Help! My local school does not want to enrol my disabled child - What can I do?

Too many families in Aotearoa find local schools unwilling to enrol their disabled child – frequently schools say they have inadequate resources.

All students are legally entitled to free full-time education at public schools. Any denial of this is discrimination and goes against New Zealand’s binding and legal obligations to include all learners in mainstream schools.

This includes disabled learners - Section 34 of the Education and Training Act (2020) specifically states - “Students who have special educational needs (whether because of disability or otherwise) have the same rights to enrol and receive education at state schools as those people who do not.”

But while you may have the backing of law behind you, the delivery of inclusive education in NZ, decades after it was first introduced, remains fragmented, inconsistent, and under-funded.

Previous Minister of Education Jan Tinetti recently likened inclusive education to a leaky roof: “There is never really an endpoint …we put a bucket under the area where it’s leaking, but then another leak springs and we put a bucket under there ...but what we really need to do is take a look at the roof . . .let’s ask ourselves what it is that we can do to affect the system as a whole”.

That said, the Ministry of Education’s (MoE) main website clearly outlines what is expected of schools in terms of providing inclusive education.

This includes:

• What is meant by inclusive education in the New Zealand environment.
• The legal and binding obligations to include all learners.
• How the Education Review Office (ERO) evaluates how well schools include students with high needs.
• The roles of boards and governance in building inclusive schools.

 There are some resources which may help to support inclusive practices in schools. These include the dedicated Inclusive Education website Te Kete Iparangi and the Inclusive Practice self-review toolkit. There are also guides available for Individual Education plans.

Some of these resources, such as Te Kete Iparangi’s online learning modules, are designed to help schools create more inclusive learning environments. They are relatively new, and reflect the on-going push to ‘do better’ where inclusive education is concerned.

The IHC Inclusive Education Survey 2022 of over 600 families and educational professionals showed the education sector is still falling short of expectations in delivering education to disabled students.
The main findings included:

• Almost all respondents said that funding for disabled students does not deliver what they need to access education.
• Respondents lacked confidence that the latest MoE Highest Needs Review would have a significant impact in resolving problems.
• Families felt that teacher capacity to teach diverse learners had reduced over the last three years.
• More than a third of the families said that their children were regularly sent home for part of the school day and were also unable to join in on non-school activities.
• 86% of the professionals reported increased difficulties with the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme (ORS) and accessing the specialist support disabled students needed to participate and achieve.

Two positive trends were also identified:

• There had been a decline in the number of schools declining enrolments.
• Less disabled students were being stood down or suspended when compared to the two previous IHC Inclusive Education surveys in 2019 and 2014.

Trish Grant at the Inclusive Education Action Group has the following advice for parents who are told their local school has insufficient resources to support their disabled child.

“Your best option is to partner up with your school and jointly make sure the Ministry of Education lives up to its obligations and provides the necessary support.”

And if you still feel the school is not doing enough, she advises contacting an advocacy group to enlist their help – for example the NZ Down Association, Autism NZ, Youth Law.

All children should feel welcome and included at their local school – with access to the support they need to be an engaged and enthusiastic learner.  It is unacceptable that for some children this isn’t the case and IHC NZ has taken legal action with the Human Rights Review Tribunal.

It may be hard getting the education for your child that the New Zealand government has promised to deliver, but by remaining consistent in ensuring that your child’s right to education is fulfilled, you will be part of creating the inclusive education environment all children deserve.

Disabled children, like all other children, want the chance to live ordinary lives, and access to mainstream education is key to that desire and their legal and human right.

If you would like to know more about Inclusive Education, the following articles by Awhi Nga Matua and IHC Library may be of interest to you.

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Meryl Richards

I’m Meryl Richards. What a pleasure it’s been to join the Awhi team. I get to spend my days researching information that supports me as a parent, and sometimes challenges me to rethink what I thought I knew. My hope is that it will be useful to you too. I live in Kapiti with my partner and two teenage boys, and spend as much time as possible in the surrounding bush and at the beach.