SCHOOLS in Donegal have been juggling familiar pressure points in recent years: school transport disruption, accommodation problems, and the strain that comes with running timetables when staffing is tight.
Demand for special education provision has also grown, along with the supports that must come with it.
Against that backdrop, the row around Special Needs Assistant (SNA) allocations has affected schools and the parents of children who rely on those supports. This week, the Minister for Education and Youth, Hildegarde Naughton, paused the review of SNA allocations and said no further letters on review outcomes will be issued while she engages with stakeholders in the weeks ahead.
The pause will bring relief in homes and staffrooms that have spent the last fortnight anxious and trying to make sense of proposed reductions. But it must now be used properly: to engage with schools and stakeholders and fix a process that has caused too much unnecessary distress.
In Donegal, the concern has been concrete. St Oran’s National School has been reported as receiving notification that its SNA allocation would drop from four to 2.5, with 28 children identified as requiring additional supports.
In those circumstances, a review isn’t an administrative exercise at all. It triggered severe distress for families. Parents spoke publicly about life-and-death medical risks requiring constant monitoring, and they were left with a real fear: that their child would lose essential support and, as a result, might not be able to remain in school safely.
It goes to something basic that can get lost in the noise: supports like this are not about making school easier. They are about making it possible. Because where a child’s access to education depends on care supports, the removal of those supports isn’t a minor adjustment; it’s a barrier.
The minister has emphasised there are no overall cuts to SNA numbers. But that does not reassure a school facing a reduction. It’s that gap between national messaging and local experience where trust breaks down.
That breakdown is made worse by how the SNA role is sometimes defined in official terms. SNAs are sometimes discussed as if the role is mainly about primary physical care needs. In practice, the role is broader and often preventative: support that helps children regulate, communicate, stay safe and access learning.
If decisions are based on a narrow understanding of what SNAs do, schools and families will see the process as disconnected from classroom reality.
Speaking to SNAs, they also want it said out loud that there are other issues beyond the headline issue of the allocation review. One is the fragmentation of posts.
Some SNAs say hours are being reduced and split in a way that leaves people with as little as a couple of hours’ work a day. It’s an unsustainable model for staff with mortgages, families and bills, and it undermines continuity for children who do best with familiar, consistent support.
When hours become unviable, people have little choice but to leave a job they value for something they can actually live on.
There is a fair point in the middle of all this: a review isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ideally, it would sit inside an overall strategic plan that looks at the totality of need in a school, based on the profile of students and how that profile is changing.
It would also be honest about other gaps, including shortages in specialist supports such as speech and language therapy, so that schools are not left trying to solve every problem through one staffing line.
If policy remains reactive, we end up in the same cycle: pressure, backlash, pause, and then another round of uncertainty.
So what should happen now? The Minister’s engagement must be public-facing: clear criteria, plain explanations, and a timeline schools can plan around.
Any revised approach should also reflect the full role SNAs play, including learning and wellbeing supports, and job security has to be part of the discussion, because the system cannot retain skilled SNAs while making the work financially unviable through disjointed hours.
The pause buys time. The test is whether that time is used to rebuild trust and put a workable, transparent system in place before the next round of letters lands.
This article was written by Donegal News columnist Sabrina Sweeney whose Fresh Take column appears each week in our Thursday edition.
