A systemic failure to protect a significant number of vulnerable pupils from child abuse, is a permeating feature of any twentieth century historical analysis of the Irish school system (Kilkelly, 2012). Like many European countries, the Catholic Church was at the fulcrum of abuse scandals – an exacerbating factor in the Irish education context, given that over 90% of primary schools operated under Catholic patronage. In recent years, the findings from a series of official investigative commissions, detailing the scale of the abuse, compelled the Irish state to legislate for child protection (McGuiness, 1993; Murphy, Buckley and Joyce, 2005; Ryan, 2009; Gibbons, 2010). This culminated in the passage of the Children First Act (2015), to ensure that mistakes of the past were not repeated (Government of Ireland, 2015). Following the legislative process, the Child Protection Procedures for Primary and Post Primary Schools (2017) were published, to inform school management and personnel of ‘new statutory obligations’, laid down by Children First, to ensure that all pupils were sufficiently protected (Government of Ireland, 2017, p. i). This paper presents a comprehensive policy analysis of the Child Protection Procedures and details potential policy ambiguities and anomalies in relation to special schools, which will resonate with policy analysts across Europe.

Walt and Gilson’s (1994) Policy Analysis Triangle forms the basis of the analytical tool employed in this study. This framework - predominantly used to scrutinise policies in the health domain - has been judged effective for analysing policy reform both in Irish (May et al., 2014) and international contexts (Walt and Gilson, 1994; Gilson and Raphaely, 2008). Its application can be justified here, as child protection policy in Ireland was historically a function of the Department of Health (Buckley, 2003). The fact that the curricular component to child protection is situated within the Social, Personal and Health Education curriculum in Irish schools, was also an important consideration in its utilisation. The Triangle’s explicit focus on the processes, context and actors that impact upon policy development, addresses the frequent concern of many scholars that policy analyses are often too content-focused (Walt and Gilson, 1994; May et al., 2014). The emphasis on policy actors also allows sufficient scope to explore the strength of ‘inter-agency co-operation’ – a practice strongly recommended by child protection practitioners (Buckley, 2003, p. 186).

The paper details data gathering currently underway to establish the extent to which the curricular elements to the Child Protection Procedures for Primary and Post Primary Schools (Government of Ireland, 2017) are implemented in practice in special schools. It highlights preliminary findings in relation to how child protection is led in a special school context, with a pupil cohort that research illustrates is more susceptible to abuse. Although rooted in Ireland, this paper will interest scholars in other European jurisdictions. Mandatory child protection procedures for schools are commonplace across the continent in order to safeguard children from harm. All of these jurisdictions have to cater for children with special needs and face the same challenges as Ireland in catering for a group that are identified as more vulnerable. In addition, this paper will showcase the role of regulatory theory in the design of the child protection procedures and illustrate how this impacts upon their enactment from a school leader’s vantage point. This adds significantly to this paper’s relevance from a European perspective, as teachers and schools across the continent are subject to greater levels of regulation in order to operationalise, at the micro level, policies that are introduced at the macro level. This paper offers insights into how that operationalisation process takes place in relation to child protection.

This paper reports on the earlier part of part of a broader mixed methods study into child protection curricula in special schools. The section of the study being presented here is a desk-based, critical literature review on child protection policy, legislation and empirical research, followed by an overview of preliminary findings from a questionnaire to school leaders. Data was generated in two phases for this paper: 1. Desk-Based Research The Child Protection Procedures for Primary and Post-Primary Schools (2017) were analysed using Walt and Gilson’s (1994) Policy Analysis Triangle as the base framework. To optimise its analytical potential for the special education domain and to aid interpretation, a selection of Riddell’s (2003) Models of Administrative Justice were applied to the Triangle. The potency of these models for analysing special education provision has been highlighted in the European context, in particular in Scotland. The resulting hybrid analytical instrument (Walt and Gilson, 1994; Riddell, 2003) enabled the procedures to be analysed using a set of lenses custom-designed for the sensitivities involved in child protection work in special education settings. 2. Questionnaire to Principals of Special Schools A questionnaire was distributed to the principal of every special school in Ireland (n=133) in January 2021. The findings of this questionnaire are presented in order to address many of the questions that emerged in the desk-based phase of the research and to illustrate some of the policy consequences of the Child Protection Procedures. An emphasis is placed on policy consequences from a leadership and oversight perspective. To situate the paper within the overall study, an outline of the next phase of data-gathering (qualitative) is also provided to give context for the preliminary findings and to signpost the direction in which this research is headed.

An analysis of the Child Protection Procedures (2017) demonstrates that while legal considerations were important contextual factors in their design, over time the legal framework had morphed into a series of rule-bound requirements, typical of bureaucratic organisations. A number of possibilities can be theorised for this change. Because of the legal jeopardy involved in child protection matters (O’Keeffe v Ireland, 2014), regulatory theory was relied upon in the design phase with the objective of ensuring maximum compliance. However, when the Procedures were enacted, the scope of regulatory theory enabled different actors to interpret them in divergent ways. In an effort to fulfil its statutory obligation, the Department of Education Inspectorate distilled the Procedures down into a series of easily-assessable compliance ‘checks’, that can be examined during inspections (Government of Ireland, 2019, p. 11). While published reports from these inspections are currently very limited, evidence from across the continent suggests that many teachers may simply perform for school inspections, in order to be compliant with the rules (Perryman, 2006). The results of the questionnaire will provide an overview of how special schools in Ireland interpret policy in relation to sensitive aspects of the child protection curriculum. It will illuminate the extent to which school leaders are influenced by the discourses of inspection and regulation – discourses which are becoming ever more prominent in the education domain across Europe and the West more generally. The inherent risk that policy enactors may show more fidelity to their legal requirements, than to the spirit of why those requirements were there in the first place, will be probed. This is a conundrum that policy analysts from many European countries will be familiar with and this paper will provide a forum to reflect on that using child protection policy as a high-stakes example.

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