Peter Hughes: Special ed services revamp shaped by feedback

Recently the Education Review Office reported that 78 per cent of schools are now mostly inclusive. Photo / Thinkstock

Just over 25 years ago, schools were for the first time required to enrol all children who came through their doors, including those with special needs.

It was a radical new vision. Until that rewrite of the Education Act in 1989, many students with special needs were segregated into hospitals, at other specialist facilities, or at home.

We've made enormous progress in fulfilling that vision of including all children in school. Recently the Education Review Office reported that 78 per cent of schools are now mostly inclusive. That was up from 50 per cent just four years earlier.

This reflects the hard work schools are doing to change their practices. And it reflects the rapid expansion of services set up to support kids with special needs, with funding up 29 per cent in the last six years. Each year we assist approximately 80,000 children and young people with special education services. More than 23,000 of those have high needs.

For a lot of parents whose children have special needs, the system is working well. Our 2013 special education client survey found 76 per cent of parents and 67 per cent of educators were satisfied with overall service delivery.

But there's still room for improvement. If a child - let's say he's called Josh and he's 9 - has a range of special needs, he may be eligible for a teacher aide, for a speech language therapist, for an occupational therapist, for transport help, and for assistive technology.

We want to ensure it's as easy as possible for Josh's parents to get access to that support.

His parents already have a difficult job. In the morning they have to get him up, dress him, feed him, perhaps change his nappies. Some days Josh is hard to manage. And they still have the rest of their children to look after.

So after 25 years, we're relooking at how we support families like Josh's. More than half of the $530 million spent each year on special education services is spent through schools, including special schools. Children with the highest needs are helped directly through Ministry services. Schools use their resources for children with milder difficulties - both their operational grant, and their special needs funding.

In the last few months we've been meeting with early education providers, parents, whanau, young people and schools to find out how we can streamline our services. We've held more than 120 hui and forums around the country, meeting more than 2600 people.

Now we've gathered that feedback, we're working on a redesign of special education services. Our goal is to provide the right learning support for kids for as long as they need it. Families like Josh's should have a single point of contact to respond to their needs. And learning support should be driven by the child's needs, not the system's.

Daily life for families like Josh's will always have its share of difficulties. We can't change that. But we can continue to improve how we support kids like him to make progress with their learning, something we all want for all of our kids.

• Peter Hughes is Secretary for Education.