Needless confusion over student aides

It took a protest outside its offices on Tuesday for student aides under contract at the Ministry of Education to get action.

The 78 student aides are engaged on short-term contracts to assist students in need of special education with their studies under covid19 restrictions.

To her credit, Education Minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly responded swiftly to the embarrassing matter, promising to regularise 68 student aides with three-year-contracts while expressing a willingness to expand the cohort of special education aides.

"No student aide will be removed from the student they are assigned to before the end of the school year," the Education Minister promised.

This isn't only a matter of helping people with a disability. It's an institutional problem with the ministry's approach to special education.

As recently as March, Independent Senator Paul Richards described the complaints of disabilities stakeholders as "institutionalised marginalisation" and called for the oversights in providing education to special-needs students to stop.

He has lots of company in his concern among the many parents and children who struggle with an education system that ignores the potential as well as the needs of disabled children and makes irregular and spotty efforts to tailor learning to their unique capacities. One need only read, for example, Dr Radica Mahase’s column on autism in this newspaper every Monday to be aware of just some of the deficiencies in this area.

At a joint select committee meeting on March 17, the Education Ministry acknowledged that 3,365 students have been referred to its student services division as special-needs students.

This is a support system that has been notoriously understaffed, largely operating at half-capacity, dropping to lows of 20 per cent over the last 20 years.

Education Ministry permanent secretary Lenor Baptiste-Simmons declared herself "stumped" by the situation.

The ministry receives significant funding in the annual budget. For 2020/2021, $7.9 billion has been allocated to education, with $29 million for special-needs children.

It's startling then, to realise that with half of it spent, there is still scrappiness in something as fundamental as direct support to special-needs children in the midst of a pandemic.

In its Inclusive Education Policy (2009), the Education Ministry demonstrates a clear awareness of what is required, but in execution, the paper reads more like a manifesto to meet the requirements of a UN charter than an actionable plan with clear strategic goals and performance benchmarks.

The ministry cannot deal with the matter as if it were just another problem to be solved with the hard slap of a budget allocation.

Infrastructure, trained personnel and most notably commitment are missing from its approach to providing inclusive education.

Far from leading on the issue of supporting students with disabilities, Dr Gadsby-Dolly has allowed the ministry to be viewed as scrambling to provide the minimum expected of it.