Colleen Brown: Parents want teachers not afraid of special-needs kids

The Government has announced it will inject $30.7 million into special education over the next four years. Unfortunately, not only is this not enough but the wrong areas are being targeted.

The Minister of Education and his officials need to sort out a series of overlapping issues, and four years is too long to leave them unresolved.

It is pleasing that $4 million of the package will be used to help assess students' learning needs. Often their needs are so subtle that they are hard to identify and target in the classroom.

But this resource needs to go directly to the frontline teacher, who often needs extra help in the planning, programming and adaptation of his or her teaching to meet the individual student's daily learning needs.

Under the Government's package, the funds will go to resource teachers and specialist teachers, but the classroom teacher has to wait for that expertise to be free in order to have access to it.

Parents want trained teachers and teacher-aides. They have been discussing this concern with various ministers for more than 15 years. They want professionals who are confident and welcome their children. They want professionals who are not afraid of special needs.

At present many teachers are reluctant to have children with special needs in their classrooms because they had no exposure to special-education practices in their training. The package does not address this very important issue.

The $9.8 million increase in funding for teacher-aides will be useful but, again, it will benefit only the tiny percentage of students already catered for within existing policies.

What will the Government do for those parents who have to pay for extra support for their children so they can remain in the mainstream? Many families are struggling to pay for those resources.

The very children who need support will not get it from this package. Many special-needs children are bulk-funded under the existing special-education grant money. That formula is not fair.

In response, the Government might say: "Look at the $16 million in supplementary learning support we've given you." But the criteria are too rigid and students cannot gain access to that support.

There are parents in Auckland with two children with special needs, one of whom has no language, and neither child can access this fund. These parents are tired of the fight to get resources for their sons to support them at their local school, and have elected to put them into segregated settings.

When meetings between parents, educators and special-education officials were held in Auckland last year, independent note-takers recorded the key issues affecting parents with special-needs children.

The overwhelming issue was that parents did not know the basics as far as gaining access to information was concerned.

Their knowledge gap is astonishing, ranging from zoning to where to go for help and what resources their child can get.

Parents and educators spoke about the complex forms they have to fill in and the fact that students with autistic spectrum disorder find getting access to ongoing resources very difficult.

The bureaucratic process to gain resources is lengthy. One parent found that by the time their child's wheelchair was delivered, it was too small to use.

Parents are sick of the piecemeal approach to funding children, and a policy that resources an elite percentage at the expense of most children with special-education needs.

A key issue for parents is the tricky transition period. This can be between schools and also after students leave school.

I am aware of one family with a young woman with autism who is in transition from school and is receiving $20,000 worth of support. But it is entirely within the family home.

The plan for her to move from the school environment into her community has not been approved and, therefore, cannot be implemented. In essence, she is now being baby-sat. We have to do better than this.

At the Auckland meetings, parents spoke of their disillusionment with the compulsory education system. Time after time, they commented how difficult it became for families when their children started school.

Words and phrases like "battle", "appalling", "unsupported" and "we've lost our funding" were used over and over.

There are times when parents have so little energy left they cannot see how they will continue to battle for their children.

The biggest challenge comes from within the teaching profession. Parents spoke about the lack of welcome they felt when presenting their child with special-educational needs to a school, especially when they did not have individual funding.

I know of a parent who was called to her child's school to change him because the teacher-aide was away. By the time the parent arrived from work, the child had been lying in his own excrement for more than an hour. The parent is now seeking alternative schooling for the child.

The funding rise adds up to only minor changes to the surface structure of education. It needs to attend to the deeper structures that still identify students with special needs in schools as "other", rather than as truly part of their school community.

Until this is done, it is tinkering with resources, and not listening and engaging with the special-needs families.

Only when we have addressed the fundamentals of special education can we decide where the $30.7 million should best be used.

* Colleen Brown chairs the Parent and Family Resource Centre.