Pregnant mums who drink ‘fuelling youth crime’, warns Queensland Education Minister Di Farmer

Children of mothers who drank during pregnancy are driving the increase in learning difficulties in schools as well as youth crime, an education minister has warned.

Queensland Minister for Education and Youth Justice Di Farmer says many children struggling at school are dealing with family dysfunction or disability. Picture: Glenn Campbell / NCA NewsWire

Children of mothers who drank during pregnancy are driving the increase in learning difficulties in schools as well as youth crime, Queensland’s new Minister for Education and Youth Justice has warned.

Di Farmer said a good education “starts with conception’’.

Too many children were dropping out of school because of dysfunctional home lives and undiagnosed disabilities, she said.

“Life is tough for them. We’ve got to get those first years of a child’s life right, and that is from conception.

“It’s got to be about supporting mums not to drink during pregnancy.’’

Ms Farmer, a qualified speech pathologist, was previously a minister for child safety and domestic violence, and is the only state education minister whose portfolio includes youth justice.

Across Australia, one in four school students has been diagnosed with a disability – up from 18 per cent in 2015 - and nearly a million children require extra support in the classroom.

Data from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority shows that 13.2 per cent of school students have a cognitive disability, 8.1 per cent have a social-emotional disability, and 2.3 per cent a physical disability.

Ms Farmer said some teenage criminals had struggled to learn at school because of alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), which damages an unborn baby’s brain when a mother drinks alcohol during pregnancy.

“In the youth justice system, there are a number of kids with foetal alcohol syndrome,’’ she said.

“Often when kids get to youth detention, that can be the first time they’ve been diagnosed with hearing loss, cognitive disability, FASD – a number of kids actually needed glasses 10 years prior, or they haven’t been at school since they were in year 3 or 4.

“The greatest single determinant that a child will end up in the youth justice system is if they’re disengaged from education by the time they’re seven.’’

Ms Farmer said teachers could struggle to cater to students who might be better off attending alternative schools that provided more support for disability or family dysfunction.

She said many children who misbehaved or dropped out “have been exposed to poverty, homelessness, DV, disengagement from education, one or both parents incarcerated, substance abuse’’.

“Sometimes we have no eyes on those kids until they get to school, by which stage they’ve experienced all those things,’’ she said. “If you’ve had that happen to you, you’re pretty badly behaved probably by the time you’re five, in prep (the first year of school). It’s not their fault – they weren’t born bad.

“But for a teacher to have to cope with that … as well as all of the other kids … some of those kids are better off not being in a mainstream school.

“If you’re 14, and you have a year 3 or year 4 reading age, you need a school system which recognises and works with that.’’

The Queensland government is spending $288m to establish 12 “Pathways Colleges’’ to help high school dropouts finish year 12, as well as “Flexi Spaces’’ in 50 high schools with dedicated teachers trained to support students who are disruptive or suffering mental health problems.

Ms Farmer said the schooling system needed to “recognise that you might have a whole lot of other stuff going on in your life, which is affecting your learning, and we need to get kids engaged with education, and then training, and then a job.

“That’s not only great for that kid, it’s actually a community safety issue as well,’’ she said.

Ms Farmer said children with disabilities or learning difficulties often flew under the radar until they started school. “I was a speech pathologist, and I was seeing kids when I was working in the education system, seven or eight years old, and they hadn’t even started talking yet,’’ she said.

“No one had noticed because the other issues they were facing, like domestic violence, or substance abuse or poverty, were so overwhelming that not being able to speak was actually far down on the list.’’