Special education is one of those euphemisms that serve only to obscure something important. The term covers all difficult or disabled schoolchildren, all of whom could do with a category of education specialising in their particular needs. But the age of mainstreaming has not yet passed. The term special education even covers gifted children since they, too, have special needs.
Terminology such as this would not matter quite so much if it merely made an important subject so dull that only those personally interested paid any attention to it. But when the system treats children as though they really were all the same, it can do real harm.
When schools get a special education grant to cater for the gifted, the disturbed, the hyperactive and the handicapped, something has to give. Usually it is the parents of a special needs child.
There have been persistent reports in recent years of schools refusing to enrol such children, referring them instead to a school nearby that has set up a special needs unit. That school has conscientiously set about providing for the special needs in its locality and does not always welcome those from further afield.
In other cases, children may be given much less than a normal school day because the school cannot afford to provide support staff, occupational therapy and other assistance for more than a few hours.
An IHC advocate has given us a glimpse of the complaints she has been receiving for years from distraught parents. They are myriad but they all stem from the attempt to provide dedicated special schooling within a system that will not consider an exception to the comprehensive ideal. All state schools are supposed to cater for all comers. One size can fit all.
When the Government commissioned a report on special education last year, its conclusions did not go to the heart of the problem. It decided to tamper with the organisational apparatus. Researcher Cathy Wylie urged the abolition of a Crown entity, the Specialist Education Service, and in its place, 30 or 40 district centres to be administered by the Ministry of Education. Nobody seems able to explain very clearly what difference that would make. But the Government last week decided to do it.
To a number of parents who went to court to contest the Wylie report, the Specialist Education Service was a dedicated quasi independent body, albeit one that had to take a fairly cautious, contractual approach to financing services in schools. They are not confident that their needs will figure highly within the ministry.
To Dr Wylie and the Government, though, the Specialist Education Service was one of those bodies set up in 1989 to let schools make their own decisions and bid for public funds. The Government is resolutely bringing all decisions and financing back under the direction of ministries.
It is unlikely that ministry control will do better for disturbed or disabled children. It may ensure that all schools provide a standard service, but so long as they are obliged to cater for allcomers they will serve nobody very well.
A better solution is staring education in the face. The most handicapped children already carry an ample grant from the state to any school that can serve them. The problem is not with them, but with the less disabled. If all special needs pupils were financed with a voucher in that way, dedicated schools would develop to meet their needs well. Until then, nothing will really change.
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