Inclusive Education – becoming a far fetched dream for kids with Special needs ?

Hi All,

from my personal experiences of school hunting for my son with special needs and information gathered from fellow parents, i realized that how expensive it has become to get your child placed in Inclusive school. Also the model that is being followed currently in the name of inclusion is setting a wrong precedence for other schools who wants to become inclusive. When majority of the schools follow a particular pattern, it becomes a trend and a norm.

An inclusive school, which handles children with special needs is expected to provide the necessary accommodations for that child to perform his task like his neurotypical peers as they require some assistance. Now to help the child, schools can either provide a Shadow teacher or allow the parent to recruit a shadow teacher or be one for their child. The role of shadow teacher is to help the child to cope with the task provided by teachers during classroom session. A shadow teacher can be a dedicated one or can be shared i.e. 1 shadow teacher can only look after 1 child or 1 shadow teacher can look after more than 1 child. From personal experience, i see that most of the Inclusive schools do not have a shadow teacher in their payrolls, it has to be provided by the Parent. People who have done B.ed or equivalent courses are normally eligible to be a shadow teacher, however parents are allowed be a shadow teacher for their child in few schools as well. The classroom teacher and shadow teacher provides their feedback about the child on regular basis and the parent is expected to work with the child to resolve the issues or avail services of a professional. Most of the parents, including me are fine with this model as it makes sense, but in reality there is a difference.

First lets see the types of schools that admit children with special needs. In Chennai I have not seen many Matriculation/State board (sama cheer) schools that admit children with special needs, apart from the schools that are run by the Government. IB, ICSE, CBSE curriculum based schools alone admit such children that too not all of them, we may have less than 20 schools in the whole city which are of inclusive nature.
(I am not considering about special schools or schools that cater only to children with special needs in this list). Now even in these schools the children with special needs will most likely follow an IEP or NIOS curriculum only.

The reason why there are not many inclusive schools in the city is due to the additional cost and associated responsibility. To become a inclusive schools, you need to hire professionals such as Special educators, occupational therapists, speech therapists, behavior therapists, etc.. and each kids have to be assessed, goals are to be set, progress needs to be monitored etc., which is an additional headache from schools perspective. However due to the legal compliance or mere willingness, few schools have become inclusive but they totally outsource the responsibility of taking care of the special needs children to the third party organization. These third party organization are nothing but your therapy centers, who collaborates with the schools to take care of the specialized services.

Now it looks more assuring when i say that therapy centers are the ones who takes care of children with special needs in schools, as they are trained professionals and have experience handling such children, so our children are in good and safe hands. Now the catch here is, if you are admitting your child to an inclusive school which have outsourced special needs services to a therapy center, you have to avail the services of shadow teaching provided by that therapy center alone and not only that, you should also avail their therapy services as well. This is a model which i feel is going to become a norm from here on.

Now the question is, what is wrong in availing the shadow teaching and therapy services from the therapy center affiliated to the school, it should be more beneficial to the child as they know the issues faced by the child in a classroom, and they will fix the issues as well through their therapy services, which is a win win situation for the parents. In an ideal nation it is the best option, since we live in India we have to look at things that may go wrong in this model, below are few pointers which came to my mind:

1) Ownership and Responsibility

The school may not want to take the ownership and responsibility for such kids, so it is the therapy center which takes care of the child. School may not have any say in what the therapy center does, parents would be asked to take it up with the therapy center directly. So the school is not the responsible party here for such kids.

2) Cost of Inclusive education

In all inclusive schools the fees you pay is split in to two parts basically. One is what you pay to the school for the academic services that they offer, another one is for the specialized services that is offered to the child with special needs. IB schools are the expensive ones in the city, the academic fee starts from 2 lacs per annum to 7 lacs per annum for Grade 1, you can extrapolate the rise in cost for other grades…
CBSE and ICSE are some what closer, they are in the range of 1 to 2 lacs per annum which most of the middle class parents can afford. Some schools even charge a higher academic fees for special needs children.

Now for the specialized services, it is further split in to two, one is for the Shadow teacher and another is for the therapy services. Shadow teacher is supposed to be a person in addition to the class teacher who shall take care/help the child whenever required. There are two classes of shadow teacher, one is the shadow teacher dedicated for one particular child and another is a shared shadow teacher who takes care of more than one child in that classroom.
For a dedicated shadow teacher the market rate if anywhere between 7K to 18K per month depending on the teachers qualification and other necessary skills. If it is shared shadow teacher, the price is less than 10K per month. Now coming to the therapy services, the therapy centers charge between 10 to 20K per month for the child. In addition to this, few centers charge additional amount for materials that are going to be used for their child as well.

So in short if you calculate the total fee if you are opting for a cheapest form of Inclusive school in the city, you have to pay:

Academic Fees of 1,50,000 Rs (Books, uniforms, donation, tution fee, special fee alone – Not considering transportation and food charges)
Shared shadow Teacher of 72,000 ( assuming 6K per month is charged)
Therapy services of 1,44,000 (assuming 12K per month is charged)
Additional materials 20,000

Total amount per annum is 3,86,000 Rs (with assumed amounts, which can go higher or lower) which is on the higher side for an household with average income.

3) Therapy services

Most parents of children with special needs are already associated with a therapy center or a set of therapists before approaching the school for admission as they are starting therapy to thier child by the age of 2-3, so the child has a good rapport with the current therapists. There is a very good chance that the child may be already getting a better and/or affordable therapy services outside school which they may have to discontinue. Also you get to decide on the number of therapy sessions your child requires, like if a child has sensory issues you take more Occupational therapy sessions, in case of speech delay you take more speech therapy sessions etc…..and more than that you have a freedome to choose the best therapist available in the market, at the same time you have a freedom to discontinue with a therapist if she/he is not able to cater to the needs of the child.
In a school provided therapy service, you do not get to choose the number of sessions or what types of therapy services you need, you get a fixed number of therapy sessions every week on fixed days. You do not get to choose the therapists, you cannot verify the credentials of a therapist, there is a very good chance that therapists may get changed frequently, also the biggest worry of all is you cannot verify if the therapy services are actually getting provided or not. Also you cannot continue in that school without availing their therapy services.

4) Trade off between Classes and Therapy Services

Now the other aspect of therapy services provided by the school is that, it will be provided during the school hours. So your kid will be pulled away from the regular classes whenever they are going to receive therapy services, so it is clear that he will loose many of his regular classes. Now when you loose a class in between, the continuity is lost on whatever is being taught, so the time your child is spending in the school is not academically beneficial. Also i imagine the special needs children would have an IEP (Individualized Education Plan), and what the class teacher teaches to all the children will not apply to the special needs children as the curriculum he is supposed to learn will be different. So i wonder how it will be beneficial to the child from academic perspective when the focus in on therapy and tailor made curriculum. Instead of joining a school, you could focus on therapy outside and have a special education with specialized curriculum which is the same for a lesser cost and you would be in complete control of what happens to the child.

5) Inclusion or Segregation

Inclusion refers to allowing your children to sit in a regular classroom with other kids and seggregartion is a model where the child is separated from the regular classroom and sits in a different room. It is common to pull out the child whenver there is a excessive stimming or disruptive behaviours that would impact the classes, teacher or fellow children, but there is no assurance as to how many classes he would be made to sit in inclusive model and in a seggregation model.

6) Child becoming Independent

The expectation of the inclusion model is to train the child adopt to the classroom etiquette by working on his sensory and/or behavior issues, so that he does not need such support in future and can become independent. From a parents perspective the child becoming independant is the positive news, but from the perspective of the therapy services it is a loss of business for them, as the child would no longer need the therapy or shadow teaching services. Due to the loss of business, i expect some lack of transparency or manipulation on the childs actual progress to the parents, to protray the image that the child still is in need of therapy services.

7) Admission Process

With respect to the admission process, it is the therapy center affiliated with the school who takes the decision, school has little or no role in this process. There will be an assessment process to check the current level of knowledge (reading and writing), sensory, behavior related issues of the child, expressive and understanding language skills etc…
Now these assessments are to be done properly and honestly to determine whether the child would require therapy services or not. To ensure that the therapy services get a continued business, the assessments are made difficult to convince the parent that the child is not up to the standard and he shall be admitted a grade lower or he has to receive their therapy services in full. If this happens, i feel sorry for all those parents who get trapped by it.

8) Contract or Legal Bond

No schools have never asked parents to sign any contract till date, but for inclusive schools affiliated with therapy centers, you may have to enter in to a contract, which i only assume is going to be drafted 100% favorable to them and relieve them from any responsibilities. You loose the freedom of making decisions in middle of academic year, as you may be bound by the contract to continue with them whether you like it or not.

If your child is academically capable or only faced with learning disability, you can avail inclusive schools that are not affiliated to any therapy center, and take care of shadow teacher expense alone. If your child has special needs , whether we like it or not, we have to select from what is made available to us, no point in debating what is right there….
If you are a open minded parent, you can totally ignore schooling your child and opt for NIOS curriculum where you can train the child with special educators and appear only for exams in individual capacity. This way , you will save enough money….
Not every parent can imagine spending 4-6 lacs per annum for 12 years for an inclusive education and you do not have a cheaper option, either you take it or leave it.

I hope in future the model becomes more flexible, parent and child friendly and less expensive.

Regards,
Saranya and karthik
karthiksaranyaparents@gmail.com