Media and politicians shouldn’t play football with my son’s special needs

EDUCATION Minister Ruairi Quinn should have thought before his proposal for an effective 10% cut in educational provision for children for special needs put the heart cross-ways in parents all over the country.

But he is absolutely right when he says that the model of provision for special needs children in this country is “deeply flawed”.

It’s a mish-mash of political correctness and political expediency.

I got my autistic son a place in a special school class of six, with one teacher and at least one SNA, by cycling around posting hand-written letters in school doors. I took a phone call from one school while I was shopping and my son has been in that school ever since.

Where is the method in that? Where is the proper assessment of who needs what resources?

A schools psychologist had recommended special education for him but this was vehemently opposed by the HSE psychologist. Why the reluctance to put an autistic child in a special school? I agree that a special unit in a mainstream school would be preferable, and there will be over 600 such special classes all over the country from September.

However, what matters most to my son is that the numbers in the class are tiny and that he has an individual education plan. He will never be “mainstreamed”. He will never live completely independently — as is the case of many, many children with special needs.

What I have found very hard this week is hearing my child and others like him being played like footballs by deeply ignorant politicians and journalists. Their focus is never on the child as he is, but on how he could become just like us.

I don’t know how many enthusiastic avowals of ABA education I have seen in the media on the basis that it cures the kids and shuttles them on to mainstream. But many don’t go to mainstream. Some will never speak. We never face the fact that some children with special needs will be adults with special needs. That is why there are disabled men and women in respite centres watching televisions in darkened rooms.

When my child was diagnosed with autism I faced a barrage of advice to wangle him a special needs assistant and send him to mainstream. As with most autistic kids, sights and sounds and smells are magnified for him. A classroom of 30 kids is a terrifying proposal. He used to come out of class like a wild animal. The provision of a special needs assistant would have made little difference to him. If that assistant had ignored the class and taught him one-to-one she would have been doing something for which she was neither trained nor paid.

Special needs assistants, first employed in 1979, can proceed without a Leaving Certificate and can do Fetac Level 5 and 6 in special needs assisting, in one college at least, in four months, They are not trained as educators. They are trained as carers.

But they are used as educators in schools all over Ireland as a report for 2009/10 found. Some rise brilliantly to the challenge. I know an SNA who knows more about autism than all the universities put together.

But that’s just a happy chance. And it’s not so happy for her. Because she’s being paid buttons when she should be paid bars of gold. The point remains that if SNAs are providing education for special needs children, then the children with the greatest need are being educated by the least trained personnel.

The same people who were shouting for university degrees for every creche worker a few weeks ago are now shouting for disabled children to be taught by staff without a degree. There was a 922% increase in the numbers of SNAs between 2001 and 2009. Much of this growth was very positive, but some SNAs were carelessly deployed. The report for 2009/10 found that 995 SNAs were still working in schools, though the student for whom they were hired had left.

That shows how stretched schools are with the second-highest class size in the OECD, and how helpful SNAs are to the classroom in general. In the UK the post of teaching assistant exists for schools, as well as the degree level Higher Level Teaching Assistant.

Right now, in Ireland, SNAs are provided to students who need practical help to access the curriculum — perhaps physical help, in the case of a physically disabled child, or encouragement to stay on task.

They are also provided when a student is considered “a danger to himself or others” and this is the heading under which nearly half of SNAs in primary schools were hired at the time of the 2009/2010 report. This caused one of the professionals consulted to comment that “if this were the case, observers could consider that Ireland was not a particularly safe place to visit.

But it’s just a white lie in many cases. I was encouraged by one professional to say my son might run away to qualify for a SNA. This is a policy of inclusion reduced to farce which leaves society in blissful ignorance that most children with special needs will never be “cured” and that many can’t be successfully “mainstreamed.”

Inclusion shouldn’t be an attempt to pretend that difference doesn’t exist. It should be an honestly funded attempt to include a person in society exactly as they are. We aren’t even starting. The stories of society’s contempt and ignorance that I hear from parents of disabled children would tear out your heart.

This week a mother told me she let her autistic daughter come shopping with a baby’s bottle in her hand because, though she is a good age, she can’t hold a cup.

“You’re a disgraceful parent”, commented one shopper. “You just want to keep her quiet.”

“Now I’m going to shock you even more,” responded the mother, and lifted the little girl’s skirt to reveal her nappy.

She was lifting the veil on the realities of some kids with special needs which our society does not want to see.

We are engaged, as a society, in a massive act of self-deception when it comes to children with special needs. Every cent of funding these kids get should be retained, but the posts which should be defended should not just be the ones which are there — they should be the ones which serve the kids best at this particular moment.

Mainstreaming for the kids who can benefit from it, special education for those who need it. SNAs where appropriate. A golden escalator to a teaching qualification for SNAs who want it. As many resource teachers as can possibly be funded.

We need to make every cent work for our special needs kids and we will never do that if we’re not prepared to lift the skirt to show the nappy and shock ourselves and others with our honesty.