Editorial: Children with disabilities deserve better

Opinion

Education Minister Anne Tolley is highly apologetic about her decision to cut funding for special education centres' occupational therapists. It is not easy, she says, to "take that support away from children who need every little bit of support they can get".

Nonetheless, the Government has decided anyway that the country can no longer afford an annual $2.5 million to fund therapy services for hundreds of children. No matter that this money was being put to excellent use or that the children involved will now probably be a bigger burden on the Government coffers in the long term.

Special education centres, such as the Endeavour Centre at Mt Roskill Primary School, receive funding for therapy through a combination of the Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Scheme (ORRS) and the $2.5 million fund. The latter, which pre-dated ORRS, funded schools selectively. In the case of the Endeavour Centre, it provided an essential part of the money required to employ one physiotherapist, two occupational therapists and two speech and language therapists.

ORRS, introduced in 2001, was designed to provide funding to individual children with high health needs. According to Ms Tolley, the additional therapist funding should have been stopped at that point. In this year's Budget, ORRS was allocated an additional $51 million over four years. Ms Tolley says the therapists' budget will become part of ORRS, a move that she believes will make special-needs funding more equitable.

But that promise of an all-encompassing benefit founders on the shortcomings of ORRS. Its critics cite narrow eligibility criteria that exclude deserving children. And former Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro provided them with further ammunition last year when she reported that to receive a grant, parents of children with disabilities had to "navigate a complex world of entitlements" - often without the necessary support, skills and personal resources to gain access to them. Ms Tolley has done well to gain extra funding. But a more formidable task will be fixing the mechanism and formula that govern the distribution of that money.

The beauty of the therapists' budget lay in its specific targeting. It also benefited from economies of scale. It has enabled facilities like the Endeavour Centre to achieve major successes through providing regular therapy for children such as Trey Hess, who was featured in yesterday's Herald. He was born with achondroplasia (dwarfism) and hemiplegia (paralyses) of his left side and has battled for support. The therapy services provided for him have played an integral role in his excellent progress. Now, his mother fears that a sharply reduced level of therapy arising from the loss of two therapists will stall his improvement.

If such is the case, children like Trey will impose far greater costs on education and health services in the long run. Some will undoubtedly have to be placed full-time in special healthcare facilities. Then, the decision that this $2.5 million can be better spent elsewhere will look like the worst kind of short-term thinking. As of now, the political decision to cut that relatively small sum looks particularly bad, given revelations about ministerial accommodation subsidies and MPs' overseas travel on the taxpayer.

Society should seek to provide every opportunity for those unfortunate enough to be born disabled. When a small sum is delivering immense improvement and clearly providing value, there is no reason to discontinue it. Certainly, anything that is done should not spell ill for those with special needs. That, regrettably, appears the case with this poorly judged decision.