Special Education

Another school set to provide special education to children with special needs will rise in Leicestershire, BBC News reported on 4 November 2012. The turf cutting ceremony for the new school was held on 5 November 2012.

Construction work on the school is set to commence this month. The construction cost of the school is pegged at £9.3 million, but the benefits it could bring to children with special needs are priceless. The school will rise on the Charnwood College campus in Loughborough, replacing Ashmount School. It will share a campus with Garendon High School and Burleigh Community College.

According to the Leicestershire County Council, the school will feature improved facilities like a hydrotherapy pool, physio room and conference and training room – aimed at providing special education to children with special needs. The school will also feature a sensory suite and a therapy suite. Set to commence operations in late 2014, the school will offer places for 125 children and young people aged four to 19.

Official remarked that the location of the new school is advantageous. Sharing a campus with Burleigh Community College opened up opportunities for the two schools to collaborate and share sporting and other facilities.

Ashmount head teacher Dave Thomas disclosed that the new school has been on hold for a long time, but the commencement of its construction now “all seems real.”  Thomas remarked that the new school will provide outstanding provision and accommodation to more children with special needs in the area.

"We are determined to make this school a dream come true for children with special needs and their families," Thomas told BBC News.

Hopefully, more schools intended for children with special needs would be built around the country. This way, special education could become more accessible to more children with special needs.

Special education refers to the formal learning process designed for children with special educational needs. The educational sector has long realised the rights of children with special educational needs to education. Just because these children have learning difficulties or disabilities, it does mean that they should be deprived of their right to education. The right to education is considered as a universal right, which means all, including children with special educational needs should be afforded with access to free education, wherever they are.

In England, it is said that around 21 percent of children, around 1.7 million young individuals, have special educational needs. This means, these young people should be afforded with free education, albeit special education. Students with learning difficulties or disabilities typically require different or more instructional methods and learning programs. Even though teaching these children could prove to be quite a challenge, it should not be considered as a big burden. These children, while having learning difficulties or disabilities due to physical, sensory, communications, emotional and behavioural elements, still have the right to be afforded with free education.

Several governments have already made significant steps in meeting special education needs of children with learning difficulties and disabilities. In England, for instance, all state schools are compelled by law to make that special help is provided for children with special educational needs. School are required to draft an assessment of the need and an action plan, which will be then be implemented. In severe cases, a statement of special educational needs is made.

While many governments already have placed systems to pursue the right of children with special educational needs to education, there are still some who miserably fail to do so. They should always remember that every person on earth has rights to be respected and pursued.

When a child is having a harder time dealing with school activities, communicating with other children and people or behaving like he is expected to, he is most likely in need of special attention from professionals and experts. These children with special needs, like any other young individuals, have the right to undertake modern education. However, because of their special difference, these children with special needs have to immersed into formal learning through a special way – special education. But how can schools provide such education to children with special needs?

Special education usually involves systematic planning and monitoring of teaching procedures, equipment and facilities. This process usually diverts from standard teaching methods, so as to help children with special needs gain knowledge and skills that would allow them to become achieve success personally and academically.

Schools providing education for children with special needs usually use one of the four teaching approaches.

1. The inclusion approach entails having children with special needs spend at least half of their academic time with other students who do not have special needs. Students with special needs may attend more intensive instructional sessions.

2. The mainstreaming approach entail having children with special needs attend classes with student without special needs during specific time periods based on their skills. On other period, students with special needs are placed in separate classes.

3. The segregation approach involves having students with special needs attend classes designed exclusively for them. They do not spend time with children without special needs.

4. The exclusion approach involves having children with special needs excluded from school. They may receive one-on-one instruction or group instruction.
With these approaches, schools providing special education could give children with special needs a good opportunity to gain knowledge and skills that fit their mental and physical capacities.

1. Special needs are needs that distinguish special learners from other learners. These needs are met in the aforementioned structures and may come in the form of learning-challenges, physically disabled, and behavioural, emotional, or developmental disorders.
2. Additional supports are the answer to the learners’ special needs. It usually consists of student monitoring, learning intervention, and correcting erroneous belief. In specific, supports and teaching approach depend on a learner’s special needs and is deemed challenging in a general education environment. 

         Special needs education or special education is the education of students with special needs or with medical, mental or psychological disabilities in a manner that addresses the individual differences and needs of those students. If you are planning to pursue a teaching career and become a special needs education teacher, it is important that you should know the importance or significance of special needs education programmes in schools especially for the kindergarten, primary school and secondary school levels.

         When you know the significance and relevance of having a special education programme in a school, then, you would have an idea about the important role you would play for children with special needs if you continue your plans in pursuing a career as a special needs education teacher. The most important reason for the significance of special education is early intervention for preschool-age children. The special needs education programmes of various school districts would include early intervention components in which preschool children with special needs would receive initial exposure to special needs learning so that they would be well-prepared on entering the kindergarten level under a special needs education class.

         The other reasons for the importance of a special education programme in a school would depend on the particular type of disabilities that need to be addressed by a special needs education programme that should be carried out in a specific school. For example, children with learning disabilities would usually receive individualised education plans because the level of a learning disability would be different from one child to another.

          Therefore, a special needs education plan that is tailor made for a specific child with a certain level of learning disability would make sure that the unique needs of the child is specifically addressed. In addition, children with behavioral or emotional disabilities would also receive special needs education plans based on the particular type of behavioral or emotional disorder.

Special education requires careful planning because its students have learning disabilities that do not allow them to understand lessons as fast and as well as their non-disabled classmates. In designing and planning special education activities, the following factors should be taken into consideration:

• Whether the students have physical or emotional deficiencies
• Whether the students are developmentally disabled
• Whether the students have learning disabilities
• If the students are impaired in vision or hearing

• Be aware that special students may face unique stressors not typically recognised or seen in a normal student. For example, what may seem to be a fun and engaging activity for a mainstream student could be stressful for an autistic student.
• Strictly monitor the incoming sensory stimulation brought about by each activity: hearing new sounds, smelling new scents, recognising new tastes and touching new textures and shapes.
• Always assure the students of their personal safety. Understand that for students with special needs, change can be very difficult to accept because their comfort zone is narrow. Thus, introducing new things and new people can seem intimidating.
• Be mindful about limiting variables in the environment. Special education students easily experience sensory overload, so keep as much of the environment consistent as possible.
• Special education students, as a result of their condition can make difficult situations for a teacher or caregiver. Be prepared for this by keeping a calm and consistent manner. Seeing these traits will build your students' confidence in you when new situations arise.
• Take the time to discuss options with your students. Often, a child with special needs have a perspective that there are only two choices when encountering a difficult situation: fight or flight. Practice them to do compromising activities such as asking help from an adult or going into a hallway when they feel threatened.

Special education is the opposite of general education. It is the opposite of the standard curriculum which is presented using standard teaching methods and without supplemental supports. Detecting special learning needs in children is done at the early stages of life.

• Early Detection – Many children are conveniently detected to have needs for special education based on their medical records. New born children are passed through screening before leaving the hospital after they were born and their genetic condition can indicate whether they have the tendency to develop special needs later. Mental retardation, brain damage, developmental disorder, disabilities of the senses essential in learning and other disabilities can be detected at this stage.

• Models for Detection – Very young learners or students who have or may develop needs for special education can either be screened using discrepancy model and the model of response to intervention. In the discrepancy model, teachers use their observation to notice students who achieve very far from what is expected of what learners of their age usually does. On the other hand, the model using response to intervention encourages early intervention.

• Discrepancy Model – Under the use of the discrepancy model, a child with special learning needs is given the services for a specific learning difficulty or SLD only under the circumstances that he or she has at least normal intelligence and underachieves based on his or her IQ. The discrepancy model has been widely used in years but it is still subjected to a good amount of criticism from researchers because, among others, these critics have asserted that diagnosing SLDs based on discrepancy between achievement and IQ does not predict the effectiveness of treatment. According to them, students who achieve low and also have low IQ also seem to benefit from treatment just like students who achieve low and have normal or high intelligence.

1. Form of Education – The ideal form of this kind of education is that it is a process involving individually planned and systematically monitored design of teaching procedures, adapted equipment and materials, accessible settings and other interventions are designed to help learners who have the special needs so that they can achieve higher level of personal self-sufficiency and success in school and community more than would be at their reach if the student were given only access to a typical or ordinary classroom education.
2. Form of Needs – The most common special needs which are addressed by special education include learning challenges or learning disabilities, communication impairment, behavioural and emotional disorders, physical abnormalities and disabilities and disorders in child and physical development. Learners and students having these different special needs can be better educated through additional educational services like various approaches to teaching, use of technology, specially designed teaching area and resource rooms.
3. Education for the Gifted – Gifted intelligence or intellectual giftedness is a disparity in learning and learning pace. This is also a beneficiary of specialised teaching techniques and different educational programs. However, special education is generally used to particularly refer to the instruction of learners or students who have special needs which reduce their ability to learn independently or in an ordinary classroom environment; thus, education for the gifted is separate and different from education for special children.

• Students with physical disabilities such as blindness or deafness
• Students with mental and emotional disabilities
• Students with autism or speech and language impairments
• Students with developmental disorders

• The barriers to learning that students of special education face
• Government laws and policies affecting the enforcement of special education in a particular country or territory
• How to identify special education students and plan a specialised program or course of study taking into account these needs