Australian Parent's Council

Extract from Senator Fifield's address to the National Disability Services CEO's Conference on 7 December 2010

Education for students with disability

Today I want to primarily talk about two elements of the Opposition’s disabilities agenda - education and workforce participation.

For a great number of Australians with disability, education is the great enabler. A good education can mean the difference between a fulfilling life of work or a lifetime struggling on the disability support pension. We know that people with disability face significant barriers to entry when it comes to seeking employment. Governments have expended much energy and resources on trying to move disability support pensioners into work. But doesn’t it make far more sense to put our focus on ensuring that people with disability who have the capacity to work don’t end up on the DSP in the first place?

One way to stem the flow of people seeking income support is to do everything we can to give them the best possible chance of finding a job and keeping it. We must start by ensuring that every child with disability has a solid educational foundation. Australia’s schools education sector on the whole is pretty good. There no doubt are areas for improvement, but there are few, if any, nations in the world where you would prefer your child to be educated. One of the reasons for that strength is the presence of two parallel, thriving sectors - government and independent. And within these sectors there are a variety of different school environments on offer.

The Coalition has always believed that parents are best placed to choose the best educational setting for their child. And in Australia, parents have a wide variety of choices of schools for their child, all of which receive an appropriate level of government support. That is, unless of course, your child has a disability. Because with such disparate levels of disability support between the government and non-government sectors, parents of children with disability have far fewer choices. The numbers vary wildly between states, but in some cases a child with disability at a non-government school is only eligible to receive around a tenth of the support of a child at a government school. Not only are the levels of support inadequate, but there is little choice for parents when it comes to what sort of support their child receives. It is basically a case of you take what you can get. This is not the stuff of a first world education and it’s not good enough. More support is needed, but more control must be handed directly to parents.

This was the thinking behind the Coalition’s Education Card policy that we took to the last election. Our policy proposed that, initially, 6,000 students with disability would receive an entitlement of up to $20,000 per annum, on top of any existing funding. Crucially, the entitlement would follow the student. For the first time, parents of children with disability would have a funding entitlement that they could take to any school and use for whatever purposes they saw fit. They could, for example, purchase some aids and equipment, or engage a speech pathologist. For many students with disability, an adequate level of support is all they need to overcome their impairment and achieve literacy and numeracy levels on par with their peers. We are doing these children and the nation a lifetime of disservice if we deny them the opportunity to succeed. The Education Card was our key policy to support education of students with special needs, but we also had a couple of other commitments that would assist. Our increased and expanded Education Tax Rebate allowed for parents to claim the costs of education for children with special needs.

We also committed to the capital funding for the Insight Education Centre for the Blind and Vision impaired. I congratulate the new Coalition Minister for Education in Victoria, Martin Dixon, who during the Victorian election campaign committed to the project. As a result of their election victory, this funding will now be delivered. I am aware that this was a somewhat controversial policy in the disability sector. Some interpreted it as a signal that the Coalition would pursue a shift back to separate institutionalised education for children with disability. Let me set the record straight.

I agree that the trend towards educating children with disability in mainstream schools is a positive one. None of us want to see a return to separation. But we mustn’t let ourselves become wedded to an ideology at the expense of choice and flexibility. There is no one approach that will suit everyone. In the case of the Insight Education Centre, there is a group of committed parents who feel that their children are not receiving the support they need in the mainstream system and believe they would benefit from a more intensive environment. The idea is that the Centre will equip blind and vision impaired students with the basic skills they will need to succeed in a mainstream environment.

Mainstreaming is good – but we shouldn’t make the mistaken assumption that placing all children with disability into a mainstream school means we can all relax and say “inclusion achieved,  job done”. For some children, a mainstream environment can be just as isolating as a specialist one. In the quest to make progress away from the institutional practices of the past, we must make sure we don’t let a pendulum swing determine our approach. There must be balance and there must be respect for parental choice. There is an intense debate around mainstreaming versus specialist schools, and strong arguments on both sides. For policymakers though, I am firmly of the view that the best approach is to facilitate choice and let parents decide what’s best for their child.

And for those of you who may be wondering why we committed to fund one school in one state for one type of disability, the answer is because there was an organised group of parents, a well developed proposal and a need to be addressed. But to ensure we didn’t neglect other students across Australia, we also committed to have our newly established Commonwealth Disability and Carer Ombudsman undertake an audit of special education needs at schools across Australia.

Recently the new Minister for Schools, Peter Garrett, announced a working group to advise him on strategies to assist students with disability. Whilst I am pleased that this issue appears to be on the Government’s radar, there has been enough talk and not enough action in this area. It is also concerning that within the eleven member group, there are six education representatives, two union representatives and two state education departmental representatives. Yet on a group dedicated to students with disability, there is just one disability representative. This needs to be fixed. We will wait and see what action the Government takes as a result of this consultation.

Read the full transcript of Senator Fifield's address here