guidance to ensure that technology supports education rather than replaces effective teaching practice.

Without clarity on funding, accountability and equity, there is significant risk that the reform will reduce provision for young people. We cannot allow that system to be set up to fail.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Apologies, Bronagh, but I am going to have to ask you to draw your remarks to a close, and Joanne will need to be very brief.

Ms Joanne Whyte (National Association of Head Teachers): I will be very quick, Nick. I commend my colleagues for everything that they said. As an overview, however, I ask this: where is the child in this?

I took all day yesterday to plough through the stuff, and I did not get to the end of any of it. There seems to be page after page after page of exceptions that the Education Authority could use not to produce a statement and very little about the people who are going to enact it, such as learning support coordinators. So much of this is untested, and what has been rolled out in the past year has not been successful. You were there last week; it has not been successful. Governors are expected to provide for the learning support coordinator to have reasonable time to take on their extra role when nobody has any idea what that is. I just think that, untested, it is too much, too fast and too soon. These are our most vulnerable children, yet we are again going to try something to see whether it works: it is not good enough.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you all. Apologies for having to rush the presentations; we have three massive briefings on our agenda today. I will ask just one question. Fundamental concerns have been highlighted about the SEN reform agenda, but there is an acknowledgement across the board that we need to reform how we deliver SEN support services. If you could ask the EA and the Department to take one step towards delivering SEN reform that brings the teaching workforce and school leaders with them, what would that look like? What should our next step be?

Ms Kelly: May I jump in there? As somebody who is dealing with this on the ground, I say that it should be to slow down. We have a real opportunity to make meaningful change and to make reform successful, but we need to slow down. You heard that from the Children's Law Centre last week, and we echo what it says. As we have acknowledged, some parts of this are good. Why can we not slow it down and embed what is in place? Changes have already occurred, so we need to take the time to make sure that those are done properly. We need to build our local impact teams. As Maxine said, they came into operation only in September 2025 and are still not at full capacity. We need to build them up, and, in schools, we then need to use their services properly. We need Health to be on board. We need to embed the use of the new portals and the new statutory assessment process. We need to ring-fence time and funding for SENCOs, and we need a realistic budget to drive all that forward.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you, Noreen.

Ms Murphy Higgins: Nick, may I come in? As I said, we need, in essence, a road map to get there from where we are now. In my presentation, I stated that 1,400 different needs had been identified; we know that those are complex. When it comes to working with Health, for example, surely we know from the figures how many speech and language therapists and educational psychologists we need. We know how many allied health professionals we need to provide support as well as how many teachers and other support staff are needed. In my head, they already have the figures and can model where we are going to go. We need to see some sort of road map. As Noreen said, we are dealing with big reforms, but, behind closed doors, there are also changes to systems that everybody has to get their head around by asking, "How do we use this?". Never mind the actual changes to be moved through; those are the practicalities. So much is being thrown at schools.

We need a staged approach. They are saying that it is going to start in September 2026, yet here we are sitting in May; it is hard to think that we will have moved by then on any level. In reality, and with the best will in the world, local impact teams coming on board and the other changes that that made put further pressure on the system. When those changes came in, there was a period during which children were not being seen and supported and schools were not being supported. Bear in mind that at least there was half a plan for what the local impact teams would look like; there is no such plan for this. That is really concerning. I want to see a road map for how we are going to do it that says how many specialists we will need in the system in five years' time.

Sorry, Nick: there is one other thing. As we have said, the Department of Education did not put the money that was needed into the local impact teams. They have to do business case after business case — I sound as though I am from the management side — which is ridiculous.

Ms Hurst: That is what I was going to say.

Ms Murphy Higgins: The local impact teams are not fully staffed, so our members — our teachers — and our pupils are not getting the support that they need.

Ms Hurst: We see the erosion of specialist services; we need to build those up. We need to look for the excellence and to get the training, and there needs to be investment. They cannot be called specialist services but have people in them who are not specialists. That is a really important point.

Ms Whyte: I would like to say —.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): This will have to be the final point, Joanne, before I bring other members in.

Ms Whyte: This is the one thing that I would say: trust the profession. We have hundreds of years of being in the profession between us. When you fill in consultations that are skewed to give a certain answer, you just wonder, "What is the point?". There has been consultation after consultation. The very people on whom the whole system depends to deliver it are saying, "Whoa. Just wait". The reforms have the potential to be fantastic and make SEN provision so much better than it is at the moment but not at that rushed pace and not without taking into account the profession's voice.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I am going to bring the Deputy Chair in. I ask members to work with us on time. It may not be possible for each panel member to answer each question, given the time constraints. I apologise that we are in that position.

Mr Sheehan: Thank you for coming in. The message from you all and the contributors in the previous session is clear: it is moving far too fast. There needs to be a pause, and there needs to be greater scrutiny. That is clear, so I do not need to ask you about that. Is that OK?

Ms Kelly: That is fine.

Mr Sheehan: Maxine, you said that it is known how many allied health professionals are needed. We have asked that question on numerous occasions of the Department, the EA and the allied health professionals themselves. None of them has been able to give us an answer about the number of allied health professionals who are needed in the system. Can you enlighten us on that?

Ms Murphy Higgins: Sorry, what I meant is that they know the complexity of the children in the system, so they should be able to model how many allied health professionals are required. Like you, we have asked that question. We have said, "You are saying that we will have all this, so if you know what our children are —". We know the profile. As you know, we have that in our general statistics. They know what the profile is, so they should be able to work out how many we need of each.

Mr Sheehan: I agree. Absolutely. That was the way that it was put to them. If you have x number of children with y type of additional needs, it should be quite easy to match them up. Anyway, I know that that is nothing to do with you.

Ms Hurst: May I bring something else up?

Mr Sheehan: Sure.

Ms Hurst: I work in a speech and language centre, and I have done for 27 years. I see a huge increase in the number of children in our mainstream schools who have speech and language problems. It is a huge concern that teachers are expected to work with a child who has a sound system disorder, and that puts a lot of pressure on teachers. The Chair asked for one ask. One of my asks is that we have specialists who work in our school system.

Mr Sheehan: Noreen, you said that you are a SENCO. Quite a number of people watch these Committee meetings; they must have sad lives. [Laughter.]

We are constantly told by the EA and the Department that the SENCO workload is decreasing because of the changes that are taking place. That is true, is it not?

Ms Kelly: No. [Laughter.]

Absolutely not, because there is an increase in the number of children presenting with those needs. While there are attempts to streamline and reduce our workload, more and more children are coming in, so more and more referrals have to be completed. As well as that, the new portals mean that SENCOs have to do significant wrangling to get round them and get used to using them. That technology is new to us and the services. The whole workload thing is well documented, and I do not want to go over it, because you are aware of it, but has our workload reduced? Absolutely not.

Ms Hurst: Again, from the specialist provision perspective, there is a real issue with a teacher from the specialist provision having to link in with a SENCO from a child's mainstream school so that they can meet together to complete all the referrals, forms and documentation that need to be filed.

Ms Kelly: We have to remember that the majority of our SENCOs in schools are full-time teachers as well. They are full-time teachers. They have all the obligations and responsibilities of a classroom, and, on top of that, they have the SENCO role. Danny, you referred earlier to a recruitment and retention crisis. That is already happening with our SENCOs, and it will only increase.

Mr Sheehan: OK. Thank you. That is me, Chair. Thanks.

Mrs Guy: Folks, thank you so much. That was a really excellent briefing. You could not have been clearer in what you were saying. I have just a couple of questions here, because of time. You questioned whether the Department had carried out a workload assessment. What would you want to see from that assessment?

Ms Kelly: We would really like to see clear working patterns for our SENCOs in schools. We want it to look at how much time is actually being devoted to the SENCO, so that they are enabled to carry out their SENCO role, which is separate from their teaching role. We know — it is clear — that there is the need for our SENCOs to have non-contact time to enable them to complete that role. When the new code eventually comes into law, that role will be even more of a statutory one, with the responsibilities that are there. There will have to be a workload assessment. One has not been done to date.

Mrs Guy: Nursery principals usually do not have their own SENCOs — they carry out both roles. Do you think that anything in the regs will help with that, or does that need to be addressed specifically?

Ms Wright: Pauline and I were involved in a SEN workload review with the Department and EA in 2019.

Ms Hurst: It was in 2020.

Ms Wright: We worked really hard over a year. I think that there were 82 short-term, mid-term and long-term recommendations. The Department and EA have a lot of that information already. They have had it for a considerable amount of time. It has never been published. A lot of the information that would really help is there. It has not been implemented yet.

Mrs Guy: Finally, you, and lots of people, have mentioned the need to pause and rationalise. When you say that, do you mean pause and rationalise within those specific SEN reforms, or do you mean it more broadly with regard to the wider reforms and multiple reforms that are happening in education? Do you think that we should pause TransformED now and prioritise SEN, or should we prioritise the most important things within each of them? For me, generally, it feels as though we should choose a few things and do them well, rather than try to do lots of things at once, which can overwhelm everyone. Which one do you think we should do?

Ms Whyte: In this instance, we are talking about the SEN regulations because we are all involved with children with SEN. For us, it is not about workload. You have a workforce who do not understand the regulations and have not had the opportunity to go through the 400-odd pages to work out what they actually mean for them and whether they are better for them and the children. That is what we are calling for, essentially. They have been written in such a way, with such a lack of clarity and detail, that it is really hard to know what the consequences of enacting them would be. Therefore, the pause that is needed is really to enable us to go through everything in fine detail and work out the actual day-to-day nitty-gritty of what the regulations would mean for children in schools.

Ms Wright: Maxine talked about a timeline. Would it not be great if there were a timeline on all those things, and then that they were cross-referenced against primary, post-primary and special support services? People are already saying that there will be a clash, in about six years' time, due to a heavy-duty workload. Therefore, there is a responsibility to look at the timelines.

Ms Hurst: As teachers, we are trained to be reflective; to stop, pause, monitor, evaluate, see where you are and plan for where you want to go next. We have to have three-year school development plans. Surely, the EA and the Department should be able to draw out a three-year plan. Our school development plan will have a focus for the year; for example, literacy. Surely, as a big conglomerate, we should be able to do the same thing: have one focus and work on it, whether it is SEN, literacy or numeracy, just like in the school development plan. The EA should have a similar plan. Sorry.

Mrs Mason: I want to say at the start of my remarks that it is class that both panels have been all-female. The future of the trade union movement is bright.

Maxine, you referred to a road map. We are not seeing a road map. I do not think that it is being hidden from us; I just do not think there is one.

Ms Murphy Higgins: There is not.

Mrs Mason: That is the issue. As Pat said about allied health professionals, we have been promised figures on how many children are being referred, how many are getting their statements, and how many are on pathways 1, 2 and 3. We are still waiting. The silence is deafening.

Pauline, you spoke about the model of having intervention supports in schools. We were told initially that the teams were going to be multidisciplinary, which everybody thought was fantastic and could work. Now, though, we have ended up with this. You mentioned the professionals in the LIT teams. My heart goes out to them because they are doing a tough job. They are the ones who are having to go into schools at the coalface to handle this. I know that the majority of them, some of whom are literacy teachers, are answering a helpline phone and do not know where to send people.

Joanne, both of us were at the meeting that I mentioned, and I think that Maxine and yourself said that you were well aware of the issues. I do not know about you, Joanne, but I got the feeling that the Department and the EA were shocked at what they were hearing. You might have heard me mention that earlier, but what is your view on DE and the EA saying that they were not aware of this?

Ms Murphy Higgins: We have been telling them. We meet with them regularly. We were meeting with them nearly every other week on the implementation of local impact teams. We are probably meeting with them monthly at the minute. We raised those issues with them time and time again. We asked the same thing: where is the road map and how are we going to get there? We cannot just get to September and there be nothing. I told them that they should know the number of allied health professionals if they can model what they will need. They have heard all the issues that we raised with you today. We raised them on every occasion that we met, including the survey results. They told us that 2,500 survey responses were mostly positive. Yes, because none of us could disagree with the survey questions. What they were asking is what we would want in a utopia. Again, I go back to the road map: they are not telling us how we get there or what provisions they will put in place. All that it ever comes back to is their saying that we need to get away from the 1:1 model. You cannot say to somebody, "Here's our 1:1 model and we're moving you" if you are moving them to nothing: they are not being offered anything at the minute. It is not about us being able to offer.

The problem then is it puts pressure on principals and SENCOs that they will have to explain to parents. Even when I say, "This is what we are going to deliver for you", there is the issue of their then trying to get that provision off the EA. Noreen does it day in and day out, going round and round and round in circles for a child. All we are saying is, "You are telling us you want us to do early intervention. That' s no problem, but we need the resources". When it then comes to getting the resources, they are not getting them. Therein lies our problem, and we are going round and round in circles.

Mrs Mason: We were told last week, "We can't pause. We can't pause this or stop. We can't take a breather because everything will collapse, and, in fact, it'll be dangerous".

Ms Kelly: We were at the consultation for the enhanced support model. I spoke on that, and we kept hearing the same message. They actually used terminology like "the burning platform", so they are using that as their case for change. The burning platform is a fear-based, change-management metaphor that basically says that taking a risky leap into the unknown is safer than staying put. That does not inspire confidence. That was published and circulated to SENCOs, and we were told to look at the burning platform.

The case for change is based on that fear-management metaphor, and it really does not inspire confidence. It is not good enough to say, "OK, we all acknowledge that things need to change", but we cannot just leap into this. As Maxine said, we need the road map, we need to slow down and we need to embed the changes that are in place. We then need to work collectively, with Health on board, to bring us forward.

Mrs Mason: That is a key point, Noreen. I have never heard any professional, school leader or teacher saying that they do not want to work together to make the situation better. Nobody in here does not want to work together to make it better. As you said, Joanne, where are the children in this? Where is their voice?

Ms Whyte: You heard the EA say, last week, that it knows that it is not right. You heard people from the EA stand up and say that it did not have the personnel and could not offer the services that were needed.

Mrs Mason: So why push on?

Ms Whyte: Yes.

Mr Baker: Thank you so much. I will pick up on what was just said: why push on? If you were to believe what officials tell us, you would think that everything in the garden was rosy and that everything will be brilliant. My question is this: if they continue to push on, wanting all the reform to take place yet ignoring all the evidence before them — you meet them and we tell them — what are they up to? What are they doing? I am really confused. Is it about saving money in the long run? Is that what this is really about? Is the reform really about saying, "Do you know what? We will take away your legal protections, and we will then not have to worry about them any more. That will save a couple of pounds"?

Ms Whyte: The EA says that 98% of referrals are picked up and run with, but I could say that 100% of my referrals to my local yoga class have been made. I have not been yet, but I have booked on, and I have got booked on 100% of the time. It is all about perspective. There is no doubt that it cannot only be about money. If there were no constraint as huge as finance, why on earth would you come up with this?

I also have a serious issue because the only oversight that is mentioned in the whole thing is the fact that DE will have oversight on the basis of key data from the EA. I doubt whether that data will be agreed with the profession. Why does the key data not come from the schools, the children and the families whom the regulations are supposed to be working for? Why are they not being asked, "Do you feel that your child's needs are being met?", and "How are they being met?", and "Do you agree?"? Why is DE's oversight of the whole thing based on EA data? As Pat says, apparently the workload of SENCOs is reducing.

Ms Kelly: I wish.

Mr Baker: I go back to when we got back up and running again and were pushing on the issues. I was guilty of using what I call the "buzzword" of early interventions, because families tell me, "We need early interventions". We have done joint Committees and all that. After one of the meetings, a member of the Health Committee came to me and said, "Why do you really need to know how many allied health professionals are needed?". That day, I knew the direction of travel that we would head in.

It is about the families that I work with every day. It is May: already, hundreds of kids are not placed this year for the start of September, and the ones who were placed last year are on reduced timetables. Nobody is keeping a record of all those children. That is a fundamental failure. I get it: we need reform in the right direction. As I said in the previous evidence session, I have really tried to get up to speed with what is happening across the water. It feels to me as if this is a copy-and-paste exercise and that this is what they are up to there as well. They have probably had better outcomes than we have had in the past 10 years, to be brutally honest, but they are going the other way as well. They are regressing and taking away protections. That means that we can just leave children at home.

Ms Whyte: If you ask any school leader, "Would you like more school autonomy over how the money is spent and what you can provide for your children?", they will always say, "Yes". However, autonomy in this case is like having the autonomy to bake a cake whenever you want but the EA having control over the amount of flour that you get and whether you get eggs and never delivering those things to you when you need them. It is autonomy without the resources to carry out the things that you are supposedly now responsible for. That is false, and school leaders and schools will end up spending their time in court trying to defend something that was not even their job to provide in the first place.

Ms Kelly: Is autonomy a cover for abdicating responsibility and putting it onto us? That is the real fear.

Ms Wright: I think that the Children's Law Centre told you that 97% of SEN tribunals are successful. That is a key point that should be listened to, because that will be on schools.

Ms Hurst: Linking into what you said about trying to do a copy and paste from across the water, my concern is that Northern Ireland has the highest statistics for special educational needs, and they keep increasing. Surely, we should be looking to the root of the problem and trying to find out what it is increasing so much and then, as a society, trying to deal with that. Is any research being done into why that is happening?

Mr Baker: Supports are still going to be needed no matter what. We really need to get the early interventions right because it has now just become a complete and utter buzzword. My last point is —.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Briefly, Danny.

Mr Baker: Is the Minister even having any engagement here? I can envisage what is going to happen in the Chamber. I know that he is going to stand up and say that we are being reckless if we vote the regulations down and that we will damage children further. I can predict the script.

Ms Kelly: When we had all the SENCOs together, the Minister did not grace us with his presence. He Zoomed into the meeting with a pre-recorded message. I get that he is busy, but that was so important that day. We had all the SENCOs together in that room, and it was very disappointing that the person who is leading this and saying that it is a priority was not there to address us in person.

Mr Baker: That says a lot about him.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I was at that event, and it did feel like a misstep that the Minister was not there. He can articulate that for himself. Jon, you are next.

Mr Burrows: Thanks. That was excellent. I will make one observation. Every person whom I speak to in the teaching profession says that the Minister's reforms — I agree with you that many of them are good — are rushed. It seems to me that they are working to a political timetable because there is an election next year. I say that as someone who supports some of the stuff that he is doing.

One of the issues where I tend to find a practical problem is with senior leadership teams getting ready for these changes and teachers being released for consultations such as on the curriculum review. Sometimes, the EA says that it needs those staff for up to 15 days, but there is not fully funded substitute cover. Is that an obstacle to engaging fully with consultations and preparing for change?

Ms Wright: Of course. There are time budgets with the hours in schools. We already know about the additional hours that every teacher and school leader work. That is well documented. If you are going to introduce all these things, you need to train people; if you are going to call people experts, they will need training.

Ms Kelly: When you promise the training, you cannot pull it. That is what happened to the SENCOs.

Mr Burrows: Correct. There is a second issue that I am very interested in. I have been raising it, but it has not had a lot of receptivity. You made the point about understanding why there has been an increase. It is not about denying that people have genuine issues such as autism or ADHD, but there is an increase that cannot simply be explained by under-diagnosis in the past. There is an understanding that brains are changing, perhaps from the impact of screens and other things. I agree with you. I think that we need to look at why there has been an increase and a change. I wanted that to be part of the SEN inquiry, but it was not. To reinforce the point, are we missing understanding the exponential rise?

Ms Wright: Yes. It is specific to Northern Ireland. It is specific to what is happening here and what is affecting education here.

Ms Whyte: I think that it is a culture thing. Previously, you talked about mobile phones in schools. It is not all that long ago that people were encouraged to take their mobile device to school. There was bring-your-own-device-to-school time because schools did not have the equipment. A lot of parents who have children starting school now were part of that and had to bring their own device to school. It is a culture thing, but it is also a societal thing with instant gratification and everything being very fleeting. There is no long-term thinking about anything, and that is why the regulations are so important. This will be the only opportunity in my lifetime, and probably all of our lifetimes, for such huge, systemic change for the better of all the children in our society. That is why we want this paused. We need to be on it like a car bonnet with every aspect of this and make sure that it is doable and workable. We cannot get it wrong again for the kids.

Ms Wright: A large percentage of underachieving children in Northern Ireland do not have access to technology at home. Schools are the places where they will have access to it. That is what needs to be driven forward in a positive way in education.

Mr Burrows: There is a big difference between that and upskilling tech abilities that can be used in a productive way. The big challenge with phones at the moment is not that it is a brick phone for communication; it is the constant scrolling, which is damaging attention.

Ms Whyte: The kids are miles ahead of us. We are never going to catch up with how the kids are now. The downfall of C2K was caused by a 16-year-old, and nobody could work out how he did it. There is a very proud ICT teacher somewhere. [Laughter.]

They are streets ahead of us.

Mr Burrows: Yet we are going to have to harness those abilities in a positive way for cybersecurity in future. We could be world-class in Northern Ireland in those things.

Ms Wright: A lot of children in Northern Ireland do not understand algorithms, and neither do a lot of adults. Whatever it is they are being fed all the time, they do not even understand how it is happening. We really need to address that.

Mr Burrows: I am intrigued by what you said about understanding why the rise is happening. More and more — I heard it during a recent visit to a primary school — I am hearing that children remain significantly behind milestones, and that that is increasing. That is not a judgement on parents, but is there a need for more practical support for parenting skills?

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I apologise; we need a brief answer.

Ms Wright: This is the first time in education that it has gone backwards. We need to look into that.

Mr Burrows: It is worrying.

Mr Brooks: We will have plenty to ask of the DE officials when they appear. I want to ask you about the phrase, "burning platform". The original usage of the term relates to an atrocity or a disaster. The phrase has been widely used in public policy, probably most famously in Northern Ireland in relation to the Bengoa report. Changes have taken place in the health sector, which have been positive. However, they did not happen in a planned way: they took place as a result of collapse, essentially, and the need to move very quickly to a different model as a result. Do you accept, then, that given the pressures in the system, there is, to an extent, a burning platform, where there is a need to find a degree of sustainability for all involved? I understand, and have heard very clearly, the message from both panels today, that things are moving too fast and there is a need to slow down. I know that that will be put to the DE officials when they are here. Does the phrase "burning platform" not ring true to some degree in that regard?

Ms Kelly: Its usage is unfortunate. It does not inspire a lot of confidence in the education field, the inference being that things will get worse if we stay where we are and do not do this now. Changes have happened; why can we not spend the time now to embed those changes and then, as Maxine said, look to the road map? We are not saying that we should stop; we are saying, "Pause, slow down". We have a real chance to make lasting reform. We cannot just jump because things are so bad. Changes are happening daily; you only have to look at how the new statutory assessment process is working. There are changes there for the good. We need time on the ground to become familiar with those changes and work those out. We need time to get round the new portals and referral systems. We need time to utilise our local impact teams effectively. Too much is coming at us too soon and too quickly. That is where we are coming from.

Mr Brooks: We have heard the call to slow down an awful lot today, as well as a lot of detail on many aspects of the changes. What aspects are you talking about when you say, "Slow down"? What does that look like? Can you put some meat on the bones? What aspects are moving too fast and need particularly to slow down?

Ms Kelly: For starters, we have to work on managing parental expectation. Our parents now feel that things are going to be different in September. What, effectively, is going to be different in September? As a SENCO, I am still going to have the same level of need in my school. I have finite resources, a finite number of staff and a finite amount of time to meet that need. It is unfortunate that we keep hearing, "This is coming in September" and "Everything is going to change in September", when, in effect, nothing is going to change in September. Stop using that language, because it is not helpful, and instead say, "We're working towards this". We would like to see a phased approach. We keep getting told, "It is up to a school to decide and design its package", but we do not have enough evidence yet or enough examples of how it works.

Mr Brooks: Joanne has essentially said, "Of course they would say that, wouldn't they?". However, from going to schools — I have talked to Joanne, and I have tried to absorb as much as I can from principals — I can genuinely say that nearly all the principals I have met have said, "I would rather have the autonomy to decide what to do, because I can do better things with the resource". They value their classroom assistants greatly, but they sometimes feel that there is no benefit from adding more and more to that. This is crude, and we have not dug into it, but I see from the press today that the Boys' Model School is performing excellently, even compared to some of the top grammar schools. That is one of the schools that moved away from adherence to the one-to-one policy. Do you think that the move will be beneficial if it is done in a structured way?

Ms Kelly: If it is structured, but there has to be equity as well. It is terrific that those schools had the resourcing to do that. The majority of our schools do not have that level of resourcing. I need an on-site speech and language therapist in my school. I do not have that. How do I then use what I have available to get that for my children? We kept coming back to the autonomy question with Danny. There is a fear that the responsibility is now all on the school. Where is the EA in all this? Is that an abdication of its responsibility? If things do not work out the way in which they are supposed to, it will be on the school, and it is the school that will be at a tribunal.

Mr Brooks: I think that it is safe to say that, although there is plenty on this and many other issues that divides those of us around the table, the need for Health to engage at a better level is something that unites us.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): There are no other indications. As with the last session, we have covered a huge amount of ground. Very clear messages have come through in last week's and this week's evidence sessions. I appreciate that you probably would have liked to say more if there had been time. We now have to try to unpick all this with the EA and the departmental officials who will be here following this session. Thank you for your evidence and your time today.