Students with special needs to enter mainstream schooling

By Sheria Brathwaite

Students with special needs will be taught in the regular school system as part of education reform in this country, Minister of Education Kay McConney has announced.

Addressing the Education Month church service at the Collymore Rock Church of the Nazarene on Monday, she said mainstreaming special needs students would expose them to a more equitable style of education, noting that various accommodations would be made to ensure they realise their true potential.

She said officials were in the process of carrying out an audit to determine how many special needs students are in Barbados and identify their specific needs.

McConney said it would also determine “what we are doing now to meet those needs and find out what is the gap so that now we can start planning what the investment will take to move us to the next step to close that gap and then be able to cater for others”.

“So this is an exciting opportunity and we have to do it in steps but we are committed,” she said.

“How many we can, we will seek to integrate and provide either the special units, the special teaching and customised spaces. For example, you have persons who are on the spectrum of autism, some can be integrated into schools because of their particular condition and some simply cannot because they cannot function within a school environment.

“That is where we move through partnership because the Government cannot build all of the specialised spaces. You already have some existing spaces out there and what we need to do is work with who else is out there caring and providing quality education for those persons with special needs and see how Government could support them in doing better. So, it isn’t Government travelling on its own but it is Government in partnership with the non-profit sector and other entities that are out there serving this community,” the minister added.

The integration process, she said, will be done gradually.

McConney was adamant that space must be made for every child in every classroom.

“It means we are including children of mixed abilities in the same learning spaces and providing the right support for those children to be able to thrive and for the teachers to be able to address the situation,” McConney said.

“A bright future for every child means making every child feel valued in schools where all types of intelligence and all different styles of learning are just not valued but they are validated in the way in which we engage with our children through the learning process. A bright future for every child means that we are offering quality instruction to every child, where our teachers are trained to meet the varied needs of children, including accommodations for children with special needs . . .. Any education system must look out for all children, not just some.”

The minister added that the education system must be framed in such a way that regardless of the age, social and economic status, learning strengths and deficits, and interests of a child, every one of them must have a “fair and a fighting chance for a bright future in this country”.

“It must be a system that is child-centred and focuses on catering to each child’s individual needs as long as those needs are actually identified. The days of guessing at what could be wrong, why this child is not learning the way the child should, we need to put those days behind us and as a ministry, we need to be putting the resources in place to ensure that proper diagnoses are done so that the right intervention could be made at the right time,” McConney said.

“We have to move to that place, and for those that are concerned, the truth is we separate children at 11 years old but . . . they go to the Barbados Community College, they go the University of the West Indies and when they go overseas they are sitting down next to children who were in mixed abilities schools for much of their life.

“So the thing is putting the right supports in place, making sure that teachers are prepared and making sure that we have done the right diagnosis with children to understand what are the best interventions and I think we can do this. It doesn’t mean we are going to get it right every time the first time, but we are going to give it our best shot and continue to increase the kinds of resources and the evidence-based type diagnosis testing that will help us to be able to take us there,” she said.

sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb