Special needs education to get €43m in next year's budget

EDUCATION minister Pilar Alegría has announced a €43 million cash injection for special needs pupils nationwide, reinforcing school facilities to ensure children with 'more complex requirements' can get the best out of their learning.

It is not clear exactly how this chunk of the 2022 budget will be spent, as the ministry has to work out a strategy, but the spectrum of special needs is extremely broad and specialist.

They range from children with intellectual disabilities, developmental disabilities, severe autism including the non-verbal variety, through to high-functioning autism or Asperger's, attention deficit disorder (ADD), and also 'academic' disorders such as dyslexia and dyscalculia, which can be overcome with specific measures such as having a scribe for exams or submitting oral instead of written assignments.

'Special needs' also covers children who are high-IQ or intellectually-gifted, who need constant stimulation and interesting, challenging tasks to realise their full potential.

It can, additionally, involve pupils with physical needs, such as bodily disabilities, who might require physiotherapists or personal care.

Foreign children who need remedial help to learn Spanish, or deaf children who need sign-language interpreters, would be included in the definition.

Pilar Alegría says a full debate will be opened up, involving regional governments and social organisations, once the State budget has been approved.

Until then, she cannot say precisely which areas will be given the most funding.

Special schools will be included, although research carried out by Sra Alegría's predecessor, Isabel Celaá, shows that of the 707,405 pupils known to have special educational needs during the 2018-2019 academic year, a total of 82.4% of them were in 'mainstream' schools.

For this reason, Sra Alegría says it is likely the bulk of the cash will go to these establishments, focusing on early-years detection and attention, 'cognitive accessibility projects', researching and specialising in 'sensory disabilities, behavioural issues and mental health'.

Ploughing resources into 'mainstream' schools to allow them to adapt education to all pupils means parents have a choice as to whether their children should go to a special school or not.

“In Madrid and other big cities, there are plenty of special schools, but in rural areas, there aren't any. Should a parent with disabled child be forced to travel huge distances to get them to school?” asks Pilar Alegría.

“If the parent decides to place their child in an 'ordinary' school, the current educational law states that human and material resources must be available to cater for this child.”

One of the major controversies that arose with Isabel Celaá's education reform was her view that special schools meant 'discrimination' against pupils with particular learning needs, and which parents of children with learning disabilities were up in arms about, fearing the minister intended to shut them down.

Families said that where their kids were severely disabled, they would never be able to integrate fully in a mainstream school and would not have their needs met.

The ministry has tried to reassure these parents, insisting there is no plan to axe special schools, but that instead, it intended to work on ensuring the main schooling network had the facilities and personnel in place to guarantee that children could be given the right attention in these if their parents preferred them to be taught via the 'ordinary centre' route.

Doing so would also free up places in special schools for children who most needed them, without leaving less-severely affected pupils 'out of the loop' or falling behind if they were taught in a 'standard' classroom instead.

This might be the case with children who, for example, are fully academically capable, but are deaf or blind – with the right aids to make school accessible, they can operate every bit as well as any hearing or sighted pupil, but without them, they cannot.