The issue of special needs education has been a major one in recent weeks, with much talk over whether children with special needs should have returned to school already.

In Italy, children with special needs are in mainstream education, and we wanted to understand how the system works over there.

Paddy Agnew is a columnist with the Sunday Indepedent, living in Italy, and he joined Kieran on The Hard Shoulder to explain how and why the Italians do it they way they do.