Thursday, May 31, 2012

Gulf News

Dubai Providing quality education to children with special needs will be a key factor in the Knowledge and Human Development Authority’s (KHDA) ratings for schools as the auth-ority goes ahead with its agenda of greater inclusion of special needs children in mainstream schools.

The move comes following the findings of the Dubai School Inspection Bureau (DSIB), which is part of KHDA, that most schools currently don’t have a clear admission policy for children with special needs. Nor do they have a system to identify such students, nor any infrastructure or resources to cater to the category.

This despite the fact that according to a 2006 UAE law and as a signatory of the Unesco Special Educational Needs convention, education is a right of every child in the country.

DSIB’s findings reveal that 60 per cent of the schools provide either unsatisfactory or acceptable level of education for children with special needs, while only half of the schools made an extra effort to involve parents in helping the children.

Basic criteria

“There are important messages that we need to send across to schools in order to raise the profile of special education in Dubai. We have been looking at this aspect since 2008 and we have been able to set a baseline. We expect all schools to be well above this,” said Fatima Belrehif, head of DSIB.

DSIB has set basic criteria in the inspection framework, like a school’s level of identification of students with special needs, policy of admission and inclusion of students in mainstream infrastructure and resources as well as trained staff.

“Our key findings are that most of the schools are not able to identify students with special needs. Some of the schools limit their understanding of special needs to only physical disabilities, not really going into the spectrum of learning difficulty. We found that many schools don’t even know or acknowledge that they have children with special needs, which is alarming,” Belrehif added.

However, she insisted that there is at least a greater level of understanding and realisation and the process of inclusion has begun.

Agreeing with Belrehif is Dr Ruba Tabari, who is an educational psychologist and has been working on the subject in the UAE for over a decade.

“There are so many centres and specialists working in the field to help these children now. There is more awareness and we find more schools willing to accept these children than we did a decade ago. So there is a major move towards realisation of the goal. We have done the groundwork from where we can set the standards,” said Tabari.

She also emphasised that the first thing that needs to be done is to identify the cases and give them customised treatment.

Training of teachers

However, schools say it is easier said than done, alleging that there is lack of support and guidance from the authorities.

“The main difficulty that we are facing is the training of teachers. In this part of the world very few trained teachers are available and even if they are available they come at a great cost. As private schools we have to look at profits as well and we don’t deny that. So we have to ask parents to bear the cost and most parents can’t afford it,” said Sonia Mahajan, Principal of North American International School, highlighting key obstacles faced towards imparting special education.

She added that though the Community Development Authority (CDA) has a special programme for Emirati children, there is no support for expats.

“There are a couple of Emirati children in our school and the CDA sends the shadow teachers and bears all the costs, but expat children don’t get the same facilities,” she said, adding that she has 15 children with special needs enrolled in her school.

The issue was discussed by a forum of experts hosted jointly by KHDA and Dubai School of Government and included activists, trainers, school principals, child psychologists, parents as well as government officials.

By Shafaat Shahbandari ?Staff Reporter

Gulf News 2012. All rights reserved.