Glen Stenhouse: Slow learners fall victim to dogma

Not all children are equally capable of academic learning. Putting aside behaviour problems and environmental factors, one major cause of learning difficulties is below-average intellectual ability.

These children, because of their limitations, have difficulty acquiring the abstract concepts that are the core of academic learning across almost all subjects, from new entrant to secondary level.

Children of below-average intellectual ability have often been referred to as slow learners because this is the most obvious characteristic of their response to academic tasks. They can acquire academic skills, but at a much slower rate than their peers.

They require a great deal of individual help and support to cope even with relatively simple academic tasks. Their teachers face the daunting challenge of trying to break down learning tasks into manageable steps for them, in effect running an individualised programme while trying to manage the needs of the rest of the class.

The policy of placing slow learners in regular classrooms is a recent development. For decades, it was the practice to gather mildly intellectually disabled children from a number of schools and place them in small classes of no more than 10, with skilled teachers who provided a programme tailored to their needs.

These special classes were an efficient way of providing a sheltered environment and an appropriate curriculum for children with special learning needs.

In the past few years, most of these classes have been closed because of a change in philosophy. It is now thought better for slow-learning children to be in the same class as their age-mates according to a policy known as inclusion.

The philosophy underlying this policy is also known as mainstreaming. Regardless of the title, its underlying belief is that it is better for children with special needs to be educated alongside their age peers.

In schools now, almost all slow-learning children are taught in regular classrooms, and are expected to follow basically the same curriculum as their classmates, adapted to their level of understanding.

Of course this cannot be done without personal help. Sometimes this is provided by a teacher aid for a few hours a day paid for by the school, but more often it is left to classroom teachers to do their best to provide individual instruction while also trying to teach the rest of the class.

When one child requires a greatly disproportionate amount of this time, as a slow-learning child inevitably must, there can be only three outcomes: the rest of the class misses out, the slow-learning child misses out, or the teacher goes crazy trying to meet everyone's needs.

Some help for teachers is available through resource teachers of learning and behaviour, who provide an itinerant service to a number of schools, assessing and suggesting programmes for children with a range of special needs.

This is helpful, but these resource teachers are not able to provide the critical factor which mainstreamed slow-learning children desperately need: individual input and support. They work in an assessment and advisory role, and are not supposed to work with children one on one. If they did, and if they allocated their time according to need, they would be spending all their time with just a few students.

As an example of what happens to mildly intellectually disabled children in regular classrooms, I saw a 10-year-old boy - let's call him Michael - in his final year of primary school who could barely read and could not write a simple sentence without help. His academic and language skills were at no more than a 6-year level.

His school was unable to provide any teacher aid time for him. His teacher got to him when she could, which wasn't often, and gave him simple tasks to keep him busy. She knew he needed an individualised, alternative programme but simply could not provide it. The needs of the rest of the class necessarily took most of her time.

An additional source of funding (ORRS) provides a small amount of teacher time one day a week at most for children with very high needs, but Michael did not qualify. Even if he had, it would not have made much difference. His needs were there every day from 8.30am to 3pm, not just when part-time help might be available.

I found Michael's situation shocking and saddening. The education system had failed him. His learning needs were not being met. There are probably hundreds of children just like him in classrooms, spending their days in quiet frustration and unhappiness.

In effect, the learning needs - academic, social, and life-skills - of mildly intellectually disabled children have been sacrificed to the ideal of mainstreaming. The benign hope was that placing them in mainstream classes with minimal support would somehow help them acquire academic and social skills by observation, imitation, or perhaps by some miraculous process of osmosis.

But the harsh reality is that it doesn't work like that. Mildly intellectually disabled children need a tailored programme, a sheltered environment, intensive tuition, and teachers with special skills to learn. They also need to be with their real peers, not just their age-mates but children of similar abilities to whom they can relate as equals, and with whom they can form genuine friendships.

All these things were provided by the special classes which, for reasons of fashionable educational dogma, are now almost extinct.

A major plank of mainstreaming philosophy is that segregated education is bad because it is stigmatising, and to a degree that is true. But special classes did not create difference. They simply recognised its existence, and a practical way of dealing with it.

Intellectual disability is obvious, whether a child is mainstreamed or not. Pretending it doesn't exist is not helpful. Mainstreaming can work well for many special-needs children with the intellectual capacity to access the curriculum without intensive support. Otherwise, it is more about good intentions than good education.

What is happening to mildly intellectually disabled children in mainstream classes is not just educationally unsatisfactory but harmful. A mainstreamed slow learner is confronted and surrounded every day with glaring evidence of his inability to do what his classmates can achieve easily. These children are not so slow that they are unaware they are failing, and you can imagine what that does to their sense of self-worth.

Like any other children, slow learners deserve to have an education appropriate to their needs, and which gives them the opportunity to experience some success, enjoyment, satisfaction, and pride in their learning.

Like any other children, they deserve to be taught in a group of their peers by skilled teachers in an environment which is dedicated to their needs.

* Glen Stenhouse is a child psychologist in private practice in Auckland.