Ministry Discusses Special Education Training

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Education

Monday, 25 February 2013 02:30

By Delana Isles

Antigua St. John's - As the Education ministry seeks to make universal education available to all students, particularly at the secondary level, it is still working toward effectively diagnosing and educating children with special needs and learning disabilities.

Ministry officials recently met with principals and teachers at primary and secondary private and public schools to share ideas on how to achieve its goal.

One of the presenters at the meeting was Assistant Director of Education responsible for Planning Doristeen Etinoff. She told the gathering that in order to help these children effectively and help the ministry to achieve its goal, the ministry must increase the number of teachers trained to deal with these children.

“We are hoping that even among the teachers out there, there are those who would be willing to specialize,” she said.

Ongoing training will have to be provided, and Etinoff noted that one session of training would not make a teacher able to handle children with learning difficulties.

“It is an ongoing process, and so in order to ensure that our children are dealt with fairly, we are hoping that the teachers would come forward to participate, and would want to do so,” she said.

Meanwhile, head of the Education Broadcast Unit within the Ministry, Phillip Lloyd, told Caribarena the ministry is still setting up a facility to accurately diagnose children with special needs, which the regular school system is not equipped to detect.
He said, “We have a dyslexic programme that we (use to) assess students with dyslexia, but these days there are a range of disabilities that have come to light and have become quite popular, and I would say we have not yet put the mechanism in place to assess a lot of those.”

The ministry set up a special needs council last year, and one of its mandates was the establishment of a diagnostic centre. But that this has not been done as yet.

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“I think the building has been identified, but some work had to be done on it,” Lloyd said. “With the financial resources in the country and so on, that was not done, but we are hoping that within the next year or two, that centre will come on stream, and we will have qualified persons there to assess a wide range of disabilities and learning difficulties students may have, so that we are then better able to deal with them.”

Lloyd said there are a few teachers undergoing training overseas, and “We hope that by the time they come back, that the centre will be in place so that they can get to work.”

He noted that there was a little disappointment over the number of teachers that came forward, but they are grateful.

“It takes a lot of patience, it is something you must really really want to do...” he said.

Training for teachers is available at the Summer Institute, which has since last year given prominence to learning difficulties among students.

Some of the training programmes offered for educators are Speech and Language Therapy, Brain Development and Student Engagement, Autism, Positive Behaviour Management, Multi-grade Teaching, ICT Integration, and Mathematics.

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