Anyways, what’s on the agenda this year? Another year in the same class band and classroom for me, which is very comforting. It’s consolidation of a great first year back in the primary classroom after my stint in third level. This summer I’ve been ruminating a lot on the things I want to be conscious of across all of my work this year. I wouldn’t call them resolutions, because I have been alive long enough to know what happens to those, but principles. Things I want to keep coming back to when the diary has gone feral and the enthusiasm of the -ber months of Term 1 is a distant memory. That happens, by the way. Term 2 for me is always peak Bono/MacPhisto, go away and dream it all up again time. And you have to do that too! But for now, September. We go again.

Sit in. One, two, three, eyes on me, etc.

1. Explicit teaching is BACK. We are leading. We are guiding. We are teaching. We went too far to the other side, lads. Everything became discovery, facilitation, choice, inquiry and child-led learning. All good things. All absolutely part of the job. Things I do a lot of. But children also need adults who know things and teach them things. Tell them what you are doing. Show them how. Model it. Practice it. Repeat it. Explain. Model. Practice. Repeat. And then do it again. I am increasingly convinced that this applies to practically everything. How do you enter a room? How do you join a group? How do you disagree? How do you ask someone for something? How do you organise a page? How do you start something you don’t particularly want to do? How do you recover when you get something wrong? Don’t tell. Teach. We should never assume they know.

2. Teaching executive functioning is the gig. It might be the whole gig in September, in fact. We’re breaking the task down and showing them what starting actually looks like. “We gather the items we need for the task. Oooh, look how I’m laying them out so clearly!” you say. “How long do we think this might take?” “I guess…” Model, model, model. “Oh, I’m stuck. How can I fix this? Can I take a couple of tasks together?” We’re going to use low-barrier-entry tasks to set them up well. This generation needs that. They need to be room-ready before they can be learning-ready. We’re also going to get better at recognising and managing functional freeze. That child can do it. We know they can. But that child also can’t begin. The page staring. The child standing at my desk, at Sabrina Sharpenter (our mounted desk pencil sharpener, I know you stop it!) and refusing to move until they reach rubber tips. The task has simply become too big inside their head. We’re going to get better at recognising that and, more importantly, teaching children what to do when that happens.

3. This year, we focus on developing understanding, not compliance. What is the point of so-called good behaviour if learning isn’t happening concurrently? Classes are busy, messy spaces. Compliant classrooms are not a requirement for learning (thank heavens, or else we’d be at nothing). This year I want to know if they understand. Simply, can they actually do the thing independently when I am not hovering beside them? I roam a room until they must see themselves through the door. This happens, I believe, through emotional security. Buy-in. They have to feel like you’re locked into them. They also can’t be afraid. A perfectly behaved child who is terrified of getting something wrong is not the classroom success story we sometimes think they are. Rotten stuff. Learning built on fear is rocky underfoot. We need to be consistent in instruction. Mean what you say. Don’t say everything seventeen times. But equally, don’t confuse authority with intimidation. We can be extremely clear and extremely kind at the same time.

4. We are also going to work hard for the high performers. High performers are becoming a dying breed in primary classrooms. Attention naturally flows toward crisis. At best, we’re all guilty of teaching to the middle. I want to bring back a focus for the kid who is flying along. How will we do this? Complexity. Beautiful books. Big questions. Serious maths. Interesting language. Opportunities to fail at things because they have finally been given something difficult enough. Differentiation cannot always mean making something easier. Sometimes it means making something properly harder. We can do all of this quite easily, and once these children are set up, they will routinely have the independence to get stuck into tasks while we divert our attention elsewhere for a bit.

5. Just do the thing. Write the damn Aladdin message. Stop procrastinating on that yearly. Get it done! AAAAND, PRINT. Save. Next. The new planning guidelines allow for monthly note-making, and it now fits much more easily within a cuntas míosúil structure. There is plenty of real work involved in teaching, and we have no need to produce paperwork just to show that teaching has taken place. Let assessment planning lead this year, as we move into a new vista of learning, teaching and assessment being the three key pillars in the literature and circulars. If procedures are genuinely useful, keep them; if they help us think, plan, reflect, or advance learning, that’s excellent. But if we’re filling in a box merely because there is a box, I’m not too interested. We are ruthlessly efficient. Inbox in, inbox out. We have pupils to teach. And miles to go before I sleep, etc. Let’s use our time on that.

6. In our classrooms, reading is a status symbol. Reading is cool. Reading is elite. Reading is what interesting people do. I am going to keep working hard to create that atmosphere. Set up beautiful library spaces. Walk to the local library. Read to them. Read with them. Talk about books like they are cultural events. Have opinions. Tell them when something you read was brilliant. Invite an author in. Children need to see adults enjoy reading. Talk about media. Stories. Magazines. Newspapers. Comics. Weird facts. Biographies. Poetry. Instructions. Reviews. Words in our mouths, on pages, on walls. Words, words, words.

7. Whimsy is key. Children need whimsy. Be the weird teacher. The classroom is Broadway. Make events out of things. PERFORM. Have ridiculous traditions, chants and running jokes. Create moments that make the other children wish they were in on your classroom jokes. We’re a club. We share silly achievements. Make an entrance in the morning. Put music on. So much music! Share nonsense. Tell jokes. Make them laugh. They will make you laugh. Lean into characters. School should contain joy. There are enough places in life where everything is serious. We have to be memorable to be meaningful now. And shove your “don’t smile until Christmas” advice. Hollow, shallow, clinical and cold. Not for me.

8. A teacher should model the world and the behaviour they want to see. Do the thing in front of them. Show them how you speak politely to another adult, how you apologise, how you disagree, how you ask somebody’s opinion. Model curiosity. Model being informed. Be in the world with them. Talk about the news. Bring in the newspaper. Talk about something happening in sport, science, music, technology. Same with the learning. Write the paragraph badly first. Get the maths question wrong. Show them how you notice. Show them how you fix it. This is a shared space of accepting that we are all learning all the time; to make mistakes is to be human, but we also work every day to make sure we put out what we want to get back. Water your own garden, etc.

9. Connect with their passions. Pebbling. Info-dumping. Whatever version of interest a child offers you, notice it. Listen to how they talk about it. Absorb their passions. Get into their world. Their development is also happening in disguise, and in rooms and places you don’t access in the school day. On development, a child doing the same apparently pointless thing over and over may be working something through. This is so true for a younger child. Watch before you interfere. Curiosity before correction. So much information sits in what children choose to do when nobody is directing them. Watch. Learn. Be humble. They breadcrumb you with details all the time.

10. Less martyrdom, please. The art of success is continuing? Not always. There is no prize for crawling over the line destroyed. Who are you doing it for? Get yourself in order and stop doing it to yourself. You have a responsibility to take care of yourself. People don’t owe you anything. You owe yourself everything. We steadfastly protect our personal time. We maintain a sense of summer throughout term time, too. We live while working. Do all you can to stay healthy and draw a line when you’re in over your head. Say no, basically. You can do that, did you know?

11. I am asking my colleagues to realise that we are sociologists. We live within and work within communities. We observe these things: the family under strain, the child who has changed, poverty, social isolation, children who spend too much time online, children who are unable to cope, the fact that the services are not being provided, and the gaps in speech, language, behaviour, care, sleep, nutrition and connection. It does not follow that teachers can solve all these problems, but schools cannot act as if the child’s existence is limited to between school hours. We must notice these things and be aware of how politics is affecting both them and us, and vote and engage in society accordingly.

12. The difficult child gets a clean slate. A teacher tells you they found a child incredibly difficult last year. You nod. You listen. You thank them for sharing their experience. And then you start again. New team. New dressing room. You get to start anew. You can choose a different route. Every classroom has its own chemistry. The child who drove somebody else demented may adore you. Give them a chance. The child you find easy may clash with somebody next year. I would also implore teachers not to make things relating to kids about you. Stop making the child’s stuff about you. You’re the adult. Get on with it.

13. Make sure the parent piece is done well and make a real connection. Pick up the phone before a small problem turns into a big one. Share something positive and make sure the first time they hear from you is because there’s something good to share, not because something has gone wrong. Also, remember to listen. No one back in the day knew what any other person’s house looked like. Social media has changed that. Something similar is happening in classrooms. Parents see and hear a lot about education and can assume things are standard everywhere, and that schools can do particular things. Not so. We should probably communicate much better about what classrooms actually are, what schools can realistically offer and what teachers are actually doing all day. Principals need to lead on this piece, in particular. Set your standard. Back your staff.

14. Instant gratification is no longer acceptable or on offer in classrooms because we simply can’t meet the demand for immediacy when there are thirty children to teach. The world keeps giving children instant rewards in the form of excitement and euphoria. The idea is to give them what they want now and avoid any delay. Just swipe, subscribe, tap, tap, tap, and then move on. I’m sorry, but in Room 4 you won’t get a dose of dopamine every twelve seconds. There are times when you’ve worked at something for an hour, and it’s still not finished. Other times the reward comes next Friday. Other times it’s next month. And on some occasions the reward is that you’re better at something than you were six months ago. That’s something you have to accept.

15. This school year, never tell a child (or colleague, for that matter) to be strong when they have come to you to be weak. Schools need places where people can put things down. For too many, we are the place. They don’t do it with us? They don’t do it at all. That means we accept and live with big emotions every day. Crying, feeling, and absorbing it all. We confront it. We talk about it. We also get on with it. We are soft creatures, but we motor on with resolve and grit. We don’t give up, but we learn to keep going. Do hard times change you, and hurt you? Yes. But can you also lead children to stand up on their own and make a way in the world, even if they are a little fragile? Of course. You don’t have to be the strongest to move forward. And weakness means you feel and are present. Talk that way.

16. And finally, schools are homes. In every way that really counts, children inhabit them. They spend huge portions of childhood inside these buildings. Clean the classroom. Make it pleasant. Put beautiful things in it. Create warmth. Make it somewhere you yourself can happily spend hours a day. This is a year of their childhood. We are creating little domestic set-ups. Let them find the best place to store things. Let them do the jobs. Someone comes to us to borrow something? Let them find it. Mary will help you. Clean the boards, empty bins, wash down the sink. This isn’t punitive; it’s a communal, co-created learning space. Their space. Let them create it.

Happy days to us. Make it full, beautiful, and warm. Mind our beautiful little minds. Mind your mind. Take care of yourself along the way. Have a rich, messy, fun, and memorable year. Strike off the losses, and retain the wins as best you can. June always comes again. What a great job we have. Never forget it.

It starts with a cry of immediacy and urgency. A yell that proclaims: I am alert to this world that is so hard for me to just exist in.

There is absolutely no obvious reason for the upset this morning. There does not need to be. She has slept softly enough the previous night and stayed asleep. A gift.

Yet the morning is broken with a period of five to ten minutes where simply being in her body anew seems distressing for her. Sustained anger. There is absolutely nothing we can do to ease this discomfort. We remain consistent, present and supportive until it passes.

She eventually indicates that she wants to go downstairs. On her terms. On my back. I carry the wholeness of her, knowing to stop on the one step she needs to touch with her feet. I know not to miss this step. Her hands clutch and pinch at my body.

Now more alert in her body, hunger is apparent. She exists without any ability to express what exactly it is she wants to eat. She refuses a substantial meal, so she snacks and grazes on foods that wouldn’t normally be classified as breakfast. This is safe. This is what makes yesterday like today and tomorrow like today. These foods fill a gap, so that’s what we do. That’s life with restricted eating. Food is food.

Constant physical input is expected from the moment of waking. Touching. Scratching. Rubbing. Simply having someone beside her. I have to make sure I immediately run to the toilet when I wake because I can’t really be away from her during the first twenty minutes of her being awake without causing further upset. Doubling. I am alongside her.

She has an immediate urge to settle herself into the day through repeated patterns. She needs access to her iPad so she can play the same clips again and again and again. That’s what eases her into the day. This is safe. This is what makes yesterday like today and tomorrow like today.

Personal hygiene is the next challenge. I’ll leave it at that.

Clothes. Getting dressed is hard too. At the moment, for some reason, dressing the lower half of her body seems to create more upset than it ever has before. There’s lashing and some kicking, but we persevere.

It’s time for the day to begin.

Begin it must, and does.

My thoughts immediately shift to where we should go and what we should do with this day. The mental load starts instantly.

I’m sad that nothing is simple.

I feel detached from a life where these things happen naturally.

I am embarrassingly reliant on my four-year-old daughter. I’m ashamed of that. Angry too.

We make it to the car, and that car takes us to the park.

She doesn’t want to leave the car.

I have to get her out.

People look and assume it’s bad behaviour.

I lie on the ground with her, making sure she doesn’t bang her head while simultaneously pretending everything is fine and encouraging my four-year-old to run ahead and enjoy herself. A fucking stupid and ignorant woman scolds me because the child isn’t wearing shoes. “Did Mammy not get you shoes to wear?”. I am ashamed that I am embarrassed.

Two children laugh at us.

I’m relieved the playground is largely empty.

We go without shoes. Or socks.

We do what we can.

She doesn’t play with her sister.

She does her thing.

She’s happy again.

It’s lonely though.

I’m lonely.

I’ll go again tomorrow.

Walking away from a permanent post, particularly in this economy, wasn’t the obvious decision. Taking a pay cut certainly wasn’t either. But I trusted my experience, I trusted my instincts, and I knew I was moving towards work that aligned much more closely with the teacher (and the person!) I want to be. I was (and remain!) annoyed by ignorant assertions that going back to school is a career regression, but that’s their ignorance to deal with. Oh, if only they knew! I will return to that another time.

A year later, I’ve worked my way back towards permanence again. More importantly, I’ve worked my way back to myself. I’ve never measured career success by salary alone. I measure it by whether the work feels like it matters. Whether I’m contributing to something bigger than my own professional output. That’s something I felt every day in my previous school, something I worried I’d lost for a while, and something I have unquestionably found again.

I have loved this year.

Working with children remains the greatest professional privilege I know. I feel like myself again in ways I hadn’t expected. Better still, I’m back in my school. It feels like a home now. I’m not going anywhere, and after everything there is an enormous peace in being able to say that. Happy days. And thank God for them.

So. Lots to reflect on. There is perhaps one major challenge (a reality one must confront and face with such positivity on show here in every other regard!) that is worthy of exploration. Before this, I spent a number of years lecturing. That work brought its own pressures, deadlines and responsibilities, but I can honestly say the tiredness isn’t comparable. Working with children is extraordinary because children are on all the time. They’re curious, hilarious, emotional, impulsive, endlessly questioning, wonderfully creative and constantly seeking connection. That’s precisely what makes teaching such a magical profession.

It’s also exactly what makes it so demanding.

Every summer teachers seem to have to relearn how to live at a normal pace. I knew this, of course. Even when I wasn’t teaching, I’ve always had one eye on schools, and I’ve seen just how depleted teachers are by the end of the year. It’s only now that school has stopped that I realise just how relentlessly switched on I’ve been for ten months. This year there were twenty-nine children, thousands upon thousands of questions, constant interactions, tiny moments to notice, problems to solve, friendships to repair, emotions to regulate, lessons to adapt and decisions to make. Every minute of every day somebody needed something from me. And, of course, it's harder now that I have two of my own at home.

And the funny thing is… the hard part is my favourite part. Genuinely. I love the relationships. I love the unpredictability. I love that no two days are ever the same. I love being trusted with children’s stories, their triumphs, their worries and their joy. But it is also utterly draining in a way that is almost impossible to appreciate while you’re living it. The fatigue is real. So what follows is an appreciation, and an explanation, of why teachers need the summers they have.

Teaching isn’t task-heavy. It’s people-heavy. You don’t spend your day ticking jobs off a list. You spend your day giving pieces of yourself away. That’s a very different kind of work. People often assume teaching is intellectually exhausting. Of course it can be. But what truly drains you is that you’re socially, emotionally and physically available to other human beings every minute of every day. There is no stepping back. No closing the office door. No disappearing behind a laptop for twenty minutes to gather your thoughts. There isn’t even time to think about yourself. You’re simply there, completely present, from the second the first child walks through the door until the last child leaves. You don’t even notice it because you run almost entirely on instinct and adrenaline. That heightened state simply becomes your normal. Then school finishes, the noise disappears, and your nervous system almost doesn’t know what to do with itself. It takes time to come down from that constant alertness. Even then, the teaching doesn’t entirely stop. There is so much to do when they are home, heck, when you are home. Your mind starts planning. Reflecting. These thoughts and plans needs to materialise in masses of paperwork. Thinking about needs. Accounting for need. Wondering about the version of children who’ll walk through your door next. It’s a profession that asks an enormous amount of your head as well as your heart. I’m not saying this to justify anything (I think we’re absolutely entitled to the holidays we get!) but I do think it’s worth explaining to people why things are the way they are.

This year I finished school, completed a week-long summer course, and then went straight into a week of Summer Provision. Provision was busy and rewarding in its own way, but it also reminded me just how much the mainstream classroom demands. Working with a much smaller group meant interactions could be planned, paced and supported. It was still teaching, but it simply wasn’t the same as trying to meet the needs of twenty-nine children simultaneously for five hours every day, where there genuinely isn’t a second to yourself.

People often compare teaching to other professions, but there is one thing that’s almost impossible to explain unless you’ve lived it. We don’t get a moment. There is no “I’ll answer that after lunch.” There isn’t really a lunch. There is a vague attempt to eat something while you have the one opportunity to interact with another adult in your working day. You’re on. Every second. It really is showbusiness, toots. And the reviews come in live (hello, Aladdin!).

I have a modest policy proposal. Just as every citizen can be called for jury duty, I think every adult should have to complete one compulsory week in a primary classroom. It should preferably be in the final week of June. We’d go easy on ye. No planning. No correcting. Just existing in the room. Five days of Sports Day, sponsored walks, awards and graduations, melting children, forgotten water bottles, emotional goodbyes, spontaneous tears, end-of-year excitement and hearing “Miss… Miss… Miss…” approximately fourteen thousand times before lunch. I suspect we’d hear considerably less commentary afterwards about teachers’ holidays.

The reality is that schools have changed too. I’ve noticed this in profound ways this year, and the wider societal shift is evident in my experience. Increasingly, children don’t just arrive carrying schoolbags. They arrive carrying life. Friendships. Anxiety. Family worries. Regulation. Identity. Loneliness. Questions about the world. Questions about themselves. Need. The “third places” that once existed in communities (youth clubs, neighbourhood groups, casual outdoor play, places where children simply learned how to be with one another) have disappeared in many places. I’ve written before about this through the lens of additional educational needs, but the truth is it extends far beyond that. For so many children, school has become the place where everything lands.

That means teachers increasingly become the adult who absorbs everything. It’s a privilege. It’s also a weight. The intensity of the school year is so great that you almost stop noticing your own body. I’m genuinely not exaggerating when I say there are days when two o’clock arrives and I realise I haven’t had a proper drink of water. The tea is stone cold. I haven’t been to the toilet. I couldn’t honestly tell you the state of my personal appearance because I haven’t given it a second thought since leaving the house that morning. You’re not neglecting yourself intentionally. You’re simply responsible for twenty-nine children who can’t be left alone for even a moment. Your own needs quickly slide to the very bottom of the list.

It’s only now, with nowhere pressing to be, in the wonderful Julyness of it all, that I’m beginning to confront just how tired I actually am. There’s lots of exciting life happening quietly in the background too. Big things. Lovely things. Family things. The sort of things that take emotional energy in the nicest possible way. They deserve my attention too. But even with all of that going on, nothing comes close to the cognitive, emotional and social demand of a school year.

This week I’ve been fit for absolutely nothing. And I think that’s exactly what my body has been asking for. The heatwave has almost been a blessing. It forces you to stop. It gives you permission to sit outside while the girls play. To reconnect with toys that have sat untouched all year. To drink a cup of tea while it’s still warm. To read until your eyes close. To potter around the house doing very little at all.

It forces stillness.

And it’s only when you finally allow yourself that stillness that leisure fatigue arrives. I completely understand the phenomenon. Your body finally believes you when you tell it the emergency is over, and suddenly all the exhaustion you’ve been outrunning catches up with you at once.

That’s where I am now. Learning how to live more slowly again. Learning how to exist without constantly scanning a room, anticipating needs, answering questions, solving problems and holding dozens of tiny threads together in my head.

One of the most valuable ideas we explored during my summer course (themed around wellbeing) was that self-care isn’t a luxury for educators; it’s a professional responsibility. We ask so much of ourselves during the school year that we have to take equal responsibility for repairing ourselves afterwards. That’s something I want to carry into this next decade of my career. Not because I want to work less hard (that’ll never be me), but because I want to keep loving this profession with the same energy, enthusiasm and joy for many years to come.

It’ll probably take another two or three weeks before I genuinely feel normal. Only then does summer stop being about recovering from the year that’s gone and silently becomes preparation for the year that’s coming.

That’s why I’ve never understood the criticism of teachers’ holidays. The holiday isn’t an extended break from work. It’s recovery and restoration. So a reminder, in case you needed to hear it. Sat down? Here we go. You cannot spend ten months pouring yourself into other people without taking time to refill the well. That’s not self-indulgence. It’s the only way this work is sustainable. The best teachers don’t return in September carrying more laminated resources or another folder of Pinterest ideas. They return carrying more of themselves.

So that’s the focus for the next few weeks. How to achieve it? Slow mornings. Tea that’s actually hot. Playing with the girls without glancing at the clock. Reading because I want to. Sitting in the garden because the weather insists upon it. And, perhaps most wonderfully of all… Going to the toilet the very second I realise I need to. It’s remarkable how exciting basic bodily autonomy becomes after ten months of teaching.

By the end of August I’ll have found my rhythm again. I’ll have rebuilt whatever this year took from me, and I’ll walk back into Room 4 ready to do it all again.

I genuinely can’t wait to meet next year’s 5th Class.

But not yet. For now, it’s July. And July is for becoming yourself again.

There is much in it that I found myself agreeing with. Nobody should receive abuse for doing their job. Nobody should have to think twice about attending public events or alter their movements because of threats or intimidation. Public representatives are human beings before they are politicians, and the dehumanisation that increasingly characterises political discourse should concern all of us. Equally, when the Minister talks about inheriting a Department that had been underfunded for years and about fighting to secure the resources needed to support schools, I agree with her. In fact, I’ve been making exactly that argument myself for a long time.

But the interview also contains comments about the SNA review and the role of the NCSE (unnamed in the piece) that deserve closer examination. They blur where responsibility for this entire episode actually lies. If we’re going to have an honest conversation about what happened earlier this year, we have to be equally honest about who created the framework, who implemented it, and who ultimately bears responsibility when that framework produces political consequences.

The Minister says she accepts responsibility for the chaos surrounding the proposed SNA reductions. That is welcome, I thought, as I read it first. Accountability matters. However, she also explains that while she knew reviews were taking place, she did not know that letters informing schools of reductions in SNA allocations were about to issue. She says those letters should never have gone out and that, had she known what they contained, she would have intervened to stop them.

I have to say, I find that explanation extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with the office she holds.

The annual review of SNA allocations is not some obscure administrative exercise buried deep within the machinery of the Department. It is one of the most significant processes in the school year. Principals spend months preparing for it. Schools know exactly when it is coming. Parents wait anxiously because they know the outcome can determine the level of support their children will receive. Representative organisations monitor it closely because of the profound impact it has on school staffing. This is not something quietly happening in the background. It is one of the defining events in the special education calendar. The Minister’s people would absolutely have been informed the process was happening. Lads, her argument is the equivalent of the Minister for Agriculture saying he/she doesn’t know when lambing is, or when silage is cut.

The Minister’s explanation leaves us with only two realistic possibilities. Either she genuinely wasn’t informed that one of the most significant annual processes within her own Department was reaching its conclusion, or she knew the review was taking place but did not appreciate that the framework established by her Department (when she herself was Minister for Special Education!) could result in schools losing SNAs. Neither possibility is reassuring. One suggests a worrying breakdown in communication at the highest level of the Department. The other suggests a lack of understanding of the practical consequences of Department policy.

This is precisely why I have consistently argued that the NCSE alone should not become the convenient villain in this story.

The NCSE did not invent the review process by itself. It did not, on some solo mission, determine the criteria by which schools would be assessed. It did not independently write the circular governing the exercise. Nor did it wake up one morning and decide to reduce SNA allocations. Its statutory role is to implement Government policy within the framework set by the Department of Education. That is exactly what it did.

I keep returning to this point because it seems to disappear every time the political conversation intensifies. There is an enormous difference between making policy and implementing policy. Governments make policy. Departments issue circulars and guidance. State agencies implement those decisions. If Ministers later conclude that the framework they approved produces outcomes they find unacceptable, then it is the framework that requires changing. It is not reasonable to retrospectively imply that the agency carrying out its statutory function somehow acted improperly.

When you look at the sequence of events, it becomes difficult to reach any other conclusion. Schools received their letters. Parents became understandably distressed. Principals raised the alarm. Teachers, unions (very quietly, mind) and advocacy organisations reacted. The issue quickly became a national political controversy. Cabinet became involved. Only then was the process paused. Only then were assurances given that no school would lose more than one SNA and that no further reductions would occur before September 2027.

The policy didn’t change because someone suddenly discovered a flaw.

The politics changed.

One comment in the piece particular encapsulates the difficulty I have with her whole framing of this issue. The Minister effectively says she did not know schools would lose SNAs. Yet that was always a possible outcome of the review as it had been designed. A framework capable of reducing allocations cannot later produce surprise when allocations are reduced. If that possibility wasn’t fully understood, then there was a failure somewhere in the system. If advisers failed to explain it, that is a failure of advice. If they did explain it and the implications weren’t appreciated, that is a failure of leadership. Neither of those failures belongs to the NCSE.

Ironically, the same interview makes an argument that I think is absolutely correct. The Minister speaks openly about inheriting a Department that had been structurally underfunded for years. She describes discovering a glaring base deficit and says she simply could not do her job without fighting for additional funding. She talks about the responsibility she has for 4,000 schools, one million children and increasing demand across the education system. I don’t disagree with any of that. In fact, I think it reinforces an argument many of us have been making for years: education has too often been expected to absorb growing need without the long-term investment and planning required to sustain it.

The €646 million bailout should not be viewed as evidence that education received too much money. Quite the opposite. It demonstrates what happens when chronic underinvestment is allowed to accumulate until emergency intervention becomes unavoidable. We don’t invest strategically in education. We patch holes. We respond to crises after they emerge rather than planning for demographic realities that everyone already knows are coming. Special education has experienced this more acutely than almost any other part of the system.

But acknowledging decades of underinvestment does not remove the responsibility to understand the systems operating within your own Department. If anything, it increases that responsibility. If you know schools are under pressure, if you know demand is rising and if you know certainty matters enormously to families, then understanding how Department policy translates into decisions on the ground becomes one of the central responsibilities of the Minister.

That is ultimately why I think this interview matters. Accountability cannot stop where politics becomes uncomfortable. The NCSE did not create the framework that produced this controversy. It implemented it. If Government wishes to change that framework, it has every right to do so. But we should resist the temptation to shift responsibility onto the very organisations tasked with carrying out Government decisions.

Once we lose that distinction, accountability begins to evaporate. And when accountability evaporates, the institutions that schools and families rely upon become progressively weaker. That doesn’t serve the NCSE. More importantly, it doesn’t serve children.

Because if there is one lesson we should learn from everything that has happened over the past year, it is this: implementation bodies cannot become the political shield for decisions that originate elsewhere. Government creates policy. Departments write the rules. Agencies implement them. Those lines exist for a reason. If we continue to blur them whenever political pressure mounts, we won’t just damage the NCSE. We’ll damage confidence in the entire special education system at precisely the moment it needs stability most.

But before I even get to what I believe is the most significant change in this circular, I have to say this.

Publishing this circular on the 7th of July is a disgrace.

I honestly don’t know who thought this was a good idea. Schools are closed. Principals have finished for the summer. Teachers are on leave. SEN Coordinators aren’t in school. HSCL Coordinators aren’t meeting families. The very people who spend every September explaining these processes, helping parents complete applications, scanning reports, contacting SENOs, answering questions and generally helping families navigate what is already an incredibly complex system simply aren’t there. Yet somehow parents are expected to know that this process now exists and that they have until the 1st of September to complete it. The day many of us return to work. Make it make sense! Are you telling me they couldn't have done this earlier in the school year when they knew that this was the direction of travel? Please. Of course they could have.

Enough people warned that this wouldn’t work. I know because I’ve spoken to many of them. They weren’t trying to block reform. They weren’t trying to make life difficult for anyone. They were simply pointing out the obvious. Parents don’t spend July and August reading Department circulars. Schools are how this information reaches families. Schools explain policy. Schools translate Department language into something parents can actually understand. Schools are the bridge between the Department and families, and for most of July and August that bridge simply isn’t there. I would be genuinely amazed if, by the middle of September, there isn’t enormous pressure to reopen or extend this process because so many families simply won’t have known. In fact, I bet my house on it. I can hear the discussions and pleas in the Dáil now.

But all that said, I don’t think that’s the biggest story here. I think we’ve all become understandably distracted by the deadline while something much more significant has slipped into the circular.

For children who are already enrolled in a mainstream school and are seeking a special class place, the NCSE will now require the child’s most recent Student Support Plan as part of determining eligibility. This changes what Student Support Plans are.

I’ve been saying for months that I believed we were moving in this direction. I said publicly that I thought we were slowly moving away from a system where psychological reports would be the primary gateway into special school and class support and towards one where evidence generated within schools would become increasingly important. Plenty of people told me I was overthinking it and that it would never happen.

Then, last December, Norma Foley announced the Government’s intention to remove the requirement for professional reports, including Assessment of Need reports, for entry to special schools and special classes, replacing that approach with a new education-based process by 2027. Her stated aim is that, ultimately, children should not need a diagnosis simply to access an appropriate educational placement. But removing the requirement for a diagnosis doesn’t remove the need for evidence. It simply changes where that evidence comes from.

And that’s why this circular matters so much. If psychological reports become less central, something else inevitably fills that space. My concern is that we’re beginning to see what that “something else” looks like. Student Support Plans, documents that were originally designed to support teaching and learning, are slowly becoming part of the evidence base upon which access to specialist provision will be decided. That is a profound change, and I don’t think we’ve fully appreciated what it will mean for teachers, schools or families.

Now, to be clear, this circular doesn’t remove the need to have psychological reports. That’s not what I’m saying. But I do believe it represents another significant step along that road, and I think we need to recognise it for what it is.

Before anyone misunderstands me, let me also say this. Teachers absolutely should have a voice. In fact, I’d argue they should have a far stronger voice than they often do. We spend more time with children than almost anyone else involved in the process. We see how they regulate themselves throughout the day. We see what happens when they become overwhelmed. We see how they access learning, interact with peers and respond to support. A report written two or three years ago can never fully capture what a teacher sees over the course of an entire school year. Of course educational evidence is valuable.

But there is a very important distinction between educational evidence informing decisions and educational documentation becoming part of the evidence upon which access to support depends.

That’s the bit that worries me.

For years we’ve been told that Student Support Plans are working documents. They’re supposed to help us identify priorities. They’re supposed to guide teaching. They’re supposed to be living documents that change as children grow, develop and respond to interventions. They’re useful because they’re honest. They aren’t written to prove anything to anyone. They’re written because they help us teach children better.

The moment teachers know that what they write in those plans may influence whether a child secures a special class place, the purpose of the document inevitably begins to change. Suddenly, the audience changes. You’re no longer writing solely for yourself, your colleagues and the child’s parents. You’re writing knowing that somebody outside your school may read every observation, every target and every description as part of making one of the most significant decisions in that child’s educational journey. Whether we like it or not, that creates pressure.

Parents will know these plans matter. Teachers will know these plans matter. Schools will know these plans matter. Then, almost without anyone noticing, Student Support Plans stop being documents that simply support teaching and begin becoming documents that help children access scarce resources. Once that happens, they become higher stakes. Every word suddenly feels more important. Every target feels more significant. Teachers naturally begin wondering not only, What does this child need? but also, How will somebody else read this?

Those are completely different questions.

The irony is that we’ve spent years trying to move away from paperwork for paperwork’s sake. We’ve worked incredibly hard to encourage schools to make support planning practical, meaningful and genuinely useful rather than simply producing documents to satisfy systems. I worry this risks undoing that progress. Once a document becomes linked to access to something as significant as a special class place, it almost inevitably stops being just a teaching document. It becomes an evidence document. It becomes an advocacy document. It becomes something much bigger than it was ever intended to be.

And if that’s where we’re heading, then we need to start having a bit of real talk about what that means for teachers. If Student Support Plans are going to carry this level of significance, then consistency suddenly becomes hugely important. Training becomes hugely important. Time becomes hugely important. Moderation becomes hugely important. We cannot increase the significance of these documents without recognising that we’re also fundamentally changing the responsibility attached to writing them.

Once again, reader, I keep coming back to the same point whenever new education policy is published.

It’s never just about what’s written on the page. It’s about what that page changes.

On paper, this circular simply asks schools to submit an existing document. In reality, I think it’s changing what that document is for.

Maybe I’m wrong. I genuinely hope I am. But experience has taught me that the moment documentation becomes linked to access to limited resources, that documentation changes. All because systems shape behaviour.

The deadline will dominate the conversation over the coming weeks, and rightly so. It deserves every bit of criticism it is receiving. But I have a feeling that, in a year’s time, we won’t be talking about the 1st September deadline.

We’ll be talking about how Student Support Plans suddenly became something they were never originally designed to be.

And lately, lads, I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the relationship between representative groups, schools and politicians.

Let me explain.

Increasingly, it feels like schools, families and advocacy organisations are supplying an awful lot of political credibility to people who have not necessarily earned it.

I know we need to engage. We absolutely should. Nobody should be rude. They absolutely shouldn’t. I do not think politicians should be shut out of schools or disability organisations. But I do think we need to have a more honest conversation about who is benefiting from these relationships and, more importantly, who is doing the work in them.

Every week there seems to be another photograph, another visit, another tour, another minister standing in front of a sensory room, another politician meeting a child, another representative group delighted to welcome somebody for a discussion, another school opening its doors. None of these things are inherently bad. In fact, many of them are done with the best of intentions. The problem is that when you see the same pattern repeated over and over again, you start to wonder whether the symbolism has begun to outweigh the substance.

And look, I get it.

If a minister wants to come to your school, you say yes. I reluctantly had one in my classroom this year. Not my call. But there he was. (All men, by the way. Not one woman in a line of seven.) Yup.

If a politician wants to meet families, you facilitate it. If somebody with influence wants to hear about your campaign, your service or your pupils, of course you take the meeting. Any sane person would.

But lately I find myself looking at these photographs and wondering whether we have become part of a performance that nobody consciously signed up for. A performance where schools, families and advocacy groups provide the authenticity, the lived experience and the emotional weight, while politicians leave with evidence that they are engaged, informed and listening. Because while politicians are visiting schools, schools are still begging for resources. While politicians are visiting disability services, families are still waiting. While politicians are praising inclusion, schools are still being expected to deliver it on budgets and staffing allocations that bear little resemblance to the reality of what children need. And yet somehow everybody smiles for the photograph and the great lads in the lineup use my child and yours, your classroom and mine, to tell everyone how fantastic they are.

What strikes me is how often the burden of creating hope seems to fall on the very people who have the least reason to feel hopeful. Schools open their doors. Parents share their stories. Children become the human face of policy. Advocates explain the reality. Representative organisations provide access. Everybody involved gives their time, energy and credibility to the process. And politicians leave with exactly what they came for: evidence that they care.

I know I am cynical. But I think many people working in these spaces feel this way too.

There is a difference between listening and acting. There is a difference between visiting and delivering. There is a difference between understanding a problem and fixing it. And increasingly, I worry that we have become so accustomed to celebrating engagement that we no longer stop to ask what engagement is actually achieving. We announce the meeting, share the photographs, thank people for attending and move on to the next event, often without ever returning to the question of what changed as a result.

Some of the most generous people I know are parents of disabled children. I mean genuinely generous. People who are exhausted. People who have spent years fighting systems. People who have become accidental experts in legislation, assessments, waiting lists and service pathways simply because nobody else was going to do it for them. And still they show up. Still they tell their stories. Still they meet politicians. Still they welcome them into spaces that are often intensely personal.

I sometimes wonder if politicians fully appreciate what an act of trust that is. Because these are not policy areas for people. These are their lives. Their children. Their futures. Their fears. When a family opens that door, they are giving something deeply personal. They are allowing somebody into a reality that is often exhausting, frightening and emotionally draining.

When a school opens that door, they are giving something too. They are exposing the daily realities of trying to meet children’s needs with limited resources, stretched staffing and constant pressure. When a representative organisation facilitates that access, they are lending credibility, relationships and trust that may have taken years to build.

The question I keep coming back to is what exactly is being given back. Because if the answer is meaningful change, then brilliant. Open every door in the country!

But if the answer is another photograph, another statement about listening, another commitment to continued engagement and another year of exactly the same problems, then I think we need to be much more honest about what is happening. We need to be willing to acknowledge that engagement, on its own, is not an achievement. It is only valuable if it leads somewhere.

That is the tension piece. I think many of us still behave as though access itself is the prize. The meeting is the victory. As though getting the minister into the room is the achievement. I am not sure that is true anymore. Not when schools are still firefighting, disability services remain overwhelmed and not when parents are still waiting years for supports. Not when every conversation seems to end with an acknowledgement that things are not good enough and yet somehow the outcome remains remarkably unchanged.

I am not saying that I think schools should stop engaging. I do not think advocacy groups should stop engaging. I do not think representative organisations should stop engaging. But I do think we need to stop confusing access with progress. They are not the same thing.

I think some of us have become so eager to demonstrate that politicians are listening that we have forgotten to ask whether they are doing anything with what they hear. Listening is important, but listening without action eventually becomes its own kind of performance. At some point, communities are entitled to expect more than acknowledgement. They are entitled to expect results.

Maybe all of this sounds unfair, and maybe I am wrong.

But I look around education and disability at the moment and I see communities carrying extraordinary burdens while simultaneously helping to create the public image of governments that have left many of those burdens exactly where they found them. I see people repeatedly giving their time, their stories and their trust in the hope that this time something might be different.

And I am beginning to wonder whether we need to become a little less interested in the photograph and a lot more interested in what happens when the photographer leaves. Because ultimately that is where the real measure of engagement lies. Not in who visited, who attended or who posed for the picture, but in whether anything improved afterwards. Whether resources arrived. Whether waiting lists shortened. Whether supports expanded. Whether promises became reality. Everything else is just documentation of a conversation. The thing that matters is what happens next.

I know. It sounds slightly ridiculous even writing the word graduates about a child who still carries a random scrap of paper around in her pocket for three weeks because she has decided it is important and therefore everybody else must accept that it is important too. There will be songs and little certificates and photographs and parents trying not to cry while simultaneously taking 400 pictures of children standing in a line singing Golden from KPop Demon Hunters. I cannot wait to hear the live delivery of the “gradulation” song we have been practicing for a month now. I will be all over it.

Lookit. It’s not that I think a preschool graduation is some enormous life event in the grand scheme of things. It isn’t. But it is a lovely little ritual marking the end of a chapter in a place that kept one of the two most precious things in my life safe, happy and loved for years. I handed that team my tiny daughter and trusted them completely, and they rewarded that trust every single day. She bounded in there each morning, made friends, learned, played, felt secure and had the kind of carefree early childhood experience every parent hopes for.

Tomorrow is really a celebration of that.

And you know what? It will be a lovely afternoon. Because these little rituals matter more than we sometimes admit.

They matter because they mark progress. They create memories. They allow parents to stop for a moment and say, “Look at you. Look how far you’ve come.” If I am being completely honest, they also allow us to feel, however briefly, like we might actually be doing okay at this parenting thing.

Man, I need that reassurance.

Most of parenting, for me at least, feels like uncertainty. I spend a lot of my time wondering if I am getting anything right. I worry. I second guess. I replay conversations and decisions and choices. I have had to learn how to parent two very different children in two very different ways, while trying my best to be fair to both. Same, but different.

Every now and again, society hands parents a little “typical” milestone. A sports day. A nativity. A concert. A graduation. A photograph with a certificate. Something tangible that says, “Look. Your child is growing. They are finding their place in the world.” I see this all the time as a teacher. I adore watching families experience the happiness, pride and joy of their children. I love seeing grandparents beam and parents fill up with tears over things that might seem very small to everyone else. Oh God, I love that. Because they aren’t really celebrating the certificate or the concert or the graduation. They are celebrating the child. The child they dreamed about. The child they got to know. The child who is becoming exactly who they are meant to be.

I’ve seen it with my lovely niece and nephew and how much joy it brings to my wider family. I’ve seen it hundreds of times in schools. And I am incredibly grateful that Gav and I get this moment with Bláthnaid. However, if I am honest, that gratitude comes wrapped up in something else too.

There is just over two years between our Bláthnaid and Doireann, but they are growing up in two entirely different worlds. The milestones that arrive naturally and automatically for one child can become a reminder of the milestones that never arrived for the other. As we get ready for tomorrow, I find myself thinking about D.

D never had a Montessori graduation. There were no little songs. No certificates. No gathering of families marking the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. When she finished in her early intervention setting, a celebration like that wasn’t even suggested. To be fair, we were so clouded by worry and concern at the time that we didn’t question it. We were focused on bigger things.

We don’t really do birthday parties. We don’t do the smiling first-day-of-school photographs. We don’t do many of the things that seem to define childhood for so many families. So it was never discussed. We never expected it. And truthfully, we were so relieved to be moving on that we simply looked ahead to her current setting, which has been as safe and supportive as we could ever have hoped for. I may write more about that period someday when I feel able to properly process it all. Stuff went on that just was not right and we didn't make right decisions at the time. But, as ever, we were just doing our best with what we knew at the time.

But tonight I find myself sad for the little girl who never got her day in the sun.

Not because she didn’t deserve it.

Not because she wasn’t achieving extraordinary things in her own way.

But because it is a brutal reminder that the structures which create these moments simply weren’t available to her.

The reality of parenting a disabled child is that you spend an extraordinary amount of time fighting for things that other families assume will simply happen. School places. Assessments. Therapies. Supports. Transport. Services.

You become so consumed with securing the basics that celebration often falls down the priority list.

And if I am being really honest, I don’t think we have ever quite felt that our family fitted naturally into those big public celebrations anyway. The things D needs to feel safe and regulated can look different to what people expect. The accommodations we make every day to ensure she is happy are completely normal to us, but can sometimes make other people uncomfortable.

So over time, without consciously deciding it, you stop putting yourselves forward for things. You stop imagining the big parties and celebrations. You quietly lower your expectations of what family milestones might look like.

I don’t think that’s particularly healthy. It’s probably a survival mechanism. And that is what I find myself thinking about tonight.

Not just the Montessori graduation she didn’t have, but all the future milestones that may never simply materialise unless people continue fighting for them. Because these moments do not emerge from nowhere. They are built on opportunity. They are built on inclusion. They are built on systems that assume a child belongs and that their participation matters.

For many disabled children and autistic children, those assumptions are still not there.

I know Doireann’s life will not look like Bláthnaid’s life. I know success cannot and should not be measured against neurotypical milestones. I know that many of D’s achievements are every bit as remarkable as any graduation certificate, even if the world doesn’t always stop to acknowledge them.

My God, that child is doing her best.

But I also know this.

Every child deserves opportunities to be celebrated. Every child deserves moments where the people who love them get to stand in a room and say, “Look at what you’ve done.” Every child deserves chapters and transitions and ceremonies and memories. And too often, families like ours have to fight for every single one.

So tomorrow I will clap loudly for my Bláthnaid. My sparky, brilliant little B. I will take far too many photographs. I will cry at songs sung by four and five-year-olds. I will marvel at how quickly she has grown and how lucky we have been to watch it happen. I will dream about the happy days she has ahead of her in school.

I will feel incredibly lucky.

And I will also feel sad.

I suspect that is the reality for many parents of disabled children. Joy and grief are not opposites. More often than not, they arrive together and sit side by side. Tomorrow is a celebration of one little girl reaching a milestone. But it is also a reminder of why I keep advocating.

I want D to have milestones too. I want her life to be marked not only by appointments, waiting lists and battles for support, but by celebrations. I want there to be joy. There is joy. So much joy. I just want more opportunities for other people to see it too. I want there to be moments where she stands in the spotlight and the people who love her get to applaud. And until those opportunities exist as a matter of course, rather than because somebody fought tooth and nail for them, I suppose I will keep fighting.

Tomorrow belongs to my Bláthnaid.

But part of my heart, as always, will be thinking about her seven shades of determination-fuelled big sister, my gloriously, unapologetically Doireann.

Unfortunately, my messages have once again filled with stories from schools that suggest we are heading in the opposite direction.

Since Thursday night, I have been contacted by principals, coordinators, teachers and SNAs from across the country regarding Summer Provision. The level of frustration is palpable. Some schools have received sanction letters. Others are still waiting. It is important to say from the outset that not every school yet knows whether it will be affected by the issues I am about to discuss. However, given the volume of similar concerns emerging from schools that have received decisions, many others would be forgiven for assuming that they may encounter the same difficulties.

The exact details vary from school to school, but the themes are remarkably consistent. Schools are reporting lower levels of staffing than they expected to be sanctioned for Summer Provision, difficulties accessing additional resources, confusion around decision-making and a level of bureaucracy that seems almost designed to slow everything down. Hmmm.

One issue that keeps coming up is the apparent reduction in Teacher and/or SNA support for Summer Provision compared to what children receive during the school year. I have now heard from multiple schools operating special classes where the level of SNA support sanctioned for Summer Provision is below the level available to pupils during term time. Schools with above SERC allocations have reported similar concerns. In some cases, support levels that are considered necessary for ten months of the year suddenly appear to become negotiable for the remaining weeks.

That raises a very obvious question. What exactly changes about a child's needs between June and July? Children who require support on the last day of school generally require support on the first day of Summer Provision too. This is apparently a point lost on the Department.

One school leader told me that they were sanctioned two SNAs per special class group despite operating with three SNAs per class during the school year. Another described having to submit what was effectively a business case in order to secure supports that already exist in their school and have already been deemed necessary through NCSE processes.

The most frustrating part is that this is all happening at exactly the point in the year when schools should be focused on delivering programmes for children. Instead, many appear to be focused on appeals, spreadsheets, business cases and trying to understand decisions that nobody seems able to explain.

I keep coming back to that phrase: a business case. A business (shudder) case for supports that have already been assessed, already been sanctioned and already been deemed necessary for children with complex needs.

Unsurprisingly, schools are appealing. Equally unsurprisingly, the appeals system appears to be struggling under the volume. One principal described submitting an appeal immediately after receiving sanction details and attaching the school's NCSE allocation letter. When they followed up, they were told that managers were reviewing appeals on a case-by-case basis and had been inundated since sanction emails had issued. No timeframe could be given for a response.

Think about the practical implications of that.

Schools are trying to recruit staff for this happening in three weeks time. They are trying to finalise groups. They are communicating with parents. They are organising transport, timetables and resources. Yet many are doing so without knowing whether they will actually receive the staffing they believe is necessary to run programmes safely.

Once again, the burden of making an imperfect system work falls squarely on schools.

Then there is the issue of the additional paperwork required to access further resourcing. Several schools have contacted me regarding requests for spreadsheets containing children's names, dates of birth and eligibility criteria. As I understand it, these spreadsheets are being submitted via email as part of applications for additional supports. They are being asked to password protect them using a single generic password supplied to the entire country. Oh, dear. My GDPR compliant pals, look away!

Now, perhaps there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this process. Perhaps there are safeguards that schools have not yet been informed about. However, it is difficult not to notice the contrast with other Department processes. For SNA reviews, schools are required to obtain signed parental consent and submit coded information rather than identifiable pupil details. For NEPS processes, consent forms are carefully managed and significant attention is paid to minimising identifiable information. Yet here, schools are being asked to email personally identifiable data in order to access supports. At the very least, schools deserve a clear explanation of how this process aligns with the standards they are expected to uphold elsewhere.

The issue that generated the strongest reaction in my DMs, however, relates to DEIS Summer Camps.

Over the past 24 hours, I have received messages from schools expressing concern that SNA support is not available at all within the DEIS Summer Camp programme.

If that interpretation is correct, the consequences are obvious. Schools report being advised that children requiring SNA support may be better suited to SEN Summer Provision. Others have interpreted the guidance as meaning that pupils requiring SNA support cannot realistically be offered places within DEIS Summer Camps. The practical reality is that schools are finding themselves in an impossible position. Teachers have told me they cannot select pupils who require SNA support. Some schools have suggested limiting numbers. Others are looking at whether parent volunteers may be required to make programmes viable. A number have questioned whether they can run programmes at all.

One message I received simply said:

"We can't offer a place to children with additional needs in our school." I have thought about that sentence repeatedly since reading it. Because whatever explanation exists at policy level, that is the message some schools feel they are being forced to deliver.

We spend a great deal of time talking about inclusion in Irish education. We talk about belonging. We talk about participation. We talk about removing barriers. We talk about ensuring that children can access the same opportunities as their peers. Yet if schools genuinely feel that children who require SNA support are effectively excluded from parts of Summer Provision, then there is a serious contradiction between the language and the reality.

Perhaps there are explanations.

Perhaps there are clarifications coming.

Perhaps there are solutions already being worked on.

I sincerely hope so.

What I am hearing from schools right now is not the story of a system making participation easier.

It is the story of a system making participation harder.

And the people left carrying the consequences are the same people who always carry them: school leaders trying to make impossible decisions, staff trying to provide programmes with inadequate information and families desperately hoping that the supports their children rely upon will still be there when summer begins.

P.S. One final point on my previous post that has not received nearly enough attention. Under the new SNA arrangements, mainstream SNA allocations now appear to be more substantially protected than some above SERC supports. Schools can find themselves having to repeatedly justify and defend above SERC allocations through annual review processes despite those supports having already been identified as necessary. I have to say, I find that extraordinary. If a child's needs have not changed, why should schools and families be forced back into the same argument every year or two? Of all the supports in the system, surely those attached to the most complex needs should be the most secure, not the least?

But there is another conversation hidden within all of this, and I think it may be the more important one, and it’s one I have written about previously here. It is not really about SNAs at all.

It is about what Irish education chooses to invest in, what it chooses to protect and what problems it believes it is actually solving. The recent announcement introduces a redeployment process for SNAs. In simple terms, when a school is deemed to have a surplus SNA allocation, there is now an expectation that reductions will be managed through review and redeployment rather than through immediate large-scale cuts. Also, schools will not lose more than one SNA per year. Whatever your views on the wider circular, that represents a significant protection for staff. And fair play to those who secured it.

The campaign around SNA allocations over recent weeks was relentless. SNAs, parents, advocacy groups and their union (Forsa) succeeded in putting sustained pressure on government. They made the issue visible. They kept it in the public eye. They forced policymakers to respond. That is how the change happened, and I respect that. The government got the matter so absolutely wrong, that even those who were able to find aspects of the 2014 circular palatable (me, for example) had to agree that the manner in which it was communicated and bluntly applied this year with enormous cuts across the board without a redeployment system being in place meant they had absolutely lost the dressing room and therefore nothing but a spectacular retreat from this issue was going to be appropriate. So, we are here.

What is striking, however, is how different the situation remains for teachers. Teaching posts can still disappear in multiples when enrolment falls. A school can lose several teachers in a single staffing allocation cycle. There is no equivalent public conversation for us. There is no widespread political outrage. It is largely accepted as part of the system.

That contrast alone raises interesting questions about representation and advocacy. There is an even bigger question underneath it. Why is the conversation about staffing almost always framed around SNAs and never around class size? Because if we are honest, the greatest unmet need in Irish education is not a shortage of SNAs. It is a shortage of teachers.

The Irish system has spent years building one of the largest SNA workforces in Europe. Today there are over 23,000 SNAs working in schools and the Government is continuing to expand those numbers. Nobody doubts the valuable contribution that SNAs make. Schools rely on them. Children rely on them. Families rely on them. But at some point we also have to ask whether we have become so focused on adding adults around children that we have stopped asking whether the classroom itself is fit for purpose.

Many teachers are still trying to teach classes of twenty-five, twenty-eight or thirty children. More in many cases. Many children with additional needs spend the vast majority of their day in those classes.

Many teachers are trying to differentiate for huge ranges of ability, language needs, behavioural needs and learning needs simultaneously. And yet the biggest intervention available to most schools remains assigning another SNA. We rarely stop to ask whether that is the best answer.

Imagine if the same political urgency that has been applied to expanding the SNA workforce had been applied to reducing class sizes? Imagine if the national ambition was to recruit an additional 25,000 teachers over time and fundamentally transform pupil-teacher ratios across the system. Imagine if every child learned in significantly smaller classes. Imagine if teachers had the time and capacity to provide more individualised instruction as a routine part of teaching rather than relying on support structures to compensate for overcrowded classrooms. Imagine what that would mean not only for children with additional needs but for every child.

The evidence on class size is often debated, but anybody who has spent five minutes in a classroom understands the practical reality. Twenty children and thirty children are not the same teaching experience. The opportunities for interaction, feedback, relationship-building and differentiation are fundamentally different. Yet, somehow, class size rarely dominates educational debate in Ireland.

Instead, we continue to layer additional supports onto a model that often remains structurally unchanged. That is why I find the discussion around the new SNA circular so interesting. Not because I oppose the protections that have been secured. Quite the opposite. If policymakers have concluded that sudden staffing reductions are harmful and disruptive, then that principle should be welcomed.

But perhaps the bigger lesson is that we need to start asking harder questions about the overall direction of educational investment.

How many SNAs should the system have?

How many teachers should the system have?

What balance are we trying to achieve?

Are we building the workforce that best supports inclusion, or are we expanding particular roles because they are politically easier to expand than addressing class size?

These are not anti-SNA questions. They are pro-education questions. And they are questions that deserve to be asked.

If we genuinely want an inclusive education system, then inclusion cannot simply mean providing more support around children. It must also mean creating classrooms that are manageable, sustainable and capable of meeting children's needs in the first place.

The new SNA circular tells us something important about what government is willing to protect. Perhaps now it is time to ask what government is willing to prioritise. And for me, that conversation begins with teachers, teaching and class size.

Ps. One final point that I cannot let pass.

In the RTÉ coverage of the circular, an unnamed Department official was quoted as saying that schools had applied a "narrow interpretation" of the SNA role under the 2014 circular and that the new definition provides clarity to avoid "misinterpretation."

That is an extraordinary claim.

The implication is that schools somehow misunderstood or misapplied the role. Yet anyone who has worked in special education over the last decade knows that the interpretation of the 2014 circular was not being invented by individual schools. Schools were operating within a system overseen by the NCSE and SENOs. Principals and school leaders did not wake up one morning and decide to remove support from children. They implemented the guidance, allocations and interpretations that came through the structures established by the Department itself. Indeed, many school leaders spent years arguing that children needed more support than the system was prepared to recognise. Many watched SNA supports being reduced despite their objections. Many advocated repeatedly on behalf of pupils and families.

To now suggest that the problem lay in schools "misinterpreting" the role feels less like clarification and more like an attempt to rewrite history.

If the Department wishes to acknowledge that the previous circular created difficulties, then it should do so openly. But responsibility for those difficulties should rest with those who designed and administered the system, not with the schools that were required to operate within it.

School leaders, teachers and SNAs deserve better than to become convenient scapegoats for a policy framework that the Department itself created.

I want to be very clear from the outset that this piece is not an argument against reform. The current system is failing. Children wait years for assessments. Families spend enormous amounts of money accessing private reports. Adults have historically had very little access to publicly funded autism assessment. The status quo is simply not acceptable.

However, I also think it is possible to support reform while asking difficult questions about the form that reform takes. The concerns being raised are not about whether waiting lists should be reduced. Everybody wants that. The concerns are about what assumptions sit underneath the new protocol and what those assumptions might mean for autistic people in the years ahead.

For teachers, I think there are ten key issues worth understanding.

1. The protocol does not replace the Assessment of Need process.

One of the biggest misconceptions I have seen online is the belief that the new protocol somehow replaces the Assessment of Need (AON) process. It does not. The AON remains a statutory right under the Disability Act 2005. Children can still apply for an Assessment of Need and the State remains legally obliged to complete one. The protocol introduces a new framework for autism assessment pathways, but it does not remove a family’s right to seek an AON.

That said, I think it is important to understand why people are still concerned. The concern is not that the AON is disappearing. The concern is how these new pathways will interact with the AON system and what influence they may have on access to diagnosis, services and supports in practice. The AON remains the mechanism through which disabled children obtain a formal statement of their educational, social and occupational needs, and the legal right to pursue one remains as important today as it was before this protocol was published.

Families should absolutely continue to pursue an AON if they believe their child requires one. The bigger question is whether the AON system and these new pathways will operate alongside one another in a way that is coherent, transparent and properly resourced. Given that the legal requirement remains six months while many families are currently waiting years, it is understandable that people are asking how any new system will solve problems that existing legislation has already failed to address.

2. The protocol assumes a level of staffing and capacity that simply does not exist.

This is probably my single biggest concern.

The protocol talks extensively about multidisciplinary working, specialist expertise, regional in-reach teams and responsive intervention pathways. It presents a vision of coordinated support that sounds excellent and, in many respects, reflects what families have been asking for over many years. If you read the protocol in isolation, you could be forgiven for thinking that a well-resourced and highly functioning network of professionals already exists and is simply waiting for a better framework within which to operate. The reality is very different.

Teachers do not need to be told about workforce shortages because we see their consequences every day. Families are waiting for speech and language therapy. Families are waiting for occupational therapy. Families are waiting for psychology services. CDNT vacancies remain widespread. Posts remain unfilled. Waiting lists continue to grow. Children who should have access to multidisciplinary support frequently have little or no meaningful contact with multidisciplinary teams. No protocol can create therapists. No framework can create psychologists. No policy document can recruit staff.

This is why I found Adam Harris’s (AsIAm) observation that the protocol will succeed or fail based on resourcing so important. Ultimately, the success of any pathway depends not on the quality of the document itself but on whether the professionals required to implement it actually exist in sufficient numbers throughout the country.

3. This is not simply a new assessment process. It represents a new way of thinking about autism.

One of the things that struck me most while reading the protocol was that it does not simply propose a different route to diagnosis. It reflects a broader shift in how autism is conceptualised. Throughout the document there is a strong emphasis on autism as a neurodevelopmental difference and on adapting environments rather than focusing on “deficits” within the individual. In many ways this reflects the growing influence of neurodiversity-informed thinking, which has become increasingly influential internationally.

On one level, many of us would agree with this. Schools should adapt environments. We should be reducing barriers. We should be creating accessible classrooms. We should be moving away from trying to “fix” autistic children. My concern is not with those principles.

My concern is whether, in attempting to move away from a deficit model, we risk losing sight of the fact that autism remains a disability for many people. Some autistic children need highly specialised teaching approaches. Some need speech and language therapy. Some need occupational therapy. Some need intensive communication supports. Some need autism classes. Some need special schools. Some need lifelong support.

The challenge is finding a balance between recognising difference and recognising disability. I am not convinced that the protocol achieves that balance.

4. The protocol places enormous faith in environmental adaptation.

A theme that runs throughout the protocol is the idea that difficulties arise not simply because of autism itself but because environments fail to accommodate autistic needs. Again, there is truth in this. Every teacher has seen situations where a child thrives when barriers are removed and struggles when environments are inflexible. What concerns me is the degree to which responsibility appears to shift towards environments without equivalent discussion of specialist supports.

As teachers, we need to be careful here. We know that good classroom practice matters enormously. We know inclusion matters enormously. But we also know that inclusion is not simply a matter of goodwill, flexible seating and visual supports. Many autistic children require highly specialised interventions and supports that cannot be replaced by environmental adaptation alone. My fear is that environmental adaptation could become a justification for providing less specialist support rather than more.

5. Teachers appear to be carrying more responsibility than ever.

As I read the protocol, I found myself repeatedly thinking about schools. Increasingly, teachers are expected to identify needs, implement accommodations, monitor progress, adapt environments, support regulation, liaise with families and facilitate inclusion. Most teachers embrace these responsibilities because they care deeply about their pupils. However, there is a point at which support systems begin quietly transferring responsibility onto schools without providing equivalent resources.

Teachers cannot become therapists. Teachers cannot become psychologists. Teachers cannot replace disability services. When we talk about inclusion, we must be honest about what schools can reasonably provide and what requires specialist support beyond the school gate.

6. Masking remains a huge unanswered question.

Many autistic people, particularly girls, become exceptionally skilled at masking their differences. They learn scripts. They imitate peers. They suppress behaviours. They appear to cope. Teachers know this. Many of us have taught children who looked absolutely fine in school while struggling enormously beneath the surface.

One concern being raised about the protocol is whether lower-intensity pathways, observation-led approaches and streamlined assessment processes could inadvertently make it harder for these children to be recognised. Historically, girls have been underdiagnosed. Children with strong academic skills have been overlooked. Children who internalise difficulties have often fallen through gaps. The protocol’s tiered model explicitly proposes different levels of assessment depending on how clearly autism presents. For many advocates, that raises understandable questions about children whose autism does not present clearly to observers but whose difficulties are nevertheless significant.

Any assessment system must actively guard against repeating those mistakes.

7. Diagnosis is not just a clinical label.

One argument I frequently hear is that we should move away from gatekeeping supports behind diagnosis. In principle, I agree. In reality, however, diagnosis remains the gateway to many supports.

It influences educational planning. It influences service access. It influences accommodations. It influences eligibility for supports. This is why families become anxious whenever assessment pathways change. They are not simply worried about the assessment itself. They are worried about everything that flows from it. When people dismiss those concerns, I sometimes think they underestimate how hard families have fought to access support in the first place.

8. The College of Psychiatrists’ concerns deserve attention.

One of the most significant developments following publication of the protocol was the decision by the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland not to endorse it. In particular, the College expressed concern about Tier 1 assessments, describing them as an “abridged” process that may be inappropriate for people who are new to services and have not previously had multidisciplinary input. This is a massively significant dunking on a process that politically speaking, has been praised to high-heavens.

This is not simply a disagreement taking place between campaigners and government. A (THE!) major professional body has publicly expressed reservations about aspects of the proposed approach. It means that the concerns being raised cannot simply be dismissed as misunderstanding or resistance to change. Teachers should pay attention when clinicians themselves are raising questions about assessment quality, consistency and professional standards.

9. Autism is not one thing.

One aspect of the public conversation that worries me is the tendency to talk about autism as though it is a single experience. It is not.

Some autistic people live independently. Some require lifelong support. Some communicate fluently. Some are non-speaking. Some thrive in mainstream classrooms. Some require specialist settings.

The protocol often speaks about autism in broad terms, but any national system must work for the full diversity of autistic people, not simply those who fit a particular profile. The children with the most significant support needs should not disappear from the conversation.

10. Many advocates feel consultation has not meaningfully influenced the outcome.

Whether one agrees with them or not, organisations such as FUSS Ireland have been engaging with this issue for years. They have consistently raised concerns about the direction of the protocol and argued that professional standards are being diluted.

The frustration I hear repeatedly is not simply disagreement with the final document. It is a sense that consultation occurred but concerns were not reflected. That perception matters because trust matters. Ultimately, that is why I think teachers should be paying attention. The implications of this change reach directly into schools. How autism is defined influences how autism is identified. How autism is identified influences access to supports. How supports are allocated influences schools. How schools are expected to respond influences teachers.

Perhaps the protocol will succeed. Perhaps it will reduce waiting lists and improve access for thousands of people. I genuinely hope it does. But I also think families, autistic people, clinicians and teachers are entitled to ask difficult questions before such a significant change is embedded across the system. Those questions are not obstacles to reform. They are how good reform happens

I’ve mentioned this before in passing online and I’ve spoken about it casually in videos or conversations, but I’ve never written about it properly here on Substack or explained what it actually is, how it affects me, or why I can sometimes be a bit defensive or awkward about it. Broadly speaking, I think because I tend to own it publicly and acknowledge it openly, people assume it doesn’t really bother me. And most of the time, honestly, I try not to let it.

But after something not particularly nice happened in the last week, where it was commented on twice by two different people, I found myself thinking about it more than usual. As ever, I suppose I’m using this platform in the only way I really know how: to try and encourage people to think a little more carefully about the things they say to other people and the assumptions they make about people, choices, bodies, appearances and, in this case, faces. Because the truth is, you just never fully know what somebody is processing internally, what they’re managing medically, or what seemingly “small” comments can land like in somebody else’s head.

Anyway. Shut up and say it, Ciara.

About ten years ago, I developed what I first thought was some sort of facial droop on the left-hand side of my face. I started noticing it when my face would twitch or pull involuntarily, particularly around my eye and mouth. At the beginning, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. We suspected it was Bell’s Palsy. Over time, after appointments and investigations, I was diagnosed with something called Hemifacial Spasm.

Hemifacial spasm is a neurological condition where the muscles on one side of the face twitch or contract involuntarily because of irritation or compression of the facial nerve. In practical terms, it means parts of my face can spasm constantly without me controlling it. Mine is mostly on the left side and, at its worst, it affects my eye, cheek and mouth. It’s exhausting more than anything else. Your face never really gets to rest. The eye irritation alone can drive you demented. It has also gotten worse over time.

Broadly speaking, I’m lucky. It doesn’t hugely interfere with my life in the way some chronic conditions do. I’m fortunate enough to be able to attend a consultant privately every three months and get treatment. The treatment, somewhat hilariously to some people, is Botox. And not a little discreet dab of Botox. A medically significant amount of Botox injected into my face every few months in order to weaken the muscles and stop the spasming.

Because the left side becomes weakened, I also need injections on the right side to keep some degree of balance and symmetry. Which means, yes, my face can look very frozen a lot of the time. Frankly, sometimes ridiculous. No, really. But honestly, vanity was never really the thing that bothered me most, so I got over that part fairly quickly. On the whole, I am too busy and doing too many things to spend enormous amounts of time worrying about aesthetics.

What is hard is the timing of it all. Immediately after treatment, when my face is particularly stiff and frozen, or later when the treatment starts wearing off and the twitching returns, people notice. They stare. They ask questions. Sometimes they are genuinely concerned and kind. Sometimes people are unbelievably blunt. Occasionally downright cruel without even meaning to be. I hate this. It does upset me. It is hard to explain how upsetting it can be to have your face commented on, especially when you are already hyperaware of every twitch and pull yourself.

And then there’s the Botox conversation itself, which is honestly its own strange social experiment. There can be a weird amount of scepticism when I explain that Botox is the treatment for this condition, as though I’ve invented an elaborate neurological excuse to justify cosmetic procedures. Reader, I promise you, nobody is voluntarily signing up for this quantity of injections every three months for the craic.

To be clear, though, I also don’t feel the need to morally justify Botox anyway. I genuinely do not care what other women do with their faces, bodies, hair, skin, injections, fillers, surgeries, vitamins or moon water. You do you, girl. I suspect I’d probably have ended up trying Botox eventually regardless because ageing is rude and relentless and I enjoy modern medicine as much as the next person. I love a dabble.

That said, there is something challenging for other people (clearly) in this in-between space where a treatment associated culturally with vanity is, for me, fundamentally medical. Necessary, even. It keeps my eye open properly. It stops pain and irritation. It lets my face rest.

Mostly though, I think I’m writing this because I’m tired of feeling like I need to either apologise for my face or explain it away. Some weeks it moves strangely. Some weeks it barely moves at all. Some weeks I look exhausted. Some weeks I look like a startled wax figure. None of it is particularly interesting, but all of it is part of my normal now.

And maybe there’s something broader in that too. We have become incredibly comfortable commenting on other people’s appearances in ways we would probably never tolerate in almost any other context. Faces become public property very quickly. Especially women’s faces. We narrate ageing, illness, weight, exhaustion, cosmetic work, “looking well”, “looking tired”, all of it, as though we are simply observing weather patterns instead of speaking about actual human beings trying to move through the world inside bodies they did not fully choose.

Most people, I think, are not trying to be cruel. Curiosity is human. So is awkwardness. But there is a difference between noticing something and demanding somebody explain it to you.

Anyway. There you have it. The world’s least glamorous Botox story. Just another strange little administrative task the body occasionally hands you while you’re busy trying to get on with your life.

And I suppose if there’s any point to writing this at all, it’s probably this: we really do not know what is happening inside other people’s lives, bodies or heads nearly as much as we think we do. The thing you’re casually pointing out, joking about, staring at or asking about may well be the thing somebody has spent years learning how to carry without letting it swallow them whole.

Most people are trying their best. Most people are carrying something. Sometimes visibly. Sometimes not.

So maybe we could all just be a little gentler with each other. Even in the small comments. Especially in the small comments.

This year, it’s the report writing guides I’m seeing a lot of, mostly on TikTok. Mother of God. I’m frustrated. And ashamed of the experienced colleagues who have engaged in this type of selling.

Let's look at what we have to do. We have these children in front of us for 182 days of the year. We know them. The template itself is basic enough, lads, we all know that. You don't have that much you have to bring to it. The nuance, the judgement, the quiet noticing that builds across the year. It's basic stuff. The child who barely spoke in September and then, without fanfare, starts putting a hand up in March. The one who looks like they’re coasting but you know exactly the effort it takes for them to hold a full day together. The one whose test scores will never shout but whose progress is there in a hundred small, meaningful ways that no standardised phrasing will ever capture. You’ve built your knowledge of them, properly, over time. You then have to write about it. And so, May arrives and somehow the narrative in some corners becomes that what you need is a five-euro download to tell you what to say about your class.

I hate it, to be honest. And not just because it’s irritating (and a waste of your money!), but because of what sits underneath it. It’s the slow chipping away at professional judgement. Writing a report is not a formality to tick off. It’s not admin to get out of the way before the holidays. It is one of the few points in the year where you actually stop and take stock of a child in the round. What they can do, where they are going, what matters in terms of supporting them next. It’s reflective work, it’s relational work, and by its nature it cannot be meaningfully templated without losing the very thing that gives it value in the first place.

And it’s not just showing up in reports. You see it in interview prep as well, and it is painfully obvious when someone has leaned too heavily on a generic script, bought from some website. You’re going to be seeing a lot of these ads from this point in the summer. The answers all sound the same, the same buzzwords, the same neat little frameworks, the same examples that could belong to absolutely anyone in any school. No sense of place, no sense of actual children, no sense that this person has lived the work they’re describing. Panels can see that a mile off. You can feel the difference straight away between someone who is speaking from their own practice, with all the specifics and slight messiness that comes with that, and someone who is reciting something they bought. One lands. The other just floats past you.

And look, I’m not blind to the context. This time of year is intense. Everyone is wrecked, the list is never-ending, and the system has a long-standing habit of asking for more than it has any business asking for. So when something comes along that promises to make it quicker or easier, of course people are going to look twice. But there is a line between supporting practice and replacing it. Sharing ideas with colleagues, talking through phrasing, helping each other land things in a way that is fair and clear, that’s good professional culture. That’s what we should be doing. Lifting generic statements from a template and dropping children into them as if they are interchangeable is something else entirely. And if you’re a school leader selling that? I would have serious questions about what standards you think we’re working to.

Children are not interchangeable. Families know that. They can tell the difference immediately between something written with their child in mind and something that could have been written for anyone. It’s there in the language, in the detail, in the tone. One reads like a teacher has sat down and actually thought about the child. The other reads like a system output.

There’s also an another piece here that we need to talk about. The undermining of confidence, particularly for newer teachers coming into the system. The suggestion, subtle but persistent, that you’re not quite equipped to do this without external help. That the expertise lives somewhere else, in a polished document written by someone who has never met the child you’re writing about. And the more we lean into that, the more we reinforce it. We start to believe it ourselves. We start to act as if the core parts of our work are up for outsourcing. They’re not. They shouldn’t be. The expertise is in the classroom, in the day-to-day, in the relationships that are built over time. That’s the work. That’s where the authority comes from.

And to be clear, this is not about perfection. Reports do not need to be works of art. They don’t need to be long for the sake of it. They just need to be real. They need to sound like you, grounded in what you actually know about that child. Honest, measured, useful. That’s the standard. Not polished, not packaged, not lifted from somewhere else.

So yes, every year, same rant, same point. You don’t need the guides. You don’t need the bundles. You don’t need something that promises to do the thinking for you. You need your notes, your memory, your sense of the child, and a bit of time to sit with it and write. That’s it. It won’t come in a neat little download and it won’t feel particularly efficient, but it is the part of the job that is still entirely yours, and I’d be very slow to hand that over.

This piece builds on a previous Substack I wrote on this proposed model of “inclusive” special (autism) classes. If you haven’t read that first, I would. It sets out the context for what’s being proposed and why there are already very real concerns about it:

What follows is what I heard last night.

*

As a fan of a dual-screen for sporting events, we’re well used to lining up two devices in this house to try and follow more than one thing at once. Last night, we gave that same treatment to politics. I know, dear reader. What a marriage.

On one screen, mine, an AsIAm webinar with the National Council for Special Education (NCSE), walking through this new model of “inclusive” special autism classes, answering questions, acknowledging concerns, and trying to bring some clarity to something that is still very obviously in motion. On the other, Gav’s, the Minister sitting in front of the Oireachtas Education Committee, speaking about “inclusion” in broad, aspirational terms.

Let’s talk about what I heard.

Down to brass tacks, these “inclusive classes” were being explained by NCSE representatives and realised in real time on that webinar. This is not a finished model being rolled out with confidence and clarity. It is something far more uncertain than that. It is a system responding, in real time, to pressure. And that distinction matters, because when you listen closely, the language gives it away. “We don’t have all the answers.” “We will learn as we go.” “There will be implications and consequences we haven’t thought of yet.” These are not the words of a settled, evidence-based model. They are the words of something still being figured out.

And to be fair to NCSE colleagues, there is honesty in that. There is an attempt to acknowledge complexity. But you cannot pair that level of uncertainty with momentum. You cannot say “we don’t have all the answers” while expanding the model at pace, with 11 classes already sanctioned at post-primary level and more clearly coming. That is not a cautious pilot. That is a direction of travel.

That is why I asked a very straightforward question during the webinar. What is the evidence base for this model? Not examples. Not anecdotes. Not “some schools are doing this already.” Actual evidence of effectiveness, independently evaluated, that can be cited and interrogated. Because if we are going to fundamentally shift how children access support, moving from smaller, contained classes into larger, more fluid structures, that shift has to be grounded in something more than intention. And they couldn’t give me that.

Instead, the answer, in essence, was that the evaluation will come. That inspection processes will monitor it. That there will be thematic reporting. That we will learn from implementation. And that is exactly the issue. The evaluation is not informing the model. It is following it. We are implementing first, and asking questions later.

Alongside that, there is a significant reframing happening in how these classes are being described. Not as classes in the traditional sense, but as a “resource mechanism”. Something flexible. Something children move in and out of. Something that exists to support a broader mainstream placement rather than to operate as a defined space in its own right. On paper, that sounds aligned with inclusion. It sounds progressive. It sounds like movement away from rigid structures.

But that kind of flexibility only works if the system around it is stable. It only works if mainstream classrooms are resourced, staffed, and structured in a way that can absorb that fluidity. Without those conditions, flexibility doesn’t feel like inclusion. It feels like dilution. It feels like less certainty, less consistency, less clarity about where a child belongs and how their needs are actually being met.

And this is the part that keeps coming back to me. Let’s assume there is a shared intention here. That we want more autistic children supported in their local schools. That we want inclusion to be real and meaningful, not just something we say.

Fine! Brilliant! But we have to then be honest about what that actually requires. Because focusing on autism classes, in whatever form they take, is only one part of the picture. The bigger question sits in the mainstream itself, and whether it is, as it stands, remotely equipped to meet those needs.

Because if it isn’t (and in many cases it isn’t) then what happens is predictable. The special class, whatever we call it, becomes the place where complexity is managed. It becomes the pressure valve. Again. And again.

And then there is the part that is increasingly difficult to ignore. This model fits very neatly with system constraints. If you are dealing with limited space, limited building capacity, and a growing number of children who need places, then a model that allows you to put 12 children into a room that previously held 6 solves multiple problems at once. It reduces the number of classes needed. It moves more children off waiting lists more quickly. It eases pressure in a way that is visible and immediate. It suits a system under strain.

But that is a numbers solution. And numbers solutions have a way of being mistaken for educational ones.

Because the question is not whether you can fit 12 children into a space. Of course you can. The question is whether that space, with that number of children, with that level of need, and with those staffing structures, can actually provide what those children need to access education in any meaningful sense. And unless there is clear, independently evaluated evidence that it can, then concern is not only understandable. It is necessary.

There was also a strong emphasis on school-level decision making. On student support planning. On ongoing review of placements. On the idea that schools know their students and will make the right calls. And again, in principle, that is exactly how it should work. But it rests on a very big assumption – that schools currently have the capacity to do that consistently and well. That they have the time, the staffing, the expertise, and the structures to hold that level of complexity.

And if we are honest about the system as it stands, that capacity is not guaranteed. It is not evenly distributed. And it is certainly not something that can be relied upon without significant investment and change.

We were told that if things are not working, the NCSE will intervene. That there are mechanisms for review and oversight. But that raises a question that has been sitting there for a long time. Are those interventions happening consistently now, in schools where needs are not being met? Because if they are not, then it is very difficult to see how adding another layer of complexity will suddenly make that oversight more effective.

And all of this brings us back to something very simple, and very uncomfortable. We have not planned adequately for the number of children who need specialist provision. We are behind. And when systems are behind, they do what systems always do. They stretch what they already have. They reconfigure. They reframe. They find ways to do more with the same.

More children in the same spaces. Fewer new classes required. Pressure eased on paper.

And very quickly, that becomes the new normal.

We are told that existing autism classes will remain. That ratios are not changing. That there is no immediate displacement of current provision. And I believe that is the intention. But systems do not change in one dramatic moment. They shift gradually. One model is introduced. Then expanded. Then normalised. And before long, it is not the alternative. It is the default.

And all the while, children move through it.

I keep coming back to that line. “We will learn as we go.” Because there is something in it that sits very uneasily with what education is supposed to be. Children do not get a draft version of their schooling. They do not get a second run once the system has figured itself out. They get one experience. One trajectory. One set of conditions that either allow them to access learning or do not.

So if we are going to build something new, it has to be built on more than urgency. More than pressure. It has to be built on something that has been tested, interrogated, challenged, and shown to work.

Otherwise, what we are really doing is asking children to carry the risk of a system trying to solve its own problems.

*

Another day, another press release. This time, a “new” approach. The Department of Education has introduced what is being framed as an “inclusive” autism class model in post-primary schools: a new tier of provision, with classes of up to 12 pupils.

And straight away, there are questions.

What does that say about the classes we already have, which are carefully structured around much smaller numbers? What does it say about the ratios that underpin them, the environments they rely on, the thinking that informed them? And did nobody pause to consider the language here? If some classes are now being labelled “inclusive”, what does that imply about the rest? (Are they “exclusive”? They are, after all, pretty hard to get into…)

On first read, to someone outside the system, it sounds positive. More spaces. More capacity. Movement in an area that badly needs it. But there is a critical detail sitting underneath it all. There is no guarantee of additional space. No clear commitment to increased teacher allocation. No certainty around additional SNA support. That is the point at which it becomes very difficult to take the framing at face value. Because you cannot talk about expanding capacity in autism classes without talking about what those classes actually require to function. These are not standard classroom environments. They depend on space, on low adult-to-student ratios, on the ability for children to regulate, to withdraw, to move safely between environments. These are not extras. They are the conditions that make the provision appropriate in the first place.

So when the proposal is “up to 12 pupils”, but without a parallel commitment to the resources that make that viable, it does not read as inclusion. It reads as dilution. That is not a dramatic interpretation. It is simply how these settings work in practice.

What is the precise intention for these classes? If it is to accommodate children with slightly lesser needs than others in 'autism’ classes, we have a capacity problem. There is already such a major falloff in capacity in autism classes from primary to post-primary, that any new class model will almost certainly be dominated by pupils ageing out of primary with nowhere else appropriate to go. These are the pupils who needs demand the lower (6:1:2) pupil-teacher-SNA ratio.

It also raises a more uncomfortable question about intent. At a time when waiting lists for classes are under intense pressure, increasing numbers within existing structures can look less like reform and more like a way of reducing figures on paper. Let's be real, once a model exists that accommodates more pupils per class, it inevitably reshapes expectations across the system. Why continue to invest in smaller classes with lower ratios if a higher number can be justified elsewhere?

The response from AsIAm reflects that unease. They acknowledge what everyone working in this space already knows: there are children without appropriate school places, and that must be addressed. But they also make a point that should sit at the centre of any reform: a place alone is not enough. It must be the right place. Enrolling a child into a setting that cannot meet their needs is not progress. It is displacement. They also highlight something that should not need saying. All autism classes should already be inclusive. That is the expectation. Not something newly designated or selectively applied. If inclusion is something we are still labelling onto particular models, then it suggests it is not yet embedded in the system as a whole.

There are process concerns too. AsIAm have pointed out that this proposal appears to have come without meaningful consultation with the autistic community. It is not hard to imagine that others who should have been consulted are not also asking questions. If provision for autistic young people is being redesigned, their voices should be central to that process, not an afterthought. The same applies to the bodies tasked with supporting and overseeing implementation, including the NCSE.

Beneath the language of inclusion, what this looks like in practice is an attempt to increase capacity within an already stretched model, without fully resourcing what that increase demands. More students, but the same structures. And in doing so, there is a real risk of creating a tiered system within autism provision itself.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect is what this could have been.

There has long been a gap in the system for children who do not neatly fit existing categories. The so-called “SEN-betweener” group: those who are not suited to special class placement, but who are not being adequately supported in mainstream settings either. There was a genuine opportunity here to design something that responded to that need. Something flexible, genuinely inclusive, and capable of supporting a broader range of learners without immediately narrowing or labelling.

That would have been transformative.

Instead, what has emerged is a new layer within autism provision. Narrower, not broader. More categorisation, not less. And that feels like a missed opportunity.

Because the need in the system is not small. It is not neat. It does not fit comfortably into fixed categories. And until provision reflects that complexity, the same issues will continue to surface, no matter how often the language changes.

None of this is to dismiss the urgency. More places are needed, and needed quickly. But urgency cannot become an excuse for getting the fundamentals wrong. Because once models like this are introduced, they do not remain temporary. They become part of the system.

And children live with the consequences of that.

We all do.

To feel uneasy about the blockades, about the disruption, about the way this is unfolding in real time across the country, and at the same time to recognise that what is happening is not random, not isolated, and not without cause. It is also possible, and necessary, to draw a clear line against those attempting to co-opt this moment for something uglier. The opportunistic racism, the familiar right-wing playbook that seeks to turn frustration into blame and division, has nothing to do with what is actually driving people onto the roads. That can be dismissed outright. It does not belong here.

But neither does dismissal of the protest itself.

Because what is unfolding is not simply about fuel. It is the visible expression of something that has been forming over years, a slow accumulation of pressure that has moved largely unnoticed until it reached a point where it could no longer be contained. Rising costs, stagnating responses, promises made and allowed to dissolve without consequence, small moments of inaction that, taken together, begin to settle into something more permanent. No single decision created this. No single moment explains it. But the continuity of it is what matters. It did not begin here, and it has not stopped.

Fuel is simply where it found its form. Enough is enough.

There is also a particular kind of frustration at the centre of this, one that goes beyond economics. It is the experience of speaking and feeling that nothing meaningful comes back. Of being acknowledged without being acted for. Of being told things are understood without seeing evidence that they are being addressed. Someone needs to do something about that! You’re so right! I hear you! Over time, that gap between language and reality becomes its own source of pressure. It compounds everything else.

And so, it gathers.

It gathers in the ordinary rhythms of daily life, in kitchens where conversations repeat without resolution, in cars where people calculate and recalculate what is possible, in quiet exchanges where a simple “same here” carries more weight than any extended explanation. It becomes shared, even when it is not formally organised. It becomes ambient. Whole.

What we are seeing now is what happens when that ambient pressure requires an outlet. The road block becomes a site not because of its symbolism, but because of its capacity. It can hold disruption. It can hold attention. It can hold, briefly, what has had nowhere else to go.

This is not neat. It is not comfortable. It is not, for many, the preferred method of expression.

But discomfort does not negate cause.

What is perhaps most striking, and most telling, is who is at the centre of it. Middle-aged men, largely. Oh, the men. Men in cars, men in tractors, men whose identities have been shaped by work, by provision, by endurance, by a cultural expectation that they absorb strain rather than articulate it. It is not the exclusivity of that group that is notable, but its visibility. We are not used to seeing these men at their limit. When they reach it, it tends to signal something more than a passing grievance.

We have seen this before. The men now visible in this moment are the generation just beneath those who carried the weight of the Celtic Tiger collapse, many of whom did so silently, and at great personal cost. That history is not distant. They cried and some died. It sits close to the surface, even when it is not explicitly named. Which is why the visuals of this week unsettles people so much.

It is not only the disruption that causes discomfort, but what it represents. A sense that something has been allowed to stretch too far. That pressure has been normalised for too long. That the systems meant to respond have, at times, defaulted to explanation over action.

That does not mean this is the right way to respond. It does mean it is an understandable one.

And understanding it is not the same as endorsing it.

There is a tendency, in moments like this, to collapse everything into a single narrative, to either fully support or fully reject what is happening. That instinct is unhelpful. It is entirely possible to recognise the legitimacy of the frustration while questioning the form it has taken. It is equally possible to reject the attempts to hijack it without dismissing the conditions that produced it.

Both distinctions matter.

Because this moment, for all its visibility, is not a solution. It is an expression. It is what happens when the accumulation of pressure becomes impossible to ignore. But it does not resolve the conditions that created it, and it cannot, on its own, undo what has built up over time.

What it can do is reveal something.

It reveals the extent of the strain. It reveals the gaps between policy and lived experience. It reveals a level of frustration that has moved beyond quiet endurance and into public expression. And perhaps most importantly, it reveals that this is not something people are willing to carry indefinitely.

That matters, because it points to something else. The idea that this level of pressure is inevitable, that this is simply how things are now, is not one that holds. There is nothing fixed about this. There is nothing that says people must continue to live at this edge.

So here’s to offering another space this morning, one can stand in in this moment and feel conflicted. You can recognise the strain and still question the disruption. You can reject the opportunism surrounding it while holding onto the reality of what has produced it.

That is not contradiction. That is clarity. Because if anything is to change, it will not be decided or resolved alone here, whatever package of measures are offered.

It will be decided when this feeling is carried forward and translated into something more durable than protest. A vote. A different vote. A different set of choices about who gets to shape what comes next. Remember the mood this week. And remember it again in under four years time during the next general.

Along the bloody Camino de Santiago, of all places. Hard to escape it, lads. Among a group of teachers who, on first meeting, presented as decent, inclusive, thoughtful. Look, they are in so many ways. Enlightened enough to have been heard talking carefully about other matters in the world. The kind of people you’d assume would have this figured out by now. Not so.

It wasn’t in a meeting. Not in anything official or deliberate where you might expect people to pause, to choose their words, to be even slightly careful. Those spaces, to be fair, have improved. People have copped on a bit there. It’s the in-between bits that tell you far more about a system than any policy document ever could. That’s where the issue sits. That’s where it happens.

“Where do you teach?”

“In X.”

“Lovely. What class have you?”

“I’m in the unit.”

“Oh God, I couldn’t do that. How bad is it? How bad are they?”

“Not too bad. It’s grand with a few of them who mainstream for part of the day. It’s the non-verbals that are the hardest.”

Just like that. Out into the air. No hesitation. No awareness of what is actually being said. No sense that anything about it might be off. I look down at my phone and stare at the screensaver, my “very bad and non-verbal” daughter looking back at me. A child who doesn’t “mainstream.” A child who would, in this framework, be placed neatly into that hierarchy without anyone blinking. The conversation moves on.

I would normally say something. I usually do. Step in, soften it, reframe it, challenge it. But this time, somewhere between 22km into a 28km walk and a glass of sangria, I said nothing. And instead I made a decision to bring it here to talk about it.

Because it is always in these spaces, isn’t it. Doorways. Staffrooms. Yard chats. Bars over the Easter break. The half sentences, the throwaway lines, the tone more than the content. The bits people think don’t matter, which in reality matter the most. It is always the same language. The same framing. The same loud, casual reduction of children into something to be measured, ranked, managed. How bad. How hard. High. Low. Verbal. Non-verbal. Unit. Mainstreamable. Not mainstreamable. As if we are talking about levels in a game or categories on a form rather than actual children with actual lives and identities and dignity.

And here is the part that sits most uneasily, and makes it harder to challenge but more urgent that we do. Most of the time, it is not even said with cruelty. It is not even said with intent. It is habit. It is language people are absolutely wedded to. Handed down through staffrooms, through outdated training, through Department reports from another era, through systems that have never been properly interrogated or dismantled. It has just… stayed. And so it rolls out now without pause, without reflection, without anyone stopping to think about what it actually sounds like, what it actually means, what it actually does.

But that does not make it harmless. If anything, it makes it more dangerous. Because it is invisible. Because it is normalised. Because it goes unchallenged.

People say it around me a lot. Naturally enough, people wouldn’t always know why I would be immediately offended myself. They weren’t in the Camino example. However, the truth is, knowing my own circumstances, knowing my daughter, some people still say it to my face. To my face. The things people feel comfortable saying, the assumptions embedded in their tone, the language they don’t even register as loaded… you would be genuinely mtaken aback if you heard it.

Why is there such a deep, almost stubborn attachment to archaic language when it comes to autistic pupils? I have seen it defended, firmly, confidently, as if it is beyond question. I even had someone argue for the continued use of the word “unit” because that is what the architectural plans call it. As if that settles it. As if something being written down once, in a formal document, makes it permanently appropriate.

Lads.

Words matter far more than people think. Because “unit” does not sound like a classroom. It does not feel like a classroom. It suggests something separate, something clinical, something other. And the moment you position it that way, the role of the teacher shifts too, whether people realise it or not. Expectations soften. Standards do lower. The job becomes about management rather than teaching, about coping rather than educating. It creates a subtle but powerful permission structure where what happens in that space is seen as different, lesser, outside the norms we would fight to uphold anywhere else in the school. And all of that begins with a single word that people insist is “just terminology.”

We can all think of countless terms that were once official, once widely used, once accepted, and are now completely, rightly, gone. Because we learned. Because we evolved. Because we recognised harm. So why, in this space, are we still clinging on? Why are we so reluctant to let go of language that clearly does not serve children, simply because it is familiar?

And let’s be very honest about something we don’t say nearly loudly enough. If teachers were speaking like this about any other minority group, there would quite rightly be uproar. Immediate. Loud. Non-negotiable. There would be pushback, accountability, consequences. The language would be called out for what it is. It would not be tolerated.

But somehow, when it comes to autistic children, it slips through. It is softened. It is excused. It is framed as “just the way people talk.” As if it sits outside the same expectations of respect and dignity we insist on everywhere else.

It does not. It is the same issue.

Because language in schools is never just language. It is the starting point for everything. It shapes how a child is seen before they even open (or don’t open) their mouth. It determines whether behaviour is interpreted as communication or defiance, whether a need is met with curiosity or control, whether a child is approached with possibility or with a ceiling already quietly in place.

You cannot build inclusive practice on top of language that is rooted in deficit, hierarchy and placement. It simply does not hold.

And what is striking, and frustrating, is that we have done so much work everywhere else. Not everywhere, not perfectly, but there has been movement. Structures, allocations, models, classrooms, pathways, paperwork, reports, meetings, circulars… the constant churn of “solutions.” We are, slowly, building an architecture around autism in education.

And yet underneath it all, in some corners more than others, the most basic layer has barely shifted. How we think. How we speak. How we understand.

We are still, far too often, operating from a deeply medicalised, deficit-heavy lens that reduces children to levels and labels and where they “fit.” We talk about the spectrum as if it is linear, as if “high” and “low” tell us anything meaningful about a child’s experience. We collapse children into their needs. And then we stand back and wonder why inclusion feels so difficult, so strained, so inconsistent in practice.

This is why training on documents like Relate cannot be optional. It cannot be an add-on. It cannot be something we “get to” if there is time left at the end of a packed day. It has to be mandatory. Properly resourced. Properly delivered. Given time, space, seriousness.

Because this is not about strategies. It is about unlearning. It is about shifting perspective. It is about understanding autism as a different way of being in the world, not a problem to be ranked and managed.

And that shift has to show up in our language. How we talk about sensory differences, without reducing them to inconvenience. How we talk about communication, without framing it as absence. How we talk about behaviour, or more honestly distress, without defaulting to compliance. How we talk about support, without turning it into hierarchy.

Because when someone says “how bad are they,” that is not just poor wording. It is a belief system, laid bare. And belief systems do not stay in words. They show up everywhere. In expectations. In interactions. In decisions. In who gets patience and who does not. In who is seen and who is helped.

I know how exhausting it is to constantly catch it, soften it, reframe it. To feel like you are interrupting, overreacting, being “that person” again. To sit in spaces where you are editing language in your own head, weighing up whether to say something or let it pass, knowing either way there is a cost.

But the answer cannot be to accept it.

The answer has to be to raise the baseline. To share the responsibility. To ensure that understanding is not optional, not niche, not dependent on personal interest or personal connection.

Because awareness is not enough. It has never been enough. Awareness is easy. Awareness is posters and themed months and well-meaning conversations that never quite go deep enough to change anything real.

Understanding is different. Understanding demands something of us. It asks us to sit with discomfort, to recognise outdated thinking in ourselves and others, to let go of language we have been using for years without question, to accept that we might have been getting it wrong.

And that is hard. But it is necessary.

Because if we are still speaking about children in ways that reduce them, rank them, and quietly strip them of their dignity, then everything else we are doing, all the structures, all the supports, all the talk of inclusion, is built on very shaky ground.

And if we are serious about doing better, really serious, then we have to start there.

Do better, guys. It’s as simple as that.

A good place to start is by reading this document and making it available to colleagues. It’s the AsIAm language guide. Start there.

Let’s name it properly, right at the start, because the polite circling and careful phrasing hasn’t worked elsewhere. If anything, has allowed it to bed in even further. There is a growing strain of absolutism in online autism parenting/education/therapy spaces that insists there is only one acceptable way to support a child on the spectrum, one correct lens through which everything must be viewed, one set of approved practices that can be spoken about without fear, and anything outside of that, no matter how thoughtful, how gentle, how carefully attuned to an individual child, is very quickly and very confidently framed as harmful. That's right. It goes straight to harm.

And that is not advocacy anymore. That is ideology. And it is suffocating the life out of what should be nuanced, grounded, human conversations.

These loud belief systems likely first started from a valid and necessary place of calling out harm, amplifying voices that were ignored and challenging outdated or genuinely damaging practices. Fine. I'm there. Sign me up to that! However, in far too many corners, it has hardened into something rigid and performative. Companies and therapists and teachers on their online accounts ready to pounce… because they know more than you… and if you like and follow you can get a link sent to sign up to their next webinar! Yeah. It's that. The sell, always.

It is completely unforgiving. The goal no longer seems to be understanding or supporting but aligning, publicly and visibly, with a very narrow definition of what is deemed acceptable, and where deviation from that, even in the smallest, most context-specific way, is treated not as a point for discussion but as something to be corrected, shut down, or quietly pushed out of the room.

And the effect of that is immediate and obvious to anyone actually living this life. Because the reality of raising a child with additional needs (particularly our beloved autixtic children who need something very specific to them) does not fit into those neat, controlled boxes that make for good online discourse. It is not theoretical, it is not clean, and it is certainly not something you can reduce down to a set of approved positions and then apply wholesale across every child, every family, every situation without losing something essential along the way.

It is lived in long days and longer nights, in kitchens and cars and classrooms, in the constant, often invisible work of noticing, responding, adjusting, trying again, and it is defined far more by negotiation than by certainty, because everything (and I do mean everything) is negotiated: food, sleep, communication, regulation, safety, transitions, participation, the small moments that pass unnoticed by others and the big ones that shape entire weeks, all of it in flux, all of it requiring attention, flexibility, and a willingness to meet your child where they are while also gently, carefully, helping them to navigate a world that does not always meet them halfway.

And yet, in these increasingly rigid spaces, even naming that reality can feel like stepping onto thin ice, because the introduction of any kind of structure, any system, any intentional support (even when it is clearly rooted in knowing your own child and responding to their needs) is so often flattened into a single, sweeping judgement of harm, delivered with a level of certainty that leaves absolutely no room for context, no curiosity about what is actually happening, no interest in the specifics that, in real life, are where all the important decisions are made. This is particularly true in the case of hardened PDA activists who feel we must be only child-led, and hands-off in everything we do. This is not something I can entertain for my daughter, as she would not be safe. Don't get me wrong, I have actively avoided particular behaviourist practices. But equally, I step in in front of her every day. I get in her way because she wouldn't cope without this type of care.

It is the certainty, that absolute conviction that there is only one way to be, one way to parent, one way to support, that should give us pause, because when conversations lose their ability to hold nuance, when they cannot tolerate difference, when they move so quickly to judgement that there is no space left for questioning or reflection, what you are looking at is not care or protection but control, a kind of ideological tidiness that might look good on the surface but collapses entirely when it meets the complexity of actual lived experience.

So what happens, then, when those families enter spaces that cannot accommodate that messiness, that demand alignment over honesty, that reward the “right” answer over the real one? They go quiet, not because they have nothing to say, but because they can see, very clearly, that saying it will come at a cost, that the careful, considered, deeply attentive decisions they are making for their child will be reduced to something simplistic and judged against a standard that has no room for context, and so they stop sharing, they stop asking, they stop contributing to conversations that, in theory, are meant to include them.

But they do not stop doing the work. They just do it alone. And that, somehow, is being framed as progress. That atmosphere of moral superiority that the ‘neuroaffirming’ experts like to flaunt in our faces when we are just trying to live in peace and love our children hard.

It's hard to accept when you actually think about what is being lost in the process, because when only one version of “right” is allowed to exist, what you end up with is not better outcomes or safer children but a narrowing of perspective, a silencing of lived experience, and a conversation that becomes increasingly detached from the realities it claims to represent, dominated by voices that are often more invested in maintaining ideological consistency than in engaging with the complexity of supporting real children in real homes.

It becomes an echo chamber, and echo chambers are not safe spaces, no matter how carefully they are curated, because they do not allow for the kind of honest, sometimes uncomfortable, always necessary exchanges that lead to genuine understanding and better support.

There is nothing compassionate about a conversation that cannot hold complexity, nothing progressive about reducing every approach to a binary of acceptable or harmful without engaging with context, and nothing child-centred about creating an environment where the people closest to those children feel unable to speak openly about what is actually happening in their lives.

Because the truth, inconvenient as it may be for those who prefer certainty, is that there is no single, universally correct way to do this work, and love and support our darling children.

There are principles, yes, and values, and important lines that should not be crossed, but within that there must be room for nuance, for responsiveness, for the recognition that children are different, families are different, and support, if it is to be effective at all, must reflect that difference rather than attempt to override it.

Otherwise, what we are left with is not guidance but doctrine.

And doctrine, however well-intentioned it might claim to be, has no place in the messy, relational, deeply human work of raising and supporting children, where the only constant is change, and the only certainty is that no single perspective, no matter how loudly or confidently it is asserted, can ever fully capture the reality of what is needed.

Thanks for listening.

As I meander through this mad and confusing world of childhood, I am getting more confident in noticing my own parenting behaviours and where they sit in my vision for how I want my daughters to be in the world. Of course, I am doing this in completely different ways, given that my daughters have very different needs profiles. In parenting my second, neurotypical daughter, I am much more “in the world” in the traditional sense. She attends and participates in a variety of activities, she has a big personality, and she thrives on social interaction. She is having a completely different early childhood experience to her sister, and my interactions with other parents and children through her are entirely different to anything I have experienced before.

In short, I feel like I am learning what parenting looks like in the typical sense at the moment, and I have some observations.

Sit in.

There is a version of parenting that feels very common at the moment, one that leans towards keeping things easy and calm and as conflict-free as possible. I completely understand why this has taken hold because I feel that pull myself every single day. I am, by nature, a very relaxed and accommodating parent. I have had to be with my eldest daughter. She has very limited understanding of limitations and safety and rules. Conscious of this, I support my children in very clear ways. I try to understand where they are coming from, I give them space and time and patience, and I am not interested in rigid or overly strict approaches that take the joy out of childhood. Lads, I let a lot go. A lot.

But alongside all of that, I also believe very strongly that it is my job to step in and correct my child when they are acting up, even when it is awkward, even when it interrupts things, and even when I would much rather let it go in the moment. Because that is the job, whether we like it or not.

This has been on my mind for a while, but it really came into focus again recently as I have been bringing my four year old to different classes and activities, where she is in groups of children who are broadly similar to her in terms of needs and understanding. What has struck me is not the behaviour of the children themselves, because children will always test boundaries and push limits and that is completely normal, but the response of the adults in the room, or more accurately, the lack of response. Let me explain.

Yesterday in particular, I found myself sitting in a little music class and feeling that very familiar sense of teacher empathy for the person leading the group, because the behaviour was difficult, disruptive, and constant. There was talking over the teacher, ignoring instructions, running around when it was not appropriate, and a general sense that the boundaries of the space were not being held. Lookit, they are four. I get it. What made it so hard to sit with was that the room was full of parents who were watching it all unfold and choosing not to step in or guide their children back to what was expected. This is not the first time I have seen this, and I know I am viewing it through the lens of being a teacher, but it is frustrating. Very frustrating.

And there I was, trying to manage my own child, stopping her, correcting her, having those slightly uncomfortable conversations in real time, and feeling very aware that I seemed to be the only one doing it.

It is a very strange feeling, and if I am honest, it can make you question yourself a little bit. It draws attention and can make you feel like you are being overly strict or overly reactive, when in reality you are just doing what needs to be done.

The truth is that it is inconvenient to parent properly in those moments. It interrupts everything, it takes effort, and it requires you to step into a situation that would be much easier to ignore. It is especially difficult when you are tired, and yesterday I was beyond tired, having been up since three in the morning with my other child. The absolute last thing I wanted was to spend that hour correcting behaviour and having conversations. I wanted it to be easy. I wanted to sit back and just get through it like everyone else seemed to be doing. But I had to keep telling myself that is exactly when it matters most. Those conversations have to happen when you are tired and when it would be easier not to bother, because that is when children learn that expectations are consistent and that they do not disappear just because it is inconvenient for us as parents to hold them in place.

What I find hard to understand, and I think I always will, is why we would sit back and watch behaviour unfold that we know is not acceptable, especially when we know our children are more than capable of understanding correction. We hear how they speak, we see what they can do, we know their level of understanding, and these are not children who are unable to process or respond to guidance. They are children who are not being consistently shown what is expected of them in shared spaces. And that has consequences.

Because as a teacher, I can say we see the other side of it every day in education, where children come in who are simply not used to being corrected or redirected, and who find it very difficult to cope when that happens. It is not that they are anxious or fragile or unable, it is that they are unfamiliar with it. No. They don't know how to react to No. Even very normal, gentle correction can feel overwhelming or unfair to them. They do not know what it is to be told no and then move on, or to adjust their behaviour because someone else has asked them to, or to sit with that moment of correction and continue. And that leaves teachers in a position where they are trying to establish something that should already be in place long before children walk through the school door.

I know it's not easy, lads. I know I do sound very judgy. I do think and accept that a lot of this comes from a place of exhaustion and, if I am honest, a kind of parental guilt. Many parents are working full time, they are stretched in every direction, and when they do get that time with their children at the weekend or in an activity, the last thing they want is conflict. They want it to be nice, calm, and enjoyable. I completely understand that, because I feel it too.

But we cannot avoid the harder parts of parenting in those moments and hope that someone else will pick it up later, because that is not how it works. Children need to see and experience those boundaries being held consistently, and they need to understand what it looks like to adjust their behaviour in response to the people and the environment around them.

There is also, I think, a growing sense that we need to be friends with our children, or at least to be seen as easy and agreeable and always on their side. Of course we are on their side in the bigger picture, but we are not their peers and we are not there to simply go along with whatever is happening. We are their parents.

And sometimes that means being the person who steps in, who interrupts, who names what is happening, and who allows a child to feel that small moment of discomfort when they are corrected, even in front of other people. Not to shame them, but to show them clearly what is expected and to help them understand how to move through the world alongside others.

I went back and forth on whether to write this, because parenting conversations can become very loaded very quickly, and I am not interested in judging anyone or pretending that I get it right all the time, because I absolutely do not. I am tired, I am stretched, I let things go that I probably should not, and I have plenty of moments where I know I could have handled things better. But I also cannot sit in rooms and watch this happen and say nothing.

And I also think there is something bigger here about the collective. It is incredibly difficult to hold boundaries for your own child when those boundaries are not reflected around them. Whether that is behaviour in shared spaces or bigger things like access to phones and social media, it becomes much harder for individual families to maintain standards when the wider group seems to be operating differently. This is where parenting cannot just be an individual effort, it has to be something we think about collectively as well.

We need to be a bit braver in the small, everyday moments, in the classes and the playgrounds and the queues and the sidelines, because those are the places where children are quietly learning how to behave and how to be in shared spaces with other people. Not perfectly, and not harshly, but clearly and consistently. Because the goal is not perfectly behaved children. It is children who know how to be in the world, and that only happens if we are willing to show them.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes with this. It is not just physical, although that is there in spades. It is a full-body, full-mind exhaustion that sits behind your eyes and in your bones and follows you through every interaction of the day. It makes simple things feel heavier and ordinary decisions feel like work. And yet, life does not pause itself to accommodate that level of tired. The lunches still need to be made, the classes still need to be taught, the conversations still need to be had, the care still needs to be given. There is no opting out of the day because the night was relentless.

I am writing this because I know we are not the only ones. There are so many families operating in this exact space right now, moving through their days on broken sleep, holding everything together with sheer will and love. It can feel very lonely in those hours when the rest of the world is asleep and you are wide awake, pacing or soothing or just trying to get through to morning. So this is a small moment of acknowledgement. This is real. This is hard. And if you are in it, I see you.

At the very same time, life is moving forward for us in big, undeniable ways. Next week I will graduate with my fourth and final degree, and you can absolutely hold me to that being the last one. A second Masters, an MPhil to add to my BCL from UCD, my HDip from Trinity and my MEd from DCU. My husband is stepping into what feels like a dream role, the first day (night!) of a job he has worked towards for years. Our house is currently in pieces as we strip it right back in preparation for a full repaint and a sale, living in that strange in-between of dust and plans and possibility.

I also turned 40 last week. I found myself in work on the day, being celebrated in a way that felt quietly significant. For the first time in years, I had colleagues who knew it was my birthday and marked it. There were cards and presents and, more than anything, presence. And for the first time in eight years, I am taking time away on my own, properly on my own, to walk a stage of the Camino over Easter. I am healthy, and 20 kilos lighter than I was last July when I started my new job and decided I wanted to move into this new decade feeling stronger and steadier. There is so much good in my life.

When I list it all out like that, it almost feels at odds with the reality of being up at 3am, night after night, trying to coax sleep into a body that will not settle. But both things are true at once. We are exhausted, deeply and consistently exhausted, and we are also moving forward, building things, reaching milestones, creating space for ourselves and for each other. We are doing the things we said we would do, even if they are being done through a fog of tiredness.

There is something in that that I am enormously proud of. Not in a polished or performative way, but in a quiet, steady recognition of what it takes to keep going. To keep showing up for your children, your work, your relationships and yourself, even when your reserves feel empty. To hold both the struggle and the progress in the same breath and not let one cancel out the other.

I am 40 now, and I feel the lack of sleep in a way I never did before. It lands differently. It lingers. It asks more of me. But we are still here, still moving, still doing it. Not perfectly, not gracefully, but consistently and with a huge amount of love at the centre of it all.

If you are in the thick of sleep deprivation right now, if your nights feel endless and your days feel like something to be endured rather than enjoyed, I hope this reaches you in some small way. Not as a solution, because there is no simple one, but as a reminder that it is possible to keep going alongside it. That life does not wait, but it also does not disappear. Things can still happen. Good things, big things, meaningful things. You can and will come out the other end.

We are exhausted. But we are doing it. And if you are reading this in the same kind of haze, I know that you are doing it too. ❤️

A story circulated this week about a mother who spent the day outside a special school in Cork after her 11-year-old son was refused entry. The family were told the move was being deemed a suspension of the child from the school. The entire school been closed for nearly two weeks following an incident in which staff were injured, and parents had been raising concerns about staffing and services in the setting for some time.

As I write this, the Minister for Special Education, Michael Moynihan, was due to meet with parents after the situation became public, with the Department stating that every child should be given the stability and resources they deserve for schooling. Parents have described the situation in the school as a crisis and have called for an emergency response. Those of us adjacent to or part of this wider parenting community have been aware of issues in this area for a long time now.

It is a distressing story to read. But for many families it will also feel painfully familiar.

Stories like this rarely appear suddenly - and as is the case with all of the themes in special education that I have writing about here on my page, they are all predictable. They are usually the visible moment at the end of a much longer journey through systems that are slow, fragmented and incredibly difficult to navigate when a child’s needs are complex. Ultimately, State systems collapse and multiple people are failed. Tale as old as time here, folks.

I do not think people fully grasp just how at sea many families of children with additional needs are, and how relatable this story is. The familiarity of hearing “we can do nothing for you here” is a line many parents will recognise immediately. Locked out. No help. No systems. Limited understanding.

Behind situations like the one in Cork are parents trying to navigate structures that can be confusing, inconsistent and almost impossible to move through in any meaningful timeframe. Assessments take time. Services are stretched or unavailable. Getting enrolled in what should be an appropriate setting is an ordeal, if it happens at all. Communication between schools and agencies can be limited or even impossible. Even when parents are doing everything they possibly can to advocate for their child, the system pushes against them.

Schools are navigating this reality as well. In writing about this area, I recognise the duality of my own identity: I am a mother but I am also a teacher, and I want to show compassion to all sides in my analysis. Please believe me when I say that most schools are trying their best to respond to needs that are becoming more complex year after year. Staff in most cases are doing everything they can within the structures that exist, but those structures were never designed for the level of need many schools are now encountering. When the supports that are meant to exist in the wider system do not materialise, the pressure does not disappear. It simply moves somewhere else, and this is frequently the school.

For some children with significant disabilities, school may actually be the only place where they encounter adults outside of their immediate family who have some capacity to support them. It may be the only place where someone is trying to support communication, emotional regulation, sensory needs or social interaction. It may be the only place where other adults are helping with safety, personal care, movement or daily routines.

When that structure collapses and a child cannot access schooling, families are not simply losing a school day. They are losing the only reliable support system they have access to.

For many parents, school has quietly become the only reliable break in a day of constant care. In many ways, it has become a form of respite. It may be the few hours where parents can work, attend appointments or simply recover enough energy to continue caring for their child through the evening and night. The school day is not simply part of a child’s education; it is often the structure that allows an entire family to function. You pull that away and everything crumbles.

We also need to be honest about the realities schools themselves are operating within. In many settings, schooling for children with significant needs can quietly drift into something closer to containment rather than meaningful education. Not because teachers do not care, but because many systems simply do not know how to properly access these children’s learning needs. In those circumstances the focus can become simply getting through the day safely. This is not a criticism of teachers. It is the result of how the system itself has evolved.

Initial teacher education in Ireland still provides very limited practical preparation for working with children who have complex disabilities and support needs. In many cases it barely scratches the surface of the realities teachers will encounter in classrooms. I can say this with some confidence having just left this sector. Teachers routinely graduate having received very little concrete training in areas such as autism supports, communication systems, sensory regulation, behaviour support planning, trauma informed approaches or working with children with significant intellectual disabilities. Many teachers encounter the realities of special education for the first time when they are already responsible for a classroom. They might have been “trained”, but learning what they actually need to know often happens afterwards and frequently must be pursued independently through additional courses, professional development or personal study.

Even in areas that impact a large proportion of pupils, such as specialised reading instruction, the system is struggling to keep pace with evolving research. The growing understanding of the science of reading and the needs of dyslexic learners is not consistently embedded in teacher preparation. Even when teachers recognise what a child needs, the system often lacks the staffing or structures required to deliver it.

Schools also rely heavily on the extraordinary work of Special Need Assistants (SNAs), and families are rightly grateful for the care and dedication SNAs bring to their roles. Yet there is no strong national competency framework for SNAs in Ireland. The formal minimum qualification requirement is relatively low, and while many SNAs pursue further qualifications such as QQI Level 5 or additional specialist training, this is not consistently required or systematically provided by the system itself.

Much of the specialised training that would genuinely support children with complex needs such as autism interventions, behaviour analysis, communication supports or sensory integration can cost thousands of euro. It is often pursued independently by schools or staff where they can manage it. In practice, this means schools (and ultimately children) are frequently relying on goodwill, experience and self-directed learning, rather than a national system that consistently prepares the adults working with some of the most complex needs in our education system.

All of this is happening at the same time as the wider health and therapy services that should surround schools are often extremely limited or non existent. Many families struggle to access occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, psychology or behavioural supports in any consistent way. Pilot programmes and inclusion initiatives are often announced, but those working within the system know how difficult it is to staff these services. The reality is that there are simply not enough therapists to support both community services and school-based supports in the way the system requires. Schools frequently end up trying to hold together situations that should be supported by multiple services working together. When those services are absent, schools are left trying to fill the gaps.

And in the middle of all of this are children whose behaviour is often misunderstood.

When a child experiences dysregulation or distress, it is often interpreted through the language of behaviour or choice. We sometimes hear descriptions that frame children as making decisions to refuse or act out. But for many children with significant disabilities or communication needs, that is not the reality of what is happening. What we see as behaviour is often communication. It may be a signal of distress, sensory overload, anxiety or an environment that has become overwhelming. Without specialist training and consistent multidisciplinary support, these signals can easily be misread and situations can escalate.

The reporting from Cork itself acknowledges something important. Officials have recognised that these behaviours are outside the control of the children involved. That recognition matters. But it also highlights the need for systems that are capable of responding to that reality in a structured and supported way, particularly when suspension is the chosen result. This raises a deeper question about how we respond to situations where a child with significant disabilities becomes dysregulated or causes harm in a moment of distress. Suspension, by its nature, is a disciplinary response. It assumes a level of intentionality and understanding on the part of the student. But how can suspension be considered an appropriate response to a child who may not possess the capacity to intentionally cause harm or to fully comprehend the consequences of their actions? Treating these moments through the lens of discipline risks misreading what is actually happening and shifts responsibility onto the child rather than examining whether the supports, environment and structures around them are adequate. When the only tool available to a school is a disciplinary one, it often reflects not a failure of the child but a failure of the system to provide appropriate responses to complex need.

As I said earlier, I am always careful about how we talk about schools in moments like this because the vast majority of teachers and school staff are working incredibly hard in very difficult circumstances. There is enormous goodwill in schools. There is patience, creativity and compassion in how people try to support children whose needs can be complex and unpredictable. But goodwill cannot be a substitute for a properly designed system. Schools are trying to hold situations together with effort and compassion. They are adjusting routines, creating supports where they can and stretching already limited resources. But when systems rely too heavily on goodwill rather than structure, those efforts become very difficult to sustain.

One of the realities we rarely acknowledge clearly enough is that every child in the country will pass through a school at some point. Schools are the one universal structure in the lives of children and families. No matter what services exist or do not exist elsewhere, schools are where the system ultimately lands. When wider supports are unavailable, delayed or fragmented, it is schools that are left trying to hold the situation together. Teachers and school leaders are now being asked to manage extraordinarily complex environments. In special schools in particular, the scale of that responsibility is often not fully understood. Many special schools now have more SNAs than teachers. Did you know, for example, that principals in Irish schools are not specifically paid to manage SNAs, including in special schools? Their salary and leadership allowance are determined primarily by the number of class teachers enrolled in the school, not by the number of additional staff they supervise. This means that even in special schools where there may be large SNA teams, the principal’s allowance does not increase to reflect the responsibility of managing those staff. This is another example of how the system has quietly evolved beyond the structures designed to support it.

We also need to speak honestly about practices that have become increasingly common in the absence of adequate supports. Children operating on reduced timetables - i.e. shorter school days than are normal - are far more widespread than people realise. In theory, they should be short term, carefully planned and supported by a pathway back to full participation in school. In reality they can become normalised when schools are trying to stabilise extremely complex situations with limited resources. When children miss hours or days of school due to “behaviours”, it is rarely because anyone believes this is the ideal outcome. It is often because schools are trying to manage circumstances that the system has not properly prepared them for.

Stories like the one in Cork should not be treated as isolated incidents. They are signals that the system surrounding children with additional needs is under enormous strain. Parents are trying to navigate systems that feel impossible to move through. Schools are trying to support children without the resources they truly need. Families are carrying far more responsibility than any single family should be expected to carry on their own. When stories like this appear in the news, it is very easy to focus on the immediate moment.

But behind that moment is a much larger story about how the system has gradually shifted more and more responsibility onto schools without providing the structures, training or coordinated supports required to sustain that responsibility. If we want to respond to stories like this with real compassion, we have to look beyond the moment itself. Because when systems begin to fail, everyone is left trying to hold far more than they should.

Moments like the one we are seeing in Cork should not simply lead to short term responses. Additional staffing, training and emergency supports are important and necessary. But they are also responses to pressures that have been building for years. What is needed now is a deeper look at how we structure support for children with complex needs within our schools.

We need initial teacher education that prepares teachers for the realities they will encounter in classrooms. We need consistent and properly funded specialist training pathways for SNAs. We need stronger multidisciplinary supports surrounding schools so that teachers are not left trying to carry responsibilities that should be shared with therapy and clinical services.

Schools cannot carry this responsibility alone. If we want schools to be places where children with significant disabilities can truly belong, learn and be supported, then we have to build a system around them that reflects the reality of that work.

Until we do, moments like the one we are seeing in Cork will continue to appear. And each one will remind us that families, children and school communities are being asked to walk alone, without the State doing what it needs to do to support our most vulnerable.