Eleanor Beidatsch has a passion for palaeontology, but that’s not as strong as her passion to see more people with disability accepted and succeeding in the sciences. “When I look around a room, I don’t often see anybody else like me. In all the time I’ve been at university I’ve never seen another student in a wheelchair and I’ve seen only a couple with other sorts of disabilities. It can get lonely sometimes.”
This research abstract reports on a survey of over 700 families that explored how Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) supported children and young people and their families to learn remotely during COVID‐19. The results suggest that participant experiences varied widely, with some people able to make the changes they required and others left with a significant service gap. This shows that individual funding schemes are not necessarily more flexible than traditional systems in an emergency situation.
According to dedicated autism research centre Autism CRC, the report is critical because it provides families and clinicians with the best opportunity to make informed decisions when choosing interventions.
0457965505
Kimberly’s sunny, athletic and inquisitive about everything. But for years she harboured terrible secrets about what happened to her. Janine Fitzpatrick investigates why her school failed to heed credible warnings that she was in danger.
Responses to the issues paper about education and learning for people with disability have been received from individuals including people with disability, family members of people with disability, advocates, organisations and government. This overview is a summary of what people are saying. The use of restraints and seclusion in schools, experiences of bullying, and what neglect … Continued
or Ronelle – who has two children with disability who attend mainstream schools in rural Victoria – the move to remote learning has highlighted the inequality in Australia’s school system.
Disability advocates are concerned by the Victorian government’s plan to allow students with disability to return to school, with fears this will put vulnerable children in greater danger of contracting COVID-19. The Victorian government has announced that students from Prep to Year 10 at government schools in metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire will learn from home from 20 July until at least 19 August.
Three special schools in Melbourne will be investigated over a series of allegations of “violence, abuse and serious neglect” of students with disabilities over the past 10 years. Victoria’s Department of Education and Training has launched an investigation into multiple claims of mistreatment of vulnerable children at Marnebek School in Cranbourne East, Jackson School in St Albans and Southern Autistic School in Bentleigh East.
Mary Sayers, CYDA’s chief executive, said that ‘‘all responses to a crisis such as COVID-19 must be designed to avoid creating further educational and social disconnection and inequality’’.
Many children have been learning at home during the pandemic. But for parents with children living with a disability the transition has been tough. Some families say they’re exhausting their NDIS funding to pay for support workers, to try to make sure their children don’t fall behind.
Homeschooling is difficult enough for most families, but parents of students with disabilities say they urgently need more support to help educate their kids. Fiona Sharkie, CEO of Victorian peak body for autism Amaze, said students with disabilities and their families had been forced to scramble for their own solutions to homeschooling. “The silence is really deafening from the [Education] Department,” she said.
Nine-year-old Quaden Bayles gained global fame in a viral video after he was bullied at school for his dwarfism. Disability advocate Stephanie Gotlib writes it is the attitudes and actions of our community that perpetuate this discrimination, abuse and low expectations experienced by children with disability.
Endeavour Foundation CEO Andrew Donne said it was shocking that so many people were uncomfortable having their children share a class with a student with an intellectual disability.
Part of this spend must go towards improving school facilities, especially for students with a disability. In 2017, around 18.8% of school students in Australia were provided with adjustments at school – to participate on the same basis as other students – because of disability. The majority of these attend mainstream public schools.
When Gibb was ready to start school, his mum, Caitlin, took him on a school tour. She had picked this school because of its “small village feel”, thinking they would embrace her son, who has Down syndrome, and provide him with the right support to thrive.