Educational support and social exclusion

The problem when it comes to “fixing” education is where to start. Schooling future citizens for a diverse society is a difficult exercise further complicated by the quest for simple solutions realisable within short electoral cycles.

Add to this the sheer breadth of the educational field. In sum, we cannot hope to fix everything to everyone’s satisfaction; even if we were to have a “revolution” in our schools.

Pragmatism requires even the most optimistic of us to acknowledge that there will be the usual selection of priorities which will add to the perennial to-do list and force further adjustments to which systems must constantly readjust.

On the eve of the Federal Government’s Education Revolution, the most important job therefore is to make sure critical cases make it onto the priority list. One of these must be to work out how to provide support to children who need it, but at the same time reduce incentives for schools to label and further stigmatise those very same children. But first, some background.

Driving Miss Diagnosis

Globally, the categorisation of children with a medical diagnosis of disability has risen markedly and Australia is no exception.

Some argue that the increase is an indication that diagnostic practices have improved and/or developments in neonatal and pediatric health care have resulted in higher survival rates.

Perhaps this is true to some extent, however international research looking at the categorisation of children in schools shows that normative disability categories are on the decline while non-normative categories are rising.

This means that “low-incidence” disabilities (hearing, vision, physical, and intellectual impairment) have tended to remain steady or have decreased, whereas “high-incidence” disabilities (sometimes called “soft” or “judgmental” diagnoses) have risen. These diagnoses represent children who are described as having social, emotional and behavioural difficulties.

In some regions, the rise has been dramatic - as has the increase in special education funding. The categories responsible are behaviour disorder, emotional disturbance and autistic spectrum disorders. To illustrate, let us introduce New South Wales as a case in point - although we hasten to add that the point could be illustrated by drawing data from any other Australian education jurisdiction.

A brief survey of annual report data shows that NSW, with 5.6 per cent of the government school student body carrying a recognised diagnosis of disability eligible for additional support funding, is second only to South Australia (8.2 per cent) - the state with the highest proportion of students diagnosed as “disabled”.

Since NSW and SA have comparatively similar proportions of students with disabilities enrolled in special schools (0.5 per cent and 0.6 per cent respectively); the variance between these two states lies mainly with those enrolled in the mainstream.

Queensland, with 4.4 per cent of her student group carrying a diagnosis of disability also has a relatively small proportion in special schools (0.6 per cent). With respect to students with disabilities enrolled in regular schools, these three states show a fair degree of variation in the number of students with a diagnosis of disability: SA (7.6 per cent), NSW (5.1 per cent) and QLD (3.2 per cent). Victoria and Western Australia are different again with 1.4 and 1.5 per cent of students enrolled in special schools, but just 1.8 and 1.3 per cent enrolled in regular schools.

It is important to understand that such variation does not reflect different rates in the incidence of disability but instead indicates differences in processes of identification, categorisation and enrolment. These are themselves affected by policy design, resource allocation approaches and practices of assessment and identification used in schools.

There are, however, additional pressures upon the latter and governments considering issues like “performance pay” for teachers need to consider how to go about such initiatives without further incentivising disability diagnosis.

We are aware of a school district elsewhere where teachers received salary loadings for the number of special educational needs students in their classrooms. Not surprisingly the incidence of diagnosis continued to escalate.

Some might wonder why the increase in diagnosis is a problem. Looking again at what has happened in NSW over the last 15 years may provide some indication. (The NSW Department of Education is by far the most transparent in this respect with extensive statistical information made available for public scrutiny. Similar phenomena have been noted in other states but there is limited data available for analysis. This is certainly one area where improvement could be made. The US has national data banks which enable sophisticated, independent research.)

Since the early 1990s, the proportion of students with disabilities enrolled in special schools (SSPs) has remained relatively steady, while the number of students in support classes (SCs) has risen slowly (see Figure 1 below). By far the greatest increase has been in students with a disability enrolled in regular classes (SWD Reg).

Figure 1: Trends in enrolment of students with disabilities in regular classes (SWD Reg) compared to enrolments in schools for special purposes (SSPs) and support classes (SCs) 1993-2007, calculated as a percentage of total enrolments in NSW government schools

But, if the population in segregated settings (for example, special schools and support classes) have not been decreasing, then where are the students representing such rapid growth in disability diagnosis coming from?

There has been movement in the placement of students with disabilities but, in the main, these shifts have occurred within segregated populations. At the same time, the number of children in regular classes with a diagnosis of disability eligible for Funding Support has increased exponentially.

Efforts to desegregate appear to have been offset by a flow from the other direction due to segregation within the mainstream itself; particularly with respect to the exclusion of children with emotional or behavioural difficulties. Disaggregation of state-wide statistics reveals considerable socio-economic and geographical variance.

Educational disability: where higher standards meet lower thresholds

At the same time that the inclusive education movement has influenced policy and practice in NSW, the academic standard that students are expected to achieve has also risen markedly.

From the late 1970s, only one third of NSW government school students completed 12 years of schooling. That figure rose to 40 per cent in 1987, climbing to 60 per cent after the economic recession of the early 1990s (NSWHealth, 2004, p. 1).

Now at about 68 per cent, the senior school retention rate is a tangible indicator of how much contemporary schools have had to change in order to accommodate a large number of students who, in times past, would have left for jobs in the unskilled labour market. Global economic networks with attendant shifts of sites for production and service have transformed this option for the concealment of schooling failure.

The net result in NSW government schools has been an expansion in the number of students who are difficult to teach, together with a contraction in the achievement bands they must reach, as well as increasing sophistication in the ways in which their progress (and that of their teachers) is monitored.

While school systems in Australia have not yet progressed down the micro-managed road of scripted pedagogies, teachers in NSW have had to contend with high-definition curriculum documents, overlaid with multiplying outcome statements and the development of integrated units, together with greater pastoral responsibilities, legislative requirements and parent communities whose demands have been sharpened by choice policies and school markets (see the report In the Balance (pdf 2.24MB)).

Such a climate, not surprisingly, fosters survivalism and in schools struggling to meet their responsibilities with growing populations of students ill-prepared or disposed to classroom-based academic learning, as well as schools determined to maintain “choice” status, at least four incentives combine to drive the medical diagnosis of children who are hard to teach. These include:

1. the extra funding attached to a diagnosis of disability;
2. opportunities to provide an authoritative medical explanation for learning failure;
3. the lure of protective special education placements for parents; and
4. the professional interest of the range of special education professions.

This experience is reflected elsewhere. Through the analysis of placement statistics, research from a number of international contexts has indicated that:

• the incidence of normative disability categories are on the decline while non-normative disability categories are rising;
• some children with additional support needs are more likely to be educated in inclusive settings than others;
• placement of students with disabilities, learning difficulties and/or challenging behaviour may be influenced more by socio-demographic factors such as gender, where the student lives, as well as level or type of need;
• placement in special classes and units within mainstream schools can result in segregation just as profound in its effect upon children’s social lives as enrolment in a special school; and
• accountability frameworks that use student performance as a proxy to assess the performance of individual schools and teachers place a premium upon children with additional support needs, increasing the desirability of separate educational facilities for under-performing students who are difficult and costly to teach.

Given the allocation of education to a new super-portfolio which also seeks to promote social inclusion, the time is ripe to address the role schools play in reproducing social stratification and exclusion.

State educational systems now have an opportunity to collaborate with the Federal government to sponsor research, policy, protocols and programs that are sensitive to such issues. A useful starting point is to gather extant knowledge and innovation across states and territories together with initiatives and research from international jurisdictions in New Zealand, Singapore, Canada and Finland. This collective evidence will provide the basis for innovation that will contribute to improved educational outcomes and more efficient resource allocation in public education.

In the meantime, investing in measures that increase the desirability of difficult to teach students through better recognition of excellence in inclusive practice, reward for team-teaching and mentoring by experienced educators, and reduction in class sizes in schools serving socially disadvantaged areas are some initiatives to help redirect focus from individual deficit. Such opportunities for a quiet revolution remain under-recognised.