INTO conference: Four hundred teachers could be recruited "for the cost of the Punchestown Equestrian Centre" to help resolve the special needs crisis in education, the INTO president said last night.
Mr Seán Rowley said that children with special education needs were still being accommodated in classes of up to 30 pupils with no specialist assistance.
This was the continuing reality, he said, despite declarations from the Minister for Education that educational disadvantage was his main priority.
Speaking at the opening session of the INTO conference last night, Mr Rowley said that hundreds of extra teachers were needed to make primary schools more inclusive.
He challenged politicians and policymakers to "come into our schools and see at first hand special needs pupils supposedly included in some of our primary schools".
Mr Rowley added: "You will find them in classes of up to 30 children all looking for their share of the teacher's time. You will find children who have special care needs that are not being met because a special needs assistant has not been sanctioned."
He said that the Minister for Finance should lift the public service jobs embargo, which was "depriving these children of an appropriate education".
The embargo, he said, had to go. "Four hundred teachers could be employed in our schools for the cost of the Punchestown Equestrian Centre."
INTO demands in the area of special education include:
r An allocation of resource teachers to every school based on numbers of pupils on the basis that every school will have some children with special needs;
r A method of accessing additional resources for children with more acute needs;
r Increased stability and manageability of special needs in schools;
r Proper guidelines for schools on the allocation of resources to children with special education needs;
r A rights-based - not resource-based - approach to resource allocation.
On educational disadvantage, Mr Rowley said that the Republic invests €24,000 in a child's primary education over eight years while paying €100,000 annually to fund a stay in prison.
Primary teachers in disadvantaged schools were witnessing children coming to school hungry, cold and undernourished.
"Our educational expenditure as a percentage of GDP places us in the bottom third of spenders on education. In addition, spending on third level does not benefit the vast majority of disadvantaged pupils, who have either dropped out of the system or mentally or emotionally disengaged from formal education long before that."
He said that the €43 million secured for disadvantage at third level last year had more to do with "getting the Minister off the hook on fees" than on any well-thought-out plan to help disadvantaged children. "If it were in earnest, it would have been ploughed into primary, where it would do the most good."