The role of the Learning Support Teacher

Learning support teachers are employed to ensure that pupils will mild learning difficulties achieve maximum proficiency in literacy and numeracy before leaving primary school.  It is likely that one learning support teacher will be shared between 2 or more schools.  The learning support teacher provides help for pupils who have fallen behind the majority of their class.  These children are expected only to need extra help for a short period of time.  The pupils are  withdrawn from mainstream classes  and work is done on areas of specific learning difficulties in skill areas of reading, writing, spelling, language and Mathematics.

Individual education plans will be drawn up for these children and their progress will be monitored by the learning support teacher weekly.

These pupils will not be expected to progress to stage 3 of the Three Step Model, nor to need the services of the resource teacher.

Following the report from the Task Group on Dyslexia, the government believes that pupils with dyslexia should be taught, not by the Resource Teacher, but by the Learning Support Teacher.

Further Information

http://www.spd.dcu.ie/ed_dis_support/learning_support.htm
http://www.ilsa.ie