You’ll have heard us highlighting the issue of speech and language therapy on this programme in our campaign Give Them a Voice. 

As it stands, the waiting lists for assessments and therapies for children who have delayed speech is outrageously long, and parents are battling hard every day to get as much as they can - and even just to get what their children are entitled to. 

So imagine going through all that, getting your son into school and then discovering that the hours he’s allocated with a Special Education Teacher in school are being dropped when a mainstream teacher is absent? 

Julie is just one mother going through that with her son, Conor, and she explained the recent changes from the Dept of Education around banked hours.