We all have until the 19th March to have a say in the Special Education Review. This is a very important issue for schools and unfortunately will probably not feature highly on the ‘to do’ list for many school leaders.
I have been in innumerable forums where educationalists have been complaining loudly about the lack of service available from GSE, the inequities of delivery from early intervention (preschool) to school age, how hard it is to actually get a kid to see a speech therapist …. on and on it goes. Now is our one-and-only opportunity to actually have some input into future directions. Particularly when you are married to an SLT people tell you their woes about GSE …. now lets do something positive.
The review criteria and report are available HERE and you can simply email responses/submissions to se.review@minedu.govt.nz.
PLEASE take even 5 or 10 minutes to send off an email saying what you believe is good about the current system and what could be done better.
My submission – as an email – is below (but I have removed specific examples):
1. The most significant challenge for schools is the level of resourcing for children, individually and collectively. Currently we seem to be in a ’sub-optimal’ resourcing model. Some children receive the support they need to ’survive’ in school rather than to appropriately address their needs. My personal experience as a principal is to have to advocate very strongly at times for support that is an entitlement. We have children with significant needs in our school and at times we believe, as the education professionals who spend the most time with them, that they are not receiving the level of support simply to keep them safe – let alone make the most of their time in the education system for educational purposes.
2. TA funding has remained the same for some time while, at the same time, the cost of TA’s has gone up because of peoples annual increments and cost of living increases. This has the effect of reducing the hours children receive each year if the school is not to top up the difference and thereby attribute the ‘cost’ to the other children in the school. This is NOT the message GSE staff give parents when they quote how many hours children have been allocated when calculating the dollar amounts we actually receive.
3. It is extremely frustrating to have GSE staff refuse to confirm with us what recommendations will be made to TA time allocation meetings despite the whole team around a child agreeing what descriptors best fit a child on the moderation form at the IEP meeting. Given the allocation we receive at times the GSE personnel would seem to go back with lower recommendations than the team agree is most appropriate.
4. There needs to be transparent review and complaints process for when there are issues with schools, parents, families, etc.
5. Special schools have a child/learning focus, GSE doesn’t (as an institution). Individual therapists in the organisation are often wonderful but the overriding focus of the organisation is one of balancing budgets and meeting targets not serving the needs of children. This is a fundamental thing that needs to change! GSE needs to return to a child focus and get away from simply telling schools about their issues with balancing budgets. Special schools should remain as a choice for families – and isn’t the MoE precluded from employing specialist teachers and that is why Resource Teachers (Literacy, Maori, LB, Deaf, etc) are administered by management committees based in schools not GSE/MoE? Won’t it require a law change for this to change?
6. Why is there no moderate needs SLT service? There is any amount of research that shows the significance of (oral and other) language issues for many children not achieving well in literacy and numeracy.
7. Psychs have a crazily low full-time workload – I was told by a GSE manager 5 full time cases is considered a full caseload when I was on an RTLB management committee. This is an insanely low workload, particularly when you look at Physios, OT’s, SLT’s, etc in the same office; or RTLB, RTLit, etc.
8. Population based funding is a significant disadvantage to areas like Otago where there can be very big distances between schools and nowhere near the economies of scale there are in big cities. Travel soaks up a significant amount of the resource allocated to our region.
9. GSE as an organisation needs to earn back the trust and respect of the school sector. At the moment schools think twice about referring children because of the work involved and the low likelihood of an application being successful. This impacts even more on schools with teaching principals and/or no SENCO. I believe this view is held at least in part because of the issues outlined above.
10 The transition to school from the EI team is wasteful of resources and time. Children are often reassessed rather than simply handed-over and because of the different criteria can sometimes no longer receive a service when their needs still warrant it if they are to fully access the curriculum.
11 There is an overemphasis on behaviour with GSE. Often therapies would be more useful for a child than psych input. Most teachers in my experience have pretty good management of children. Resolving an underlying motor, language, coordination or sequencing issue through SLT/OT/PT may be of more benefit to a child than simply managing the behaviour that is a symptom of these things. It is my understanding that most GSE funding is for ‘delivery of behaviour services’ and would argue this needs to change. We are not able to access services for a child if there are no personnel to deliver them.Many thanks
Greg Carroll
Principal
I do wonder about the #6 above in relation to National Standards. When we see the numbers of children we do with language issues of all kinds on entry to school it is little wonder that quite a proportion of them go on to have literacy and numeracy issues at a later date.
We have children in schools who can splutter out strings of phonemes related to letters because of phonics programmes but they can’t syllabify or rhyme for example. This causes a big issue when they try to put it all back together again in chunks when reading or in spelling.Phonological awareness issues underly a big number of children struggling with literacy according to research I have read. We simply assume they can do this stuff on school entry, often they can’t.
Try doing maths if you have a sequencing issue – again research shows you have to be able to sequence to at least 4-5 parts to function in a school and manage classroom instruction. This is why sequencing charts work so well for children struggling to be ‘organised’ in the classroom. Interestingly I have found they often have a positive impact on those working around them as well as they ‘look over the shoulder’.
Again research shows 60-80% of prison inmates have some sort of underlying language disorder. Having more of the people specifically trained to work with children with moderate needs (there is no moderate SLT service, the SLT equivalent of what RTLB provide in behaviour) would have to make a difference. Jane’s research shows that teachers often don’t have the requisite in-depth knowledge to deal with these sorts of issues and perhaps even identify them in their children. Spend some of the $26m on this?
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