DBE failing disabled kids
Most schools don’t have the proper facilities to cater for learners with disabilities
THE Department of Basic Education (DBE) is failing children living with disabilities by not providing necessary learning support and by allowing issues affecting disabled learners to continue unattended.
According to André Kalis, a policy and children’s matters specialist from the National Council of and for Persons with Disabilities (NCPD), 500000 children with disabilities are not attending school due to schools not being disabled friendly.
Kalis was responding to a recent case involving a learner with a mild form of cerebral palsy who uses a walker.
As he was describing the learner’s situation, Kalis said the child’s classroom was unfortunately on the second floor, making it impossible to reach, while the closest accessible toilets were too far to reach comfortably.
He cited this as a prime example of a child whose future had been compromised.
“In fact, Human Rights Watch and even the Department of Basic Education itself noted the number of children with disabilities not attending school.
“Not having access to a formal education has devastating implications for the child. These children are basically robbed of their future, relegated to a life marked by poverty and dependence on others,” he said.
Kalis said that for learners with more severe disabilities, there were, of course, schools that accommodated them by providing high-level support in the form of adequate and specialised personnel.
“But the NCPD encounters yet another problem that relates to under-staffing. An example occurs at a school for the physically disabled and the visually and hearing impaired in the Northern Cape, where there were only two helpers for the 33 learners residing in the hostel, meaning that the learners’ needs were not properly attended to.”
DBE spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga said the department was currently far advanced in completing norms for the distribution of resources in inclusive education, which would bring about radical change towards funding inclusive education rather than only special schooling.
Mhlanga said the DBE had taken all possible steps to ensure that special schools were part of the universal strategies on school safety and school infrastructure provision.
However, Mhlanga said the realisation of these strategies in support of children with disabilities needed continuously to be strengthened through a process of mainstreaming disability across sectors.
“By their very nature, special school hostels make children with disabilities more vulnerable, especially children who are deaf and those with intellectual disabilities.
“There are several inter-department collaborative programmes to deal with this challenge. The DBE strongly believes that it is mainly through a more radical introduction of inclusive education that negative stereotypes can be systematically broken down and combated to ensure that people with disabilities can live fully integrated in society.”
Education activist Hendrick Makaneta said the government had put good policy documents on paper to cater for learners living with disabilities, but in reality there were still many challenges faced by such learners.
“For instance, most of our schools are not inclusive. They do not have proper facilities to cater for learners living with disabilities,” said Makaneta.
“Learners living with disabilities are still confined to schools which are often far from their homes, so they frequently have to live away from their loved ones as opposed to learners at day schools who are fortunate enough to see their loved ones on a daily basis,” he said.