If You’re Taking Responsibility, Then Take It

Today, the Sunday Independent published a profile interview with the Minister for Education, Hildegarde Naughton. It’s the classic Sindo political profile: the dramatic cover photograph, the carefully curated personal story, the invitation to see the person behind the office. These interviews are always the Oprah couch of Irish politics, happening when someone needs to present a softer side. This one touches on everything from the personal abuse she has received as a public representative (disgraceful, by the way) and the precautions she now takes in public life, to her relationship with Cabinet colleagues, the Department of Education’s €646 million funding shortfall and her determination to fight for schools in the face of growing demand. It is, in many ways, a carefully constructed “revealing” interview, inviting readers to sympathise with the realities of political life.

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.