Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am on record in the past for having suggested that what we need to do is close down all the special schools in Australia and divert all of those human resources and all of the other resources, including the technological resources, into mainstream schools because that is the place where students with disabilities should be. I continue to hope that this is something that will be achieved in my lifetime.

The Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act 1992 makes it unlawful for schools to discriminate against a person on the grounds of disability, but in education discrimination is everywhere. There was a 2002 Senate inquiry into the education of students with disabilities—it was before I came to the Senate—that found clear and unambiguous evidence of a growing proportion of students with disabilities, a growing number of students with increasingly complex disabilities, a considerable level of unmet need, underfunding and underresourcing of programs, a serious and worsening skills shortage among teachers, and teachers ill prepared and unskilled in methods which involve teaching across a wide spectrum of abilities, capabilities and disabilities. That inquiry also found that there was an assumption that teachers would develop skills in areas that were once the domain of specialists, presumably by osmosis, but that there had been a failure to provide the resources or training to achieve this.

I would like to say that this problem has been fixed. I held a public forum in Brisbane in late 2008 to try to push this idea further. The title of the forum was ‘Is it the will, the skill or what’s in the till that will make inclusive education work?’ The decision of that forum was that it was all three—that is, it was schools wanting to do it, it was schools having staff with the skills to undertake inclusive education and it was also about the level of funding that was available. There is also the problem that schools that do not have the ‘will’ will use the ‘till’ excuse, the lack of resources, not to take on a student with a disability. And this can only change if we move all of the resources out of special schools into mainstream schools, where they should be, so that we are practising the talk that so easily trips off our tongues about equality of students with disabilities.

What do we say to children at mainstream schools if they watch a bus with children with disabilities in it drive past to go to another school? We can talk as much as we like and as a hollowly as we like about how we must include people with disabilities and how they must have equal rights. But while we are separating them in that most fundamental of areas—education—from their peers, we are giving them a completely different message from the one we send with our words.

This broken landscape of equal rights is not only further defined but also accentuated by the total chaos of funding, administration and definition within the area of inclusive education. A recent study this year by the Australian Education Union found a total mess when it came to support of children with disabilities in the nation’s schools. It found there were variations within and between states and territories, school sectors—that is, government, independent and Catholic—and the different levels, namely secondary, primary and child care. We do not even have uniform definitions of learning disabilities, so how do we know what we are doing in this area if we do not know what we are doing it about? It is the same sort of question I have asked many times of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Until we define it and measure it, we cannot know how successful we are being.

The 2002 Senate inquiry noted the importance of reaching national agreement on the definition of learning difficulties, and yet eight years on nothing has been done about these definitions. This is a serious and a disgraceful omission that has been perpetuated by the government. They have omitted reforming the funding for students with disabilities in the National Education Agreement, which came into effect in January 2009. The only significant reference to reform of the support for students with disabilities in that agreement is a reference to ‘future work’. Future work? Education is the way to future work. We acknowledge that in every other sector.

Under this government, people with a disability apparently do not have a future. The 2004 Productivity Commission review of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 described exclusion from and segregation within education as one of the most serious forms of disability discrimination regarding long-term effects on individuals. It was found that education accounted for the third-highest area of complaint under the DDA. Discrimination is a word. Let us see what it means in this context. In the context of inclusive education it means: refusal of enrolment; exclusion from sport, excursions, camps or other activities; lack of suitably trained staff or adequate amenities; and unsuitable or inflexible curricula.

Nationally, the number of students receiving some sort of funding—no matter how inadequate—rose by nearly 38 per cent between 2001 and 2008. The New South Wales Auditor-General has looked at the increase in students there, between 2001 and 2006, and described the increases as the most dramatic change in the classrooms of public education in decades. There was a 23 per cent increase in the number of secondary students with a moderate intellectual disability, a 280 per cent increase in the number of students with autism and a 585 per cent increase in the number of students with a behaviour disorder. It is to be praised that these increases have happened. What is to be deplored is the fact that these people have been set up to fail, by a lack of resources. Over the same period, in primary schools, the New South Wales Auditor-General found a 50 per cent increase in the number of students with a moderate or severe level of disability.

Growth in this area will go on as diagnosis improves and the population grows. What is this government doing about it on a practical level? According to people who know—the education system’s teachers and principals—nothing much and not nearly enough. The 2010 Australian Education Union’s State of our schools report surveyed 10,000 teaching professionals. It stated that 70 per cent of school principals in the survey said the state education department’s support for students with disabilities was less than adequate, and that while inclusion was a slogan—often repeated—all it produced were greater numbers of unmet need.

One principal, who had a son with Aspergers, described the disability and impairment funding requirements in regard to autism as a farce—and this is just one example. The survey makes it very clear what teachers and principals consider would assist teachers in improving student outcomes. The two critical factors were smaller class sizes and additional support for students with disabilities or behavioural issues. Some 44 per cent thought that additional support for students with disabilities or behavioural issues was an important change.

Disability is not just one little world that we can isolate and coat with verbal platitudes. It affects all of us, and that is especially true in education. Rights are not just words on paper—they only truly ‘live’ when they are given the priority of actions and resources. It is an old adage, but it is true: if you want to know what is important in this world, follow the money. If you follow this government’s priorities, supporting our educators and disabled students is not one of them—pouring more money into the black holes of waste and spin seems to be what is important. A commitment to maintaining and justifying their fiscal mess appears to be more important and more valued than a commitment to principle and to assisting teachers, students and their families in inclusive education.