Transcript

ELAINE COWIN

Schools face a lot of challenges in delivering inclusive education, I think, starting off from things like funding because a child may come to your school with an educational health care plan, and that may be partially or fully funded. But even when it's fully funded, that doesn't actually cover all of the costs that it costs a school to provide something like a learning support assistant to support that child the whole day.

It may come with enough money to fund them for 3/4 or 4/5 of the amount of money that it covers. But you can't hire somebody for 3/4 of a day. You have to fund them for the whole day. So schools are financially run at a loss if they take children with educational health care plans. And that can add up.

If you only have one or two, then school budgets can manage that because they have certain allocated funding for doing that. But that doesn't grow with the amount of children with needs that you have. That's a fixed amount of money. So there's no financial incentive for schools to accept children with educational needs like that. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. You're running at a loss, sometimes quite considerably. And my school, particularly, struggles financially with that.

I think at the forefront of our ethos as a school is that we want our children to know that children with special needs are a part of our community and that they have as much right to be in our community as anybody else. And I also see the benefit for that, for all the children. It helps develop a real sense of empathy and understanding of everybody. And I also think it makes teachers better.

Essentially, if you're teaching children with special needs, you have to be a good teacher. You have to teach something well. And that impacts everybody. So there isn't anything I've learned from teaching children with special needs that I haven't been able to use for other children. So it's actually had great, positive benefits for our whole school.