A National Council for Special Education (NCSE) Working Group published a proposal in 2014 to improve how schools are resourced to support students with special educational needs.
In September 2014, the ERC began the process of gathering the information required to develop the new model at primary (Weir & Denner, 2015) and post-primary levels (Weir & Denner, 2016).
The new Special Education Teaching Allocation Model was then introduced in primary and post-primary schools in the 2017/18 school year with revised allocations due to be made to schools from September 2019.
The revised model closely follows the format of the existing model, using updated information on enrolment, the number of students with low academic performance, and the school’s socio-economic context. The ERC, led by David Millar, is responsible for combining the different sources of data and running the resource allocation model under the direction of the DES/NCSE Steering Group.
