Below is the text of my submission to the Disability Royal Commission. Submissions close at the end of this month.
Throughout your inquiry into our education system, you have heard from many disability advocates and academics who research the field of inclusion. Many of these are ideologically committed to full inclusion — the idea that all children, whatever their needs, must be fully included in mainstream classrooms at all times. Advocates frame this in terms of human rights and point to various international treaties.
This appears to be a stance baked into the sector, with dissent being rigorously policed. Writing in 2020, two sceptical academics working in the field note (Kauffman & Hornby, 2020):
“Some senior academics in key positions in the field of special education have promoted a vision of full inclusion, now often portrayed by the term, “All Means All”, in which all children, with no exception, must be educated in mainstream school classrooms alongside their age peers. This policy advice has been promoted despite the widely reported concerns of teachers and parents, and the lack of research evidence for the advantages of inclusive education for some children over traditional special education provision and placements.”
The authors continue with an enlightening account of why such a view persists in academia, despite the evidence. The reasons include the simplicity of the full inclusion model — “For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong” — the implicit suggestion that criticism of full inclusion is tantamount to denying children their human rights, and a rigorous gatekeeping of the field by senior academics and academic journals — “Don’t you want to get promoted?”
While it has been important for your inquiry to hear from advocates and academics, you have heard less from the teachers attempting to grapple with the practical implications of this lofty rhetoric. This is no fault of your commission, but rather a product of restrictive media and social media policies that, anecdotally, prevent many government school teachers from airing their views.
I am in a more privileged position. I teach at an independent school where I am not under such restrictions. I have recently completed a PhD in instructional design and I host a popular Substack newsletter with over 13,000 subscribers from across the Australian education sector and beyond.
In June of 2022, I asked subscribers to my newsletter to send me feedback on their, “positive and/or negative experiences of including students with disabilities and disorders in mainstream classrooms.” I promised to include their comments anonymously in a submission to your commission. This is not a piece of scientific research — nobody is doing such research for the reasons outlined above — but it does give an insight. I have included the most salient comments below. I have edited them for length and corrected typos.
“Explicit instruction is vital. It reduces the load on working memory. Other strategies that are required include short sharp bursts of teaching with short brain on body movement breaks, highlighting relevant info, break the task down into smaller parts, only show 2-3 questions, not 50 questions… Rather than giving more time to complete activities (which doesn’t work as the child is already exhausted mentally), break assessments so they can be completed over 2 days, 30 min today, 30 min tomorrow. I would add that all of these adjustments should be standardised in the classroom for every child, not just children with disabilities.”
This comment illustrates the fact that many adjustments that are effective, particularly for students with ASD or ADHD, work at the whole class level. Yet the law — expressed via bureaucracy — seems to require teachers to make individual adjustments that must be documented for each child.
“I am a primary classroom and special education teacher [who has worked across a range of states and is currently based in South Australia]. These are the major issues I saw: Inclusion and Paperwork- the amount of paperwork required of mainstream schools who had students with a disability or learning difficulties was out of control. They had recently implemented a new funding model called the IESP (Inclusive Education Support Program- partially aligned to the NCCD) which was supposed to allow schools access to funding for students who have needs outside of what could be supported by quality tier 1 instruction. The process was a debacle and it has been put on ice due to an overwhelming number of complaints from principals and teachers regarding the amount of hours spent writing applications (10+ hr per application), the requirement to also include a 'One Plan' (which replaced a traditional IEP) and is 10 or more pages of pointless information which in no way supports students, and the fact that half the applications were being rejected or underfunded (and only guaranteed for 6-18 months before a new application is required).”
“[I work at a] P to 12 independent school in outer Metro North Melbourne… For students with identified mild intellectual diagnoses, like auditory processing problems etc we have to fill out a form twice per term saying what special actions we will take for the students. Some classes of 26 have seven students in this situation, which uses up hours of time. I would estimate a typical full-time secondary teacher would spend 15-20 hours per term on this activity. This is all new in the last few years and no extra time allowance has been given for it.”
“For Yr 7 - 10 students NCCD data needs to be submitted on the LMS [the school database]. We have been told how many students other schools have registered on NCCD, and that we were "behind" so were given instructions to add more students and more info for NCCD
For students with an Individual learning Plan there is a lot of extra work - accessing and filling in the ILP, making personalised assessments, recording these and the progress made on the ILP, as well as recording the assessment on a separate mark book on the LMS from the rest of the class. If you have multiple students on an ILP this is heaps of extra work.
Even for students not on an ILP there are students doing "adjusted work". They should have adjusted work in classes, as well as adjusted assessment tasks, which need to be designed and recorded separately to the standard students.”
This additional bureaucracy, during a teacher shortage exacerbated by workload issues, is not helpful.
One special school teacher sought to comment on the positive effect on students of moving to a special school.
“We have seen students come to us and express that they are equal and have friends now. The social implications are rarely discussed and at our school they have genuine friends and socialise outside of school. We have students who are violent, who frequently swear, who strip and also who try to run away.”
Some teachers with extensive experience of working with disabled students wonder if academics understand the practical realities:
“I really have to wonder whether inclusion advocates have spent any time in schools for special purposes. Some issues: Physical deformities: parents and students often don’t want the social challenge of mainstream education. Degenerative disease: the needs of students with these conditions are constantly changing. I’ve worked with children who come to school in a bed, others who have lifelong contagious viral illnesses that need aides to gown up to change the student. Even in special schools, classes often have to be grouped by physical needs to facilitate feeding and changing. This often involves tube feeding and staff often develop back problems from the lifting involved. Who would staff this? How would the blind and deaf be accommodated and how will staff be trained?… I’ve worked in schools with perception windows. Said school is a centre of excellence with integrated family services aimed at getting students back to mainstream successfully. Teachers for the most part, especially secondary, have no SOR [Science Of Reading — best practice in reading instruction] training, thanks largely to the same universities arguing for inclusion.”
A fundamental source of frustration is that academics often suggest strategies that will work one-on-one but the reality of classrooms is that they contain 25+ students whose needs must be balanced:
“I’ve had multiple students with disabilities over the years, particularly at my previous school... I taught them in mainstream Year 8-10 Science classes, some of them a couple of times. At my current school I’ve taught a student with severe dyslexia and another issue I can’t recall about motor control.
In all of these cases, they were in a class of 24-26, and we were asked to produce adjusted resources for them but to teach them ostensibly the same course/content. To some degree this seems to work well with a couple, particular if the main issue was around seeing (several were legally blind) and the adjustment was to print everything in A3 with larger font to allow them to be able to read it, or to provide an electronic copy (less common then). Although I did forget sometimes and this did cause issues. When the disability has been more of a cognitive nature (eg. dyslexia) I didn’t find a way to successfully integrate those students into my mainstream class. I tried modifying resources, breaking them up or even writing completely different ones to try and tailor them to these students. I don’t think I ever found a way to really make improvements but I certainly noticed that the quality of instruction/feedback to my other students suffered.”
“I work in a government school in South Australia. I have been in education for approximately 12 years. My experience with including students with disabilities and disorders has been mixed. In children with moderate disabilities such as being language delayed, or dyslexic I have found it is entirely possible to include the children and ensure they have access to the content so long as I provide additional in class support. Where inclusion has been difficult is in children with significant intellectual disabilities (such as autism) and/or behavioural issues (such as oppositional defiance or ADHD). I have been unable to meet the students’ academic needs as, in order to do so, I would need to work one on one with them teaching curriculum several years below their currently level. These experiences have been very unpleasant for me — I feel as though I am failing the student. It's challenging and a form of injustice for classmates whose learning can be constantly disrupted by the behaviour of the student. The arrangement also fails to meet the needs of the child who cannot function in my mainstream classroom. In my view it is naive to argue that the teacher can develop skills to teach year level appropriate content to significantly disabled or dysfunctional children alongside their 'normal' classmates. I also consider it unreasonable and unethical to deny disabled children access to suitably qualified educators in small group or one on one settings. Inclusion at all costs feels like the needs of the few are being privileged at the expense of needs of the many.”
“I am a Speech & Language Pathologist who has worked in the Tasmanian Department of Education for almost 20 years... So I have seen the system from both outside and within. Just a few stand outs off the top of my head: One memorable moment is where my personal life met professional life in one 5/6 classroom – where the teacher had my daughter (gifted – performing 2-3 years ahead at least – so needing high school level teaching and challenges) and a student with ASD/intellectual disability who was still at a prep level in many ways e.g. still practising decoding, needing adult support to complete most academic tasks (& very little TA support). How could anyone make a single lesson to have multiple entry/exit points that would suit both those students (and all the rest in between?) How is it even reasonable to expect teachers to do that? That teacher said it was the hardest year she had ever taught.”
A lot of advice on managing students with disabilities requires the teacher having detailed knowledge of the child and building positive relationships. However, this is not always possible when teachers are absent and their classes need to be covered. In these circumstances, school-wide structures can help.
“…the most challenging behaviour problems I have experienced occurred when I was teaching as a CRT [Casual Relief Teacher] in government schools. I would turn up in the morning and be given a device and a folder with some class notes for the day. There was rarely any specific information provided about students with special needs or routines or any other established ways the school had implemented to manage the challenging behaviour. I would usually have to discover for myself that there were students with special needs, sometimes they would tell me themselves or their classmates/teacher aide would. There was a lot of variation in the level of challenging behaviour that I experienced, some government schools were running very smoothly with established routines and were lovely places to work. The difficult schools would generally have two or three students with quite severe forms of ASD or ADHD and these students would disrupt the class continuously by calling out, getting out of their seats and sometimes leaving the room. Students leaving the room was concerning as I had to ensure their safety and so at times, I had to leave the room to find another teacher to help coax the student back to class. In one particularly difficult place to work a student left the room and I had to leave the class to find a teacher and while I ducked out a student pushed another student over. In another school there was a student with ADHD who would make inappropriate gestures to the girls and who was eventually removed from the class (once I had had the chance to speak to another teacher at recess about it).”
Some teachers worry that a mainstream classroom cannot meet the needs of disabled students in the same way as a more targeted approach:
“I work in a Catholic Secondary School in a largely working class area of Melbourne. However, there are many aspirational parents and students.
I am concerned about the nature of "inclusion" at my school. We have all seen the Equity Meme where different sized boxes allow all of the three students to see over the fence. However, some of the students who end up in mainstream classes have learning issues of such magnitude that they are not studying a modified curriculum, they are studying a completely different curriculum. I believe that there may be some socialisation benefits of having students with learning issues in a mainstream classroom as it gives them an idea of what life will be like in the workforce. On the other hand, I something think that it is cruel and that we are setting some students up to fail who are attending mainstream classes.”
One suggestion that is often made us that student differences can be accommodated by ‘differentiation’ — not treating all students the same and instead meeting their individual learning needs. This can be impractical and lead to teachers being blamed for not differentiating effectively enough when problems arise.
“Another example of inclusion not working very well was a yr7 class I had with a) an autistic girl who would be in tears if I didn't agree with her interpretation of where she thought a comma had to go, b) a boy with foetal alcohol syndrome who could just, at a stretch copy down a heading in illegible handwriting he couldn't really read back to you, c) a boy with severe ADHD who would get locked into a cycle of trying to bully others and then being bullied in return as he completely misjudged the social consensus (ie he turned everyone against him), and d) a younger Aboriginal boy with very low literacy who would get up and walk out of class and wander the school most lessons of the day. With those 4 in the class the constant need to de-escalate conflict and attempt remedial instruction meant the behaviour of the rest of the class devolved into an unpleasant dominance hierarchy. And despite the constant admonishment to "just differentiate" by end of third term all 4 of those students were moved out of mainstream settings. At no point the entire time were the classroom teachers of those students given any support beyond the intimation we just weren't trying hard enough.”
Finally, I have included the following feedback in full because it ranges over a number of issues, including parental expectations.
“ [I] Work at NSW government high school. Much contact between teachers and parents, often the person coordinating meetings and liaising between them.
I hear many demands from parents about what their child particularly needs. Examples:
- Seating plan: "my child needs to sit... at the front/ back/ side/ near the door/ near windows/ near this person/ away from this person." Teacher is balancing those needs with the number of students in the room and what they know will best work for the majority of lessons. Often parent advocates will claim for a particular seat for the child's learning needs.
- differentiation: "my child is an auditory/ visual/ hands-on (rarely use kineasthetic) learner. School would work better is you catered for them". Often parents will discuss how their child with learning needs doesnt like reading, struggles at maths, but is great at hands-on tasks like building and timber projects. Parents of students with learning needs and disabilities are more likely to ask/ demand for accomodations based on hands-on learning tasks, to be outside and experience the world.
- paperwork: often there is a large amount of paperwork for students with learning needs or disabilities. This occurs when students are transitioning from primary school to high school (in my context); when teachers start identifying issues, when learning/ behaviour issues start occuring; when teachers have time to talk to each other/ read student profiles and consider the student in the context of what they had been seeing in class; after parent meetings and trying to disseminate the information to teachers to then implement in their classes; when applying for additional support/ funding; seeking progress reports. All of this takes significant time and energy by teachers and executive staff
- Contact with parents/ guardians. This can be a difficult area, depending upon the families' context and history. I have met with parents who feel they have been unsupported in the past and no one has listened to them, so the child has misbehaved/ fallen behind/ hated school. At my school, I could readily use an additional number of teachers and support staff to help make communication great with parents, especially in the organisation of meetings, paperwork and implementation of procedures. We could utilise staff to monitor/ assess students and to especially support them in rooms. Reducing teacher loads would give teachers more time to consider their students and better plan for their needs. this again goes to the point of differentiating work or delivering lessons for a variety of students.
Too often, school staff are blamed for student misbehaviour because teachers did not cater for them or communicated poorly for their needs.”
One predictable response to this feedback is that the teachers and schools involved are not doing inclusion properly — these are not examples of true inclusion. Instead, more training is needed.
It is worth noting I received strikingly similar feedback from the U.S. and Canada that I have not included in this submission. If full inclusion is not being done successfully anywhere, then should that cause us to pause and think?
If effectiveness is built into the definition of inclusion — it’s not true inclusion unless it is effective — then we are left with an unfalsifiable claim. We can never cast doubt on its effectiveness because all the examples we produce will not be examples of true inclusion. This is the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy.
The reality is that pretty much everyone in the education system could support a principle that children with disabilities should be included in mainstream classrooms wherever possible, accept that this can be done better than it is now and support calls for additional research and resources. The problem arises from the unreasonable assertion of absolutes that leaves no room for pragmatism and compromise, and that ignores the practical reality for teachers.
References
Kauffman, J. M., & Hornby, G. (2020). Inclusive vision versus special education reality. Education sciences, 10(9), 258.
Well written. The situation is heart breaking. I think most teachers would agree that inclusion (for all but those with the greatest needs) is ideal but teachers are just not trained for this and the resources are not there to support them. This leaves many teachers feeling they are failing when they are giving everything they have. I do not know what the answer is but know that we cannot carry in as we are with teachers leaving the profession and few choosing to enter.