Tuesday, August 18, 2009

McCarthy Report Recommennds Attack on Rights of Children with Special Needs

Children with special education needs have been the first to feel the cuts in resources in education even before the publication of the McCarthy Report.Parents and educators understand the immeadiate impact these cuts will mean for the hundreds if not thousands of individual children affected, how the self esteem, learning, social integration, emotional development and behaviour of each of these individual lives can be negatively affected.

The department of education talks about the 'transformation' of special education needs rovision in the recent years and numbers and figures are quoted as evidence of this transformation. There is no doubt that there has been increased funding in relation to special education needs and welcome progress has been made however, given the appalingly low base that special needs services were starting from it is a job that is still only half done. If we look to our neighbours in the UK or America we see that we are 30-40 years behind in terms of legislation and education provision.While parents in these juristicions will point out that none of these systems are perfect, it does highlight just how far behind we are in Ireland not only in terms of actual resoucres but in our philosophy, understanding and governmental response to the needs of children with special education needs. It is shocking to think that we have not enacted rights based legislation for children with disabilities before now and even more
shocking that the EPSEN Act has been stalled and never fully implemented. Service provision for children with special needs in Ireland seems to still be based in an archaic charity based ethos of giving rather than a 21st century rights based model .

It is difficult to understand the governmental mindset which promotes cuts in already underfunded services for vunerable children.Mr McCarthy advocates that these specific cuts in special education are made, on a recent Newstalk interview he actively promoted these cuts in special education provision for the 'handicapped' children as he called them.A jarring phraseology stuck in the 1970's and refelective perhaps of his regressive mindset on this issue. Unfortunately, the only 'handicap' these kids have is the archaic and uninformed beauracracies who it seems are incapable of making the jump to rights based service provision.MrMcCarthy went on to glibly describe the increase in special needs assistants in recent years as government decisions which 'overegged the pudding' for these children. The flippancy with which MrMcCarty treated this serious issue, his complete lack of understanding of special education provision and his apparent ease in stepping outside his boundries of competency i.e. economics and giving the nation advice as to how special education needs provision should be organised were red flags
regarding his competency to make recommendations in relation to these children.

Many false arguments are made by the department of education in support of these cuts. One argument frequently made by the department of education in support of the recent special education cuts is that mainstreaming children with special needs is in line with international best practice. While international best practice supports the mainstreaming of children with special needs when it is in their best interests to do so, most international standards would also require that children with special needs would have their individual needs assessed and met . Something which is currently not a legal entitlement of children in Ireland.

Another argument in favour of increasing class size is that we all attended school in the good ole days when class sizers were larger and didn't we do fine. The hidden cost of those 'good ole days' were the many children with special needs whose needs were not met and who suffered life long consequences as a result.

To take an economic view, the longterm economic cost to the state will also increase when we do not ameriorate the special needs of these children. The gap between them and their peers widens and greater intervention is required in the long term to address that gap. Even if one uses only an economic perspective these proposed cuts are penny wise and pound foolish.

Every parent knows that the greatest resource available to their child in school is the ommittment, vision and expertise of their childs educators, but a finite amount of resources is not an elasticband which can be stretched without snapping.Parents and educators have long experience in making the most of sparse resources but it would take Houdini to recreate resources where they have been removed.

Children with assessed special needs make valued and positive contributions to their family, school and community every single day, however they need the protection of the constitution now more than ever if they are to access an 'appropriate education' which our constitution....their constitution, sets out to protect. The wisdom of our nations founding fathers will hopefully be an inspiration to the politicians of today.

Children with assessed special education needs are not looking for rugby pitches, swimming pools , gyms or computer rooms or any of the 'pudding' available to so many children in the Irish education system.The assessed requirements of children with special education needs are not the jam or pudding, they are the bread and butter of their educational experience.

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