No more Special Schools; Abled and disabled kids to study in one class
Imagine a classroom setting where children who are visually impaired (blind) or deaf and students with no disability whatsoever sit together to study. Will you consider that as strange? No, it will only be a different classroom scene but that will surely make all of you children appreciate one another better from a very young age.
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This is exactly how the situation will be from the September 2015 academic year in the classrooms of all public basic schools in the country. Students who have no disabilities would share the same classrooms with the visually and the hearing impaired.
With this novelty, which is referred to as Inclusive Education (IE), there would no longer be special schools for people with disabilities and regular schools for mainstream (able bodied) students.
There are many forms of disabilities. These are the visually impaired, hearing impaired (both mild and severe), movement problems as well as children with learning difficulties.
The Head of the Special Education Department of the University of Education, Winneba, Dr Samuel K. Hayford, has explained that IE involves changes in the way schools are organised (for example school buildings), the curriculum used as well as the method of teaching that will address the needs and abilities of both the disabled and able students.
According to Dr Hayford, the policy means that now children with disabilities would attend any school of their choice without any hinderances.
He pointed out that IE starts from the nursery school to the university level pointing out that for now, the country would start with basic schools.
Inclusive Education started in 1994 at a UNESCO conference on the subject. Then, UNESCO wanted a system of education which would no longer create a separate system of education for the disabled and a regular school for able children.
Ghana was among the countries that signed this pledge and since 2003, the policy has been piloted in 749 schools in 48 districts of the country. Some of the schools are Ghana National Basic School in Cape Coast and the St Joseph Basic School at Bechem.
Explaining how the policy would work in the classroom when it starts in 2015, the Deputy Director of Special Education at the Ghana Education Service, Mr Thomas Patrick Otaah, said apart from the regular teachers for mainstream (able) students, there would be a special teacher to assist the visually impaired in the class.
‘The hearing impaired would be provided with hearing aids to assist them to hear and understand what the teacher says,’ he added.
Unfortunately, he said, the deaf would continue to go to special schools created for them due to the limited number of sign language teachers in the country. ‘Unless we have enough sign language interpreters, they cannot be integrated,’ he noted.
“The good news, however, is that the GES has asked the University of Education, Winneba, to train more sign language interpreters for this purpose”, he said.
According to Dr Hayford, many teachers had undergone training in order to understand Inclusive Education and pointed out that school structures were also gradually moving away from the traditional style that catered for able students only to a universal design that enabled everybody, including those with disabilities to move around without difficulty.
Regional and district coordinators, school resource persons and other individuals would also form a team to support each school to make it possible.
Inclusive Education will give majority of children education. This is because currently, there are only a handful of special schools for children with disabilities in the country. These special schools are not represented in all districts and regions of the country which means, a lot of children with disabilities cannot be in school. The situation is, however, different from regular schools that can be found in every part and corner of the country.
Giving statistics to support this, Dr Hayford said, there were only two basic special schools in the country to cater for the visually impaired while for the hearing impaired, there were 12 and these were not represented in every district.
He, therefore, called for the nation to transform schools if it wanted all children to be in school. ‘Every child has the right to attend the school in his or her village so the village school should also be transformed in order to cater for the needs of children with disabilities in that community,’ he stressed.
Dr Hayford is hopeful the introduction of the policy will be successful adding, ‘let us not say it will not work when we begin in September 2015. In terms of learning, there is nothing like special schools.’
He said under the policy, “we will be moving away from the various ways of describing persons with disability. The years of physically challenged is gone and now we are moving to special educational needs. Special educational needs because the needs of those children are different from all others”.