The Hub is an online resource that provides information, tools and guidance on diverse learning, including:
– understanding autism and how schools support autistic students
– understanding the different types of learning difficulties
– how learning difficulties can affect a child’s and young person’s learning
– evidence-based resources, tools, and guidance on learning diversity
– professional learning and teaching resources for school staff.
A Victoria University student is fighting to study all her law classes online, saying her disability and chronic health issues mean coming to university is not safe or accessible.
Closing date: March 31, 2023
The Australian Disability and Indigenous Peoples’ Education Fund is open for applications. We completed our twenty-seventh round of funding on 30 September 2022 but as we are only a small fund, we were only able to assist 12 applicants. The closing dates for the Education Fund are every six months at the end of March … Continued
Child care and kindergarten give your child the chance to learn, play, make friends, and have fun. This guide will help you to know hat to look for in an inclusive child care centre and kindergarten, and how to get support, such as staff training, specialist equipment, and extra educators
Equal access to education has been a hard-won right. As a teacher and parent I understand that while laws might demand the inclusion of all children, achieving this is not always easy. To help relieve some anxiety, here are my five top tips for starting the school year off right.
The ways educators orientate to disability is crucial to how they ensure students are not excluded from any aspect of educational participation because of the conditions they live with. An educator’s orientation to disability is also just as important when they are designing and delivering inclusive curriculum. Unfortunately, still too many students with disabilities receive inequitable schooling opportunities in Australia.
School is a crucial place to think about friendships for kids with disabilities because, as research confirms, it’s a space where all kids learn to make and maintain friendships. Some studies imply that schooling plays an even more important social role for students with a disability than for typically developing kids – with non-disabled students modelling appropriate behaviours.
The Disability Inclusion Profile and surrounding process is designed to helps schools and families identify the strengths, functional needs, and educational adjustments schools can make to assist students with disability and additional learning needs. The profile is part of a broader package to strengthen inclusive education across the school system including the expectation that schools must make reasonable adjustments to ensure that students with disability can access and participate in education on the same basis as students without disability, regardless of the availability of additional funding.
Another State responsibility, the education systems, could also be letting children with developmental delay down, Minister Shorten believes, causing more parents to look for support from the NDIS and driving growth in participant numbers above expectations.
A key concern identified was that schools failed to follow policies and laws when denying or discouraging the enrolment of students with disability, and failed to identify and implement appropriate, reasonable adjustments for students with disability.
Australia’s first university chancellor who identifies as having a disability says things have improved since the days when his law studies revolved around whatever resources he could obtain in Braille or reel-to-reel audio tape. “I had a smaller range of material,” said lawyer and disability advocate Graeme Innes, who was born blind. “My challenge was that I had to know that material better than other students who could research more broadly than I could.”
Disability is often relegated to “second-class” status in student activism. More effort, listening and discernment is needed from other activists to build a genuinely inclusive student movement.
The bottom line of that analysis is although … a contested issue, my own view is the better view of the Convention’s obligation, in particular Article 24, is that Australia needs to move progressively over some time to have [a] transformed system with inclusive education, which does not, as a matter of principle, include special schools as a long-term separate form of education. And I think that is also a position taken by the CRPD Committee.”
Students with disabilities have been the worst affected by the upheaval caused by this year’s severe staff shortages in Victorian schools, according to principals, education experts and the students themselves.
Disabled students in public schools are missing out on $600 million a year, because of onerous and unfair funding arrangements.