ABUT Seeking Special Needs Education Policy

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Education

Wednesday, 21 September 2011 02:30

By Colin Sampson

The Antigua & Barbuda Union of Teachers (ABUT) is spearheading the process of devising a national policy for the education of children with special needs, according to Ashworth Azille, general secretary of the teachers union.

Speaking on Tuesday on the Colin Sampson Show, Azille said activities will begin in October.

Initial assistance is being secured from Aubrey Webson, a specialist in the education of the visually challenged.

The ABUT initiative is designed to support the Ministry of Education, which has to date been unable to focus holistically on the rapidly emerging issue of special needs education. Azille was pleased to note that three teachers recently graduated from university with this specialty.

The ABUT general secretary welcomed this valuable enhancement of the nation’s ability to provide challenged children with the extra attention and special teaching methods they require.

He recognized the valuable role played by institutions like the Industrial School for the Blind, the Adele School for Special Children, and the Dyslexia Institute. However, he emphasized the need for an overall special needs education policy covering all the various forms of learning disability that afflict young persons in the educational system.

Speaking on the same programme, Salma Crump, the parent of a child in need of special education services, fully supported the ABUT position and initiative.

A founding member of Ability - an association of parents of special needs children, Crump noted that the spectrum of recognised special needs in education has grown to include such once poorly understood conditions as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD).

Both Crump and Azille rejected any attempt to lump all children with special education needs into one central institute. They jointly pointed out that the spectrum of educational needs is far too wide. Further, when consideration is given to the infinitely varying levels of development, of age, rates of learning, and of required teaching techniques, that solution becomes entirely inappropriate.

The ultimate solution, which has already been adopted in principle by educators in both the public and private sectors, is to “mainstream” special needs children into the general school population as much as possible. Crump noted that to date, private sector educational institutions have been more successful than government schools in providing support to special needs children. These special services, however, come at considerable economic cost to parents.

Azille reported that the education ministry has plans to establish a center for special needs education. He also expressed the hope that the additional human resources represented by the three recent graduate specialists will be deployed to enhance the overall ability of the school system to cater to the needs of special children.


The ideal solution may be to empower teachers at all levels of the system to recognize children in need of special education and deal with any situation that might arise, but Azille sees this as possibly unrealistic. A more practical approach, perhaps, is to establish effective screening procedures in the earliest years of education - preschool, early childhood, and primary. Such a procedure would serve to identify special needs children early enough to avoid the later difficulties inherent in dealing with children who may have already suffered from a lack of attention to their challenges.

In the meantime, Salma Crump, Ability, and scores – perhaps hundreds – of parents struggling with the challenge of raising children who need special teaching services, will continue to pressure the education authorities to address this painful gap in our educational structure.

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