Special education cash missing the target

By JOHN MINTO*

One fine Saturday morning four years ago a Quality Public Education Coalition delegation met Helen Clark, then the Leader of the Opposition, to tell her of our worries about the new National Government policy called Special Education 2000.

We were received sympathetically and Helen Clark expressed disbelief at the absurdity of bulk funding special education money to schools for children with moderate special needs through the Special Education Grant.

Under this funding mechanism - with an annual allocation of more than $30 million - a school that has two children with moderate special needs receives the same funding as a school that has 20.

Aside from the obvious iniquity, this also provides an incentive for schools to discourage enrolment of special needs children. A school that has no such children still receives this windfall, while schools that normally welcome these children worry they will have to spread the same money more thinly over the special needs children they have. It is a bizarre policy.

But after more than three years under Helen Clark's political leadership this absurdity continues.

The grant is just one aspect of a policy that has gone badly astray after promising so much when it was first announced.

Within a short time, thousands of parents found their children were left with less support than under the old policy, despite a big increase in Government funding.

After appeals to three successive ministers of education failed to get changes, the last resort was reached and sausage sizzles were organised to raise funds to take the Government to court.

Some of the 14 parents taking the case have children in special needs units, but most have children in mainstream classes who are not getting the support they need for their children to excel.

Last month, the Court of Appeal found that the Government acted unlawfully in disestablishing special needs units, although it did not find other parts of the policy unlawful - even if they are absurd.

Since units were disestablished, more than one-third have closed, with more closing each year as schools and school "clusters" face the problem of funding them on their own.

So it was with a profound sense of disappointment that parents received the reaction of Associate Education Minister Lianne Dalziel to the court decision. Perhaps hoping for an apology to parents was too much, but more was expected than the minister's smugly dismissive comments.

Hopefully, when the High Court decides on remedies the result will be greater choice for parents in establishing units around the country where there is significant demand.

But the bigger problem remains. There is not the slightest indication that the serious flaws in the policy's funding mechanisms will be addressed even now.

At the heart of this problem is that successive ministers have preferred to leave what they see as a difficult policy area to their officials to sort out. This hands-off lack of leadership has meant erratic, haphazard policy development, with the ideological bent of officials taking centre stage.

So just why is it that despite more money the service for so many children has declined?

Part of the answer lies in the allocation of funding under the Special Education Grant, where millions of dollars goes to schools where there is not a special needs child in sight. Further millions are distributed in a kind of bulk-funded spray across schools and school clusters from various pools of money.

Still further millions have gone into developing RTLB (Resource Teachers of Learning and Behaviour) positions, where itinerant teachers advise classroom teachers on ways of teaching children with special needs and dealing with behaviour problems.

While this is a valuable role, it is one step removed from direct support in the classroom and too often fails to meet student, parent or teacher needs.

One of the tragic ironies in all this is that a backlash is developing among teachers and parents against the concept of mainstreaming special-needs children because for so many now the reality is "maindumping".

This is education code for children with special-education needs being put in mainstream classes without proper support to the detriment of everyone.

What are the solutions? Without changing the basic structure of special-needs policy a lot can be done without spending vast sums of extra money. Reorienting much of the bulk-funded money to more focused needs-based funding would be a great start.

This could also retain the flexibility that schools need to provide the best for special-needs children. Besides targeting the grant to schools on the number of special-needs children enrolled and re-establishing special-needs units as a Government responsibility, two additional changes would make a huge positive difference.

First, increasing the number of children receiving ORRS (Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Scheme) funding to its originally proposed 2 per cent of the school-age population.

At present just 1 per cent of children receive this funding, which is for children with high and very high special needs.

Secondly, strengthening local parent advocacy and support in dealing with schools.

Once special-needs money is allocated in a more targeted fashion so that it reaches children with special-education needs, we will be able to see what extra financial resources, if any, are needed.

* John Minto is part of the Quality Public Education Coalition