Special Needs funding in the media

I really appreciated this well written comment on special needs education funding from Paul Drummond, president of the NZ Principals' Federation.  Paul has given approval for to share his article.

This week the media highlighted the plight of special needs children and their right to attend their local school. For the record I fully support the right of all children to attend their local school and believe it is our job to provide a quality education for every child that is best suited to their needs and capabilities. Inclusion and diversity are values I believe we should all support. That said I also recognise that schools need a level of resource that matches children’s requirements, parental expectations and our own high standards. This is where the dilemma arises. Principals want to accept high needs students, but do not receive the necessary resources to provide the educational experience and the safe environment that these children richly deserve.

ORRS funding goes some way to providing critical support for children with highest need, but it will not have escaped your notice that the threshold for receiving ORRS funding has seemingly lifted. The verification system still produces inconsistences about who is funded from one year to the next and the moderated support funding often doesn’t cover what is required for high needs children to access the full curriculum. Decreasing support assumes that because the child is a year older they no longer need it! The challenge for us is to find the same level of funding or support from somewhere else. That can be our S.E.G. or creative use of staffing, parents, peers or arrangements with other schools. Unfortunately that ‘somewhere else’ doesn’t exist for all of us and inevitably compromises the rights of other students to access the curriculum. 

For some, the dilemma has been answered by suggesting that parents enroll their child at an alternative school which is better resourced or has specialist teachers in the particular area of disability. For others the answer is to accept the child and acknowledge that there will be limitations to the educational experiences from which the child could derive benefit. This might include, for example, excluding the child from school activity when there is no teacher aid support for toileting, a field trip or camp. As principals we must manage this complexity with professionalism and integrity.

Principals and teachers are constantly calling on their own resourcefulness and creativity to accommodate their special needs children who bring a diversity and richness to our school communities. These children add value to our schools. They help all of our children to develop a sense of empathy, of tolerance and accepting difference as normal. These are qualities which will ultimately create a more compassionate and civilised New Zealand – a nation to be proud of. 

When policy was introduced to deinstitutionalise and move to the mainstream, there was an expectation that all the resources would be transferred to the mainstreaming effort. It is time now to remind policy makers that our special children deserve their rightful share and if attending your local school is a right then it has to be protected and honoured with full resourcing.

It is timely to examine systems that achieve better than we do in the education of special needs children. One such system is Finland. Click here to read a review of a recent publication on the Finnish system and what can be learned.