Schools for the deaf need specialists
BASIC Education Minister Angie Motshekga has revealed startling statistics of learners with disabilities, but who have very few specialists attending to their impediments.
Motshekga said in a written reply in Parliament yesterday they were providing assistance to deaf learners.
She said there were 27 schools for the deaf with audiologists in the country.
There were 3 700 hearing aids for the deaf learners in all provinces.
Motshekga said there were 13 speech therapists, 16 occupational therapists and five psychologists for deaf learners across South Africa.
Basic Education Department spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga could not be reached for comment on further details on the matter, including the total number of deaf pupils.
Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has said that during the screening of 3 million learners last year, they discovered that one-third of them either have hearing problems, oral hygiene disorders or problems with their sight.
This was a big number, which left them shocked, but the department planned to strengthen its healthcare programmes in the schools.
This is one of the interventions they wanted to make through the National Health Insurance (NHI) fund, which will be established later this year.
More details regarding the NHI fund will be announced in the Medium Term Budget Statement in October.
The government was working on the details of the fund and reviewing some of the laws, to align them with the establishment of the fund and its needs.
Motsoaledi said they had also found that there were 3 000 optometrists in the country, but only 250 of them were in the public healthcare sector.
They wanted to urgently intervene in these matters, including providing assistance to all learners with one of the problems they discovered last year.
They would, as part of strengthening healthcare in NHI pilot sites, provide learners with spectacles.
Motsoaledi said they were shocked by the findings on the number of learners with problems at such an early age.
This required that the government would have to pull out all the resources to deal with the problem.
Most of the learners were in the NHI pilot sites, where they did the screening.
The country has 11 NHI pilot districts, and the establishment of the fund would be another stage in the NHI.
In her reply, Motshekga said the specialists in schools for the deaf were providing the necessary assistance to the learners.
The Department of Basic Education is one of the departments that remained a priority for the government.
The government has set up five key priorities since 2009, and they include education, healthcare, fighting crime and corruption, and land reform.