The Minister for Education has taken steps to reduce the practice of placing children with disabilities on short school days.

Earlier this month, a new report by TU Dublin and Inclusion Ireland reveled that children with disabilities are often placed on short school days, denying them their right to education, as well as the chance to socialise with other children.

The report reveled that one in four children with a disability has experienced short days, and this figure rises to one in three for children with autism.

It also revealed that the average short school day lasted just two to three hours, with many children forced to attend school for less than an hour per day. (See more here.)

In response to this, the Minister for Education and Skills, Joe McHugh, has announced that schools will be required to give formal notification if they intend to use reduced timetables.

Following recent consultation between officials from the Department of Education, the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and the TUSLA Educational Welfare Service, arrangements to facilitate the notification and monitoring of reduced timetables have been agreed.

As part of this, schools will have to inform Tusla's Educational Welfare Service that a reduced timetable is being put in place, why it is being put in place and how the school intends to return the child to a full school day.

The parents of the child will also have to consent to the reduced timetable. The TU Dublin report had pointed out that parents were being "forced to either accept a short school day or to remove their child from school".

"Proposed guidelines have been drafted to provide clarity to schools around reduced timetables and to set out the procedures to be followed by schools where such an option is being considered and used. The aim is to ensure that the use of reduced timetables is limited solely to those circumstances where it is absolutely necessary," the Department of Education said.

It emphasised that a reduced timetable should never be used as a sanction or as a tool to manage behaviour.

"A reduced timetable is not in any way a standard aspect of a child's experience of school and must not be allowed to become such. It should be an exceptional measure.

"It has to be accepted that in some cases it may be necessary to use a reduced timetable, for example, as a means of assisting the reintegration of a pupil to a school routine, but such arrangements must only be adopted in limited and time-bound circumstances," Minister McHugh said.

He is seeking the views of educators on these proposed guidelines prior to the publication of the finalised guidelines.

The department is inviting observations from education stakeholders until October 18, 2019.