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| Tuesday, 02 November 2004 |
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Placing Special Education on the right track by K. Piyasena, former Director of Special Education It is most encouraging to note that both the new Minister and Secretary, Education are genuinely interested in enhancing the country's Special Education programme.
On several occasions Secretary, Education has said that she was committed to develop Special Education to meet the present day requirements in this sphere of education. She has already taken steps to strengthen the Special Education Unit and now the Unit could launch more and better programmes for the country's children with Special Educational needs. There were two important events in the recent history of Special Education in the country. The first was the taking over of the responsibility of Special Education by the Ministry of Education in 1969. The second was the establishment of the Special Education Unit at the Ministry in 1971. In the first 10 year period since the establishment of the Unit, it was manned by one officer and he was entrusted with the herculean task of building up a suitable Special Education programme for the country. The Unit single handedly took up the challenge and the first programme thus started was the Integrated Education Programme for the blind. Admission of 17 blind children located in the slum areas of Colombo into eight regular schools near their homes enabling them to learn in the same classroom sitting together with their normal peers, was a revolution in the schools' history of Sri Lanka. Six itinerant graduate teachers who were trained to teach the blind children visited the eight schools on itinerary basis. In 1972 Integrated Education programme was extended to deaf children and in 1976 to mentally retarded children and the following year to physically handicapped children. Two-year teacher training programmes were organized to train teachers for the blind, the deaf and the mentally retarded respectively. Community based surveys and identification programmes to locate and identify children with Special Educational needs in the respective districts were started and this process of activities continued with UNICEF assistance before new integrated units were introduced in schools every year. Survey programmes were carried out in schools too to identify children with special needs. Within the first 10 year period the Integrated Education programme of different categories of handicapped children expanded in all districts including Jaffna and Batticaloa. Integrated system is still functioning in regular schools as a very successful service delivery system in Special Education. Due to the efforts of the Special Education Unit another long standing dream of a Braille Press came true during this period. The present Braille Press is a donation from the SHIA organization of Sweden and is established in the Maharagama Teachers' College premises. Another new venture on Special Education was the starting of resource centres for the Special Education programme and for the first time three Resource Centres were established, one at the Bandaragama District Hospital and two others at Nissanka M.V. in Kurunegala and Central College, Anuradhapura. Another experiment in Special Education was the opening of two Special Education Units at two General Hospitals, Colombo and Ragama, for Orthopaedically handicapped children who had to stay in hospital for a long period. Special Education Unit also raised the standard of Special Schools or Homes for the handicapped to the level of educational institutions. Seventeen such Homes were converted to real schools and registered them as Assisted Schools under the Code of Regulations for Assisted Schools. Almost all teachers of these schools were trained under two year Special Education training course at Maharagama Teachers' College. During this period a considerable number of blind children and a few deaf children entered the university from regular schools and later passed out as graduates. Forty three of them were later given teaching appointments in regular schools. Some are now retired and a few are still continuing as competent teachers. The second phase of the Special Education programme commenced with remedial teaching for children with Special Educational needs (then known as slow learners) in schools. In the SIDA assistance primary school teachers were trained to teach them. Slow learner programme was successfully operated for several years. However today this programme is defunct. If the slow learner programme continued to-date all slow learners in schools could have been brought under the proposed Inclusive Education programme. Later in 1988, the Special Education Unit had completed plans to start the third phase of the Special Education Programme and that is to extend Special Education facilities to intellectually gifted children. Under general education, gifted children are not given adequate educational provisions commensurate with their learning capacity and level of intelligence. Implementation of this project for the gifted had to be postponed as the newly set-up National Institute of Education demanded the entire Special Education Unit of the Ministry to be shifted to the NIE. In the second decade of Special Education in Sri Lanka, the Special Education Programme began to gain international recognition. Several Special Education observation teams visited our programme, one team came form the USA headed by Dr. Jeane R. Kenmore and several other teams from Japan and Sweden. A team of UNESCO specialists headed by Dr. Jangira of India visited the programme in 1979. On the request of the UNESCO team a report on the Situation of Special Education in Sri Lanka' was prepared by the Special Education Unit and UNESCO published this report and copies were sent to all its member countries. UNESCO from time to time attempted to educate the member countries on Special Education through declarations, workshops and statements. The most recent is the Salamanca Statement in 1994. It clarifies that children with Special Educational needs include not only those with physical, mental or emotional impairments but also children who have special needs due to social, economic or environmental reasons. Intellectually gifted children too require Special Educational provisions as they are not given adequate educational attention under general education to develop their potential abilities to the optimum. In the Salamanca Statement, UNESCO calls upon all governments and urge them to invest greater effort for early identification of children with special needs in the community as well as in schools and bring them under Special Needs Education. In the Salamanca Statement, UNESCO stresses that those with Special Educational needs must have access to regular school which must accommodate them within a child centred pedagogy capable of meeting these needs, wherever possible, under inclusive education. Special schools, integrated units and mainstream programmes also have been recommended as different systems of delivering Special Education. It has been conservatively estimated that at least 30 per cent in Sri Lanka has Special Educational needs. In the UK, according to the Warnock Report (1976), this was 20 per cent. Many children with Special Educational needs are below average and a few are above average. Under general education in our schools more attention is focused on the average child. Special Educational needs of the below average and the above - average children are hardly taken into consideration in general education. Some children with severe disabilities and handicaps remain out of school right through their life and a large number of students with mild or growing disabilities and various other Special Educational needs come to school but drop off early even before they reach Grade V level. The drop-outs often become a burden on the society. On the other hand if the gifted are misunderstood and educationally mishandled there is the danger that they may become dropouts or delinquents all the more dangerous on account of their high level of individual ability and intelligence. They all need Special Educational provision to develop their potential abilities. The gifted, educationally well handled and their inborn talents developed, could become an asset to a country. That is why many European countries like USA, Russia and Israel and several Asian countries including Philippine and S. Korea, have already extended Special Education to gifted children. Major challenge in Special Education today is to bring all children with Special Educational needs under Special Education. At present only a very small percentage of them are receiving Special Education facilities. It is very necessary to identify such children both in the village and in schools and assess their Special Educational needs before they are given placement under inclusive or integrated education or sometimes in special schools depending on the child's need. |
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