There is an intersection between these two areas of responsibility. The harrowing findings of the Royal Commission included accounts of abuse in residential schools for young people with intellectual, sensory and physical disabilities. Some of the abuse amounted to torture, as Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has acknowledged.
Following the Royal Commission report, there have been calls to close New Zealand’s three residential schools.
It is easy to understand those calls. Children with disabilities are amongst the most vulnerable members of society. Most residential school staff are strongly motivated to help children with high needs thrive. However, as the Royal Commission report shows in graphic detail, a few take advantage of the cloistered environments of state institutions to indulge in sadism.
Even so, Minister Stanford is not rushing to close the residential schools. Instead, she has asked the Education Review Office to conduct annual reviews and the Ministry of Education to increase its oversight of them. She has also announced a programme to assess the investment required to better support students with special educational needs. There are two obvious places for such investment.
One is in initial teacher education programmes. The three residential specialist schools are the tip of an iceberg. A further 27 non-residential schools educate around 4,000 students with high needs and there are many more such students in mainstream schools. Teachers must be prepared better to teach young people with neurodiverse conditions. They also need better training in basic classroom management. Neither of these things currently receive much focus in teacher education programmes.
The other is to provide schools with much better access to specialist support. Schools frequently wait months even to get a child assessed for a learning disability. When a diagnosis has been made, the resources schools receive to support neurodiverse students are often woefully inadequate.
Even a well-run institution is not a great place to live, much less to grow up in. But to successfully integrate the young people who live and learn in residential schools, mainstream schools must be equipped to meet their needs.
Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. This article was published HERE
Following the Royal Commission report, there have been calls to close New Zealand’s three residential schools.
It is easy to understand those calls. Children with disabilities are amongst the most vulnerable members of society. Most residential school staff are strongly motivated to help children with high needs thrive. However, as the Royal Commission report shows in graphic detail, a few take advantage of the cloistered environments of state institutions to indulge in sadism.
Even so, Minister Stanford is not rushing to close the residential schools. Instead, she has asked the Education Review Office to conduct annual reviews and the Ministry of Education to increase its oversight of them. She has also announced a programme to assess the investment required to better support students with special educational needs. There are two obvious places for such investment.
One is in initial teacher education programmes. The three residential specialist schools are the tip of an iceberg. A further 27 non-residential schools educate around 4,000 students with high needs and there are many more such students in mainstream schools. Teachers must be prepared better to teach young people with neurodiverse conditions. They also need better training in basic classroom management. Neither of these things currently receive much focus in teacher education programmes.
The other is to provide schools with much better access to specialist support. Schools frequently wait months even to get a child assessed for a learning disability. When a diagnosis has been made, the resources schools receive to support neurodiverse students are often woefully inadequate.
Even a well-run institution is not a great place to live, much less to grow up in. But to successfully integrate the young people who live and learn in residential schools, mainstream schools must be equipped to meet their needs.
Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. This article was published HERE
1 comment:
My view on this is mostly my own experiences. I also was a quite severely brain damaged child from a difficult birth.
The changes we need in education will benefit everyone. Our shameful long tail of under achievement includes many students who would greatly benefit with the best cognitive science, including direct instruction can provide.
Possibly having a bar of lower than an IQ of about 80,everyone can be taught to read and achieve in basic traditional arithmetic. I remember the four year old Down syndrome girl taught to read who read at the top of her voice because she was so proud she could read at all. My mother, Doris, had many special needs students as a private tutor teaching phonics. She taught the parents how to teach their own children and whereas she had 100 students per week with only half hour lessons after school, and with whom she succeeded the school's special needs teachers were frequently failing with only fifteen students per week. Reluctantly, the special needs teachers of the local area came to her school room , because of public pressure. Their outrageous rudeness to my mother was palpable. Almost everything Doris did was counter to what they had been taught in their courses, I suspect.
Doris had been thoroughly inducted into Universal Literacy in the 1930s and 40s , and claimed she never saw a dyslexic reader in her five years of teaching at otago low decile public schools. She only observed slow readers and did have a dyslexic cousin.
To me patience and determination with correct and effective methods, time tested supported by recent science is the answer. Also beginning academic learning in preschools. But who is listening ?
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