Something isn’t adding up for autistic children in our schools
With regard to the education of children on the autistic spectrum, the situation is even more serious than your reports suggest. For example, the official figure of more than 300 autistic children on waiting lists for specialist schools is only the tip of the iceberg.
The vast majority of children affected by autism are not on any such list because there are no appropriate schools or special units for them to apply to in their area.
They attend mainstream schools with a paltry maximum of five hours resource teaching per week — if they are very lucky. Most classroom and resource teachers have little or no training on methods of teaching children with autism.
The burden on teachers and pupils alike is tremendous. Teachers do their best to integrate the children into the mainstream teaching which must be their priority. This is what Education Minister Mary Hanafin must mean by preferring an eclectic approach and spending an estimated €5m in the courts on one case alone to insist on it. I am the parent of a 10-year-old autistic child who still cannot read and write. This is not the fault of any classroom teacher who has worked with him, but of the needlessly inappropriate system which we are forced to accept for him. Our son is two years away from second-level, which is a looming nightmare because, deplorable though things are in primary schools, the situation at secondary level is worse.
To compound this, the Government has withdrawn funding for parents to educate their children at home — a much undervalued option for many autistic children and indeed for the education system itself.
Parents with seriously autistic children have been targeted deliberately by the State and pressured to return seriously disabled children to the (for them) highly inappropriate and damaging school setting. No new grants are being awarded for home schooling.
And it gets worse. At a recent public meeting in Dunmanway a representative of the National Council for Special Education said the reason it had adopted a policy of regularly swapping special needs assistants around was to ensure children didn’t become too attached to them. The ignorance of this strategy is distressing.
Those who know anything about autistic children understand that the central problem with this disability is a profound difficulty in relating to and communicating with other people and, conversely, in our own ability to understand them.
It can take months or even years for a child to form a constructive attachment and for the adult to be able fully to interpret what the child may be trying to communicate. Children can be seriously distressed and conflicted by even minor changes in routine. To break up a well-established and happy relationship for such a reason is tantamount to psychological and emotional abuse for these children — a needlessly distressing experience and hugely counterproductive, educationally.
How can the very authority designated to oversee the education of our children promote such an ill-informed strategy? Bear in mind that this is just one example from many equally inappropriate strategies that deserve exposure.
Contrary to what the minister says, this is all about funding. We are accustomed to hear her talking in telephone numbers about all her department is doing — squillions for this, trillions for that, battalions of new teachers for every school, if we are to believe it all.
Well, something is not adding up because the situation on the ground is getting worse.
Miriam Cotton
National Co-ordinator
Disability Election
Pledge Alliance
Woodlands
Clonakilty
Co Cork
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