Schools called out on special needs teaching

A mother of five children with disabilities tells inquiry of her response to a complaining teacher.

Queensland Teachers Union president Kevin Bates.

A mother of five children with disabilities has told the disability royal commission of her blunt ­response to a teacher who complained of not having time to cater for one of her child’s special needs — “that’s your job”.

“What do you say when someone says to you ‘I’ve got 27 other children in the class’? They’re basically saying to you these 27 other children are more important than your child,” the woman, known only as Witness AAC, told the commission on Tuesday.

“The perception is that the education of students with disabilities is a lower priority and that … teaching this child with a disability is like an extra thing in your job, and it’s not. It’s your job. That’s your job,” she said.

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Witness AAC gave evidence on the second day of hearings in Townsville of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, ­Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, in a week devoted to education issues.

As well as being a parent with five children aged between 15 and 28 and all with different disabilities, she is also a qualified special education teacher, and spoke of her experience from both perspectives.

She offered a harrowing account of some of the bullying and discrimination directed at her children, including being hit, ­humiliated and having schoolwork ripped up and thrown at them by teachers inadequately trained to understand their particular needs. One of her children was bullied so badly he took a knife to school for protection.

Witness AAC said she had known some teachers who became worried they might do too well in teaching children with disabilities.

“There’s still a lot of mistrust with teachers that if they do really well in that year with their children with disabilities, then next year they’re going to get more kids with disabilities and other class teachers won’t,” she said.

She said the principal of a school in which she worked in 2017 couldn’t understand why staff were working over lunchtime on the social and emotional goals of students with disabilities.

“Instead (he) proposed gathering every child with a disability at lunchtime and confining them to an undercover area,” she said.

“I tried to explain how this proposal was not satisfactory, but the principal didn’t seem to understand. I had to resort to doing a comparison with choosing a group of children of a single race and asking whether it would be OK to put them in a shed at lunchtime.”

As the commission grapples with whether specialist disability schools still have a place in education systems in Australia or whether all students should be taught in mainstream schools, the woman said she was surprised that some principals and administrators still believed children with a disability should not be taught in an inclusive environment.

She backed the Queensland government’s 2018 move to an inclusive education policy, and said most people were finally beginning to understand that “inclusion is not integration”.

The commission also heard from Queensland Teachers Union president Kevin Bates, who defended teacher performance. “The expectations of a single teacher are often beyond the ­capacity of a single human being to deliver,” he said.

Mr Bates said the QTU had made a policy decision to support the existence of special schools for children with disabilities as a critical part of the education mix in Queensland. “If you make a blanket ­decision to take away special schools as an option, it denies the system and parents and those ­students one of the suite of ­options for ­providing effective education in a state school system,” Mr Bates said.