(UK) NI: "Remarkable" fact: one in 12 boys have ASD; forcing mainstream schools to add special classes
- Jul 7, 2025
- 2 min read
June 30, 2025, Irish News: Chris Donnelly: Plan for special needs crisis will only widen performance gap for rich and poor
Last week, the chief executive of the Education Authority, Richard Pengelly, issued a letter to mainstream schools in what amounted to an explicit warning that if they failed to voluntarily open new specialist classes for SEN pupils, he may take the unprecedented step of instructing them to do so.
The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) reported last month that 5.9% of all 4 to 15-year-olds in the north of Ireland have been diagnosed with autism, an astonishing figure.
Even more remarkable is the fact that 8.3% of all schoolboys [one in 12] now have an autism diagnosis, but only 3.4% of girls (I would recommend readers pick up Suzanne O’Sullivan’s excellent book The Age of Diagnosis.)
In 2014/15, 6,757 children were taught outside of mainstream classrooms in either special schools or SPiM classes in primary and post-primary. That number has skyrocketed to 11,914 this year. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of these children are boys.
The chronic need for new special schools has been apparent for a long time.
Last summer, the amalgamation of two north Belfast primary schools allowed the Education Authority to repurpose one as a special school, with the refurbishment completed with considerable haste to allow a new 72-pupil Deanby Centre Special School to open after a £1 million refurbishment, alleviating some of the pressure.
Yet in its wisdom, the education bureaucracy has determined that the best way of dealing with the crisis is to compel schools with disproportionately high numbers of poor pupils to carry the responsibility of opening SPiM classes.
The specialist provision classroom is a different learning environment to the mainstream classroom, and schools already signed up to what is effectively a hybrid mainstream/specialist school model will testify to the significant impact of the new provision on the capacity of the school to function as previously was the case, when the full focus was on meeting the needs of mainstream learners.
This is of considerable importance given that, in the north of Ireland, all SEN pupils taught in SpIM classes at post-primary level are in non-grammar schools, with SpIM classes all but an alien concept to the grammar schools.
Similarly, less than 2% of the 125 most affluent primary schools have SpIM classes, a glaring contrast to the situation in schools serving our most deprived school communities where the greater number of SpIM classes are located. . . .
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