Date: 09/07/2004
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: E Surty: Workshop on Equalisation of Opportunities for Disabled Persons in Education
SPEECH BY THE DEPUTY MINISTER OF EDUCATION, MR ENVER SURTY, MP, AT THE WORKSHOP ON THE EQUALISATION OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR DISABLED PERSONS IN EDUCATION, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 9 July 2004
Chairperson
Distinguished delegates
Ladies and gentlemen
Thank you for inviting me to speak at this important workshop. I am certain that the deliberations here will contribute greatly to our own efforts as the Government to improve access to education for all our people.
During her Budget Speech on 18 June 2004, the Minister of Education, Ms Naledi Pandor, among other things, emphasised the provision of access to quality education for all as a key priority of our Ministry.
As part of this broad mission to improve access to quality education for all, we have put disability on our radar screens. I wish to assure you that we take very seriously the objectives of the White Paper on Public Service Delivery (Batho Pele) to promote equitable representation of people with disabilities; to remove barriers for people with disabilities in employment and to eliminate unfair discrimination; to develop a human resource strategy and programme to ensure training and reorientation of people with disabilities; and to ensure representation and participation of people with disabilities in decision-making.
In this regard, the Department of Education has among its staff compliment officials who are disabled, although I believe we can still do more to bring in members of staff who are disabled. To ensure that these officials are able to do their work without hindrances related to their disability, the Department has put in place sufficient mechanisms to facilitate access to all parts of our head office in Pretoria. These include ramps and accessible toilets. This was not the case when we inherited the building from the apartheid administration in 1994.
We have also brailed our policies to ensure that they are accessible to the blind. Further, assistive devices and other necessary equipment are also in place to provide the appropriate support for our employees to function optimally. Several opportunities have also been created for the personal development of disabled staff.
Today I wish to focus on our national policy and to indicate the number of initiatives undertaken by our Department to provide you with a sense of how we are advancing the equalisation of opportunities for disabled persons.
Our policy is based on the principles and values contained in the Constitution. Translated into policy, the Constitutional values have meant the promotion of human rights and social justice for all learners; participation and social integration; equal access to a single, inclusive education system; access to the curriculum; equity and redress; and responsiveness to our community.
At this point, it might be worth elaborating on how we define inclusive education and training. First, we acknowledge that all children and youth can learn and that all children and youth need support. Second, education structures, systems and learning methods should meet the needs of all learners. Third, we believe that we should acknowledge and respect differences in learners, whether due to age, gender, ethnicity, language, class, disability, HIV and AIDS as well as other infectious diseases. Fourth, inclusive education should be seen as being broader than formal schooling, acknowledging that learning also occurs in the home and community, and within formal and informal settings and structures. Fifth, we believe we face the challenge of changing attitudes, behaviours, teaching methods, curricula and environments to meet the needs of all learners. Sixth, inclusive education means maximising the participation of all learners in the culture and the curriculum of educational institutions and uncovering and minimising barriers to learning.
Our Ministry recognises that access to learning is influenced by a wide range of factors. Therefore, our approach is not confined to disability or to an individual deficit model. We are of the view that different learning needs may arise from a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, negative attitudes to and stereotyping of difference; an inflexible curriculum; inappropriate languages of learning and teaching; inappropriate communication; inaccessible and unsafe built environments; inappropriate and inadequate support services; inadequate policies and legislation; non-recognition and non-involvement of parents; and inadequately and inappropriately trained education managers and educators.
In accepting this inclusive approach, we acknowledge that the learners who are most vulnerable to barriers to learning and exclusion in South Africa are those who have been historically termed "learners with special education needs", i.e. learners with disabilities and impairments. Their increased vulnerability has arisen largely because of our history of less than adequate educational support provided to these learners.
Based on the lessons learnt from implementing other policies and in the light of the complexity of the task relating to transformation towards an inclusive system, the Department of Education has embarked on a twenty-year plan to provide mechanisms for the inclusion of learners with disability in line with Education White Paper 6 on Special Needs Education.
In building towards the achievement of our inclusive education goals in the next twenty years, we have adopted short-term steps that involve field-testing. These piloting steps, which we hope to have completed by 2006, include the implementation of a national advocacy plan and education programme on inclusive education; planning a targeted outreach programme, beginning in the Government's rural and urban developmental nodes, to mobilise disabled out-of-school children and youth; completing the audit of special schools and implementing a programme to improve efficiency and quality; designating, planning and implementing the conversion of thirty special schools into resource centres in thirty designated school districts; designating, planning and implementing the conversion of thirty primary schools to full service schools in the same thirty districts I mentioned earlier; designating and putting in place district support teams in these thirty districts; and the gradual orientation and introduction of managers, governing bodies and professional staff to the inclusion model in all public education institutions. As part of our plan, we also aim to establish, on a gradual basis, systems and procedures for the early identification and addressing of barriers to learning in Grades R to 3.
In order to develop a feasible implementation plan in the medium to long-term, we will undertake a number of research tasks during the field-test. The research will inform the development of medium and long-term plans and future system-wide implementation. The research includes the costing of an ideal district support team; costing the conversion of special schools into resource centres; the costing of an ideal full-service school; devising a personnel plan; and costing non-personnel expenditure requirements.
What is very clear is that in order to move towards an inclusive education and training system, we have to keep in mind we had two parallel systems in the past. The first system was the ordinary school system and the second, the special school system. Both systems had their own understandings of teaching and learning. A clear by-product of that history was the understanding that anyone who could not succeed in the ordinary sector should be moved to the special sector, irrespective of the severity of his or her perceived problem. This followed logically from the individual deficit model, which paid scant attention to the system deficiencies that militated against effective learning. It was this type of thinking that influenced the majority of teachers and educationists.
Inclusive education requires of us to move away from the dual system we inherited from apartheid, to a single system in the long-term. This involves changing or radically revisiting entrenched notions and understandings of teaching and learning that excluded many learners from ordinary education. Interventions at a systemic level must create the conditions for a single system. Thus a substantial period of time is being spent on advocacy, production of new knowledge, adaptation of the curriculum, and the development of human, physical and material resources.
Inclusive education as an approach is beginning to influence various programmes in the national and provincial education departments. These include quality assurance, whole school evaluation, further education and training, early childhood education, adult basic education and training, and educational management and governance development. Thus the underlying message and emphasis of mainstreaming disability and addressing barriers to learning is beginning to be heard.
Understandings of an inclusive system are taking hold throughout the system as a result of several initiatives. Our advocacy programme, which involved visits by our officials to provinces, districts and schools, informed key role players about Education White Paper 6 on Special Needs Education.
We have involved university personnel, provincial departments, disability movements, and teacher unions in the development of concept documents to ensure that there is common understanding among us. I would like to take this opportunity to thank higher education institutions for adopting inclusive education for their programmes. We are also impressed by the number of post-graduate students at universities who are conducting research in the area of inclusive education.
Inclusive education also formed a key feature in the training of Grade R to 6 teachers in ordinary and special schools during the orientation on the Revised National Curriculum Statement in 2003 and 2004. We will be targeting Grade 7 to 9 teachers next year.
As we move towards inclusive education, the large number of disabled out-of-school children and youth has concerned us. During our advocacy campaign, we have encouraged provinces, districts, schools, universities, community organisations and the disability movement to assist us in reaching these children. The place of these learners is not one of isolation in the dark backrooms and sheds. It is with their peers, in schools, on the playgrounds, and in places of worship where they can fully be part of local communities, enjoying the freedom we fought so hard for.
Our approach in mobilising all our people to join us in equalising educational opportunities for all has been characterised by partnerships. We have, for example, facilitated closer working relationships between our provincial departments of education and the disability movement and many NGOs. DEAFSA, provincial officials and university academics have, for instance, been encouraged to jointly address the issue of the lack of sign language interpreters.
We have recently completed an audit of all special schools. We now face the challenge of repositioning these schools to perform a new role within an inclusive education and training system. I must add here that special schools have an important role in the new system. There is no intention whatsoever to abolish special schools, as we have heard from many who have not given themselves time to read our policies and who, as a result, have a narrow understanding of our approach to inclusive education. Provinces are currently looking at those schools that have been disadvantaged with a view to expanding and improving facilities to cope with more children that require support.
With the assistance of key stakeholders throughout the country, we have adapted the National Curriculum Statement (Grades R-9) to meet the requirements of inclusion. The adapted curriculum provides guidelines on the adaptation of learning programmes, work schedules and lesson plans to accommodate all learners in an inclusive education system; the adaptation of learning area statements; and the use of inclusive teaching, learning and assessment methods.
We will field test this adapted curriculum in the full-service schools and the special schools/resource centres I referred to earlier. We will then put them out for system-wide implementation, taking the lessons of the field test into account.
The Department of Education recently commissioned a service provider to develop a report on the physical and material resources that will be required in the full-service schools. We will use the report to provide the necessary assistive devices and other mechanisms that will make these schools accessible to all. By the end of the year, we shall have trained staff in all full-service schools, district-based support teams and special schools/resource centres.
I would like to emphasise the pivotal role of higher education in ensuring the success of inclusive education in our country. Besides the training of teachers and related personnel, it is important that learners who are disabled have access to higher education. Together with the Council on Higher Education, we have commissioned research on issues related to disability and higher education. This report will be tabled shortly.
In concluding, I am sure that you are aware of the magnitude of the task. I want to take this opportunity to invite all stakeholders to support us in this challenging task that lies ahead. It is not possible to complete this task without partners. Telkom, for example, made a substantial investment in providing Braille facilities and training in some of our special schools. Danida has assisted with transporting officials to the training centre in which training in Braille was provided. Some of our most disadvantaged schools have benefited from this exercise and these Braille facilities are open to community members as well. I also wish to express our gratitude to Danida and the Finnish governments, who have sponsored our pilot projects.
It is against this background that I want to invite the higher education institutions to continue to participate actively in the production of new knowledge, to develop a research agenda that is consistent with White Paper 6 and to be centrally involved in the important task of creating the space and possibilities for an inclusive education and training system.
I thank you
Issued by: Ministry of Education
9 July 2004
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: E Surty: Workshop on Equalisation of Opportunities for Disabled Persons in Education
SPEECH BY THE DEPUTY MINISTER OF EDUCATION, MR ENVER SURTY, MP, AT THE WORKSHOP ON THE EQUALISATION OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR DISABLED PERSONS IN EDUCATION, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 9 July 2004
Chairperson
Distinguished delegates
Ladies and gentlemen
Thank you for inviting me to speak at this important workshop. I am certain that the deliberations here will contribute greatly to our own efforts as the Government to improve access to education for all our people.
During her Budget Speech on 18 June 2004, the Minister of Education, Ms Naledi Pandor, among other things, emphasised the provision of access to quality education for all as a key priority of our Ministry.
As part of this broad mission to improve access to quality education for all, we have put disability on our radar screens. I wish to assure you that we take very seriously the objectives of the White Paper on Public Service Delivery (Batho Pele) to promote equitable representation of people with disabilities; to remove barriers for people with disabilities in employment and to eliminate unfair discrimination; to develop a human resource strategy and programme to ensure training and reorientation of people with disabilities; and to ensure representation and participation of people with disabilities in decision-making.
In this regard, the Department of Education has among its staff compliment officials who are disabled, although I believe we can still do more to bring in members of staff who are disabled. To ensure that these officials are able to do their work without hindrances related to their disability, the Department has put in place sufficient mechanisms to facilitate access to all parts of our head office in Pretoria. These include ramps and accessible toilets. This was not the case when we inherited the building from the apartheid administration in 1994.
We have also brailed our policies to ensure that they are accessible to the blind. Further, assistive devices and other necessary equipment are also in place to provide the appropriate support for our employees to function optimally. Several opportunities have also been created for the personal development of disabled staff.
Today I wish to focus on our national policy and to indicate the number of initiatives undertaken by our Department to provide you with a sense of how we are advancing the equalisation of opportunities for disabled persons.
Our policy is based on the principles and values contained in the Constitution. Translated into policy, the Constitutional values have meant the promotion of human rights and social justice for all learners; participation and social integration; equal access to a single, inclusive education system; access to the curriculum; equity and redress; and responsiveness to our community.
At this point, it might be worth elaborating on how we define inclusive education and training. First, we acknowledge that all children and youth can learn and that all children and youth need support. Second, education structures, systems and learning methods should meet the needs of all learners. Third, we believe that we should acknowledge and respect differences in learners, whether due to age, gender, ethnicity, language, class, disability, HIV and AIDS as well as other infectious diseases. Fourth, inclusive education should be seen as being broader than formal schooling, acknowledging that learning also occurs in the home and community, and within formal and informal settings and structures. Fifth, we believe we face the challenge of changing attitudes, behaviours, teaching methods, curricula and environments to meet the needs of all learners. Sixth, inclusive education means maximising the participation of all learners in the culture and the curriculum of educational institutions and uncovering and minimising barriers to learning.
Our Ministry recognises that access to learning is influenced by a wide range of factors. Therefore, our approach is not confined to disability or to an individual deficit model. We are of the view that different learning needs may arise from a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, negative attitudes to and stereotyping of difference; an inflexible curriculum; inappropriate languages of learning and teaching; inappropriate communication; inaccessible and unsafe built environments; inappropriate and inadequate support services; inadequate policies and legislation; non-recognition and non-involvement of parents; and inadequately and inappropriately trained education managers and educators.
In accepting this inclusive approach, we acknowledge that the learners who are most vulnerable to barriers to learning and exclusion in South Africa are those who have been historically termed "learners with special education needs", i.e. learners with disabilities and impairments. Their increased vulnerability has arisen largely because of our history of less than adequate educational support provided to these learners.
Based on the lessons learnt from implementing other policies and in the light of the complexity of the task relating to transformation towards an inclusive system, the Department of Education has embarked on a twenty-year plan to provide mechanisms for the inclusion of learners with disability in line with Education White Paper 6 on Special Needs Education.
In building towards the achievement of our inclusive education goals in the next twenty years, we have adopted short-term steps that involve field-testing. These piloting steps, which we hope to have completed by 2006, include the implementation of a national advocacy plan and education programme on inclusive education; planning a targeted outreach programme, beginning in the Government's rural and urban developmental nodes, to mobilise disabled out-of-school children and youth; completing the audit of special schools and implementing a programme to improve efficiency and quality; designating, planning and implementing the conversion of thirty special schools into resource centres in thirty designated school districts; designating, planning and implementing the conversion of thirty primary schools to full service schools in the same thirty districts I mentioned earlier; designating and putting in place district support teams in these thirty districts; and the gradual orientation and introduction of managers, governing bodies and professional staff to the inclusion model in all public education institutions. As part of our plan, we also aim to establish, on a gradual basis, systems and procedures for the early identification and addressing of barriers to learning in Grades R to 3.
In order to develop a feasible implementation plan in the medium to long-term, we will undertake a number of research tasks during the field-test. The research will inform the development of medium and long-term plans and future system-wide implementation. The research includes the costing of an ideal district support team; costing the conversion of special schools into resource centres; the costing of an ideal full-service school; devising a personnel plan; and costing non-personnel expenditure requirements.
What is very clear is that in order to move towards an inclusive education and training system, we have to keep in mind we had two parallel systems in the past. The first system was the ordinary school system and the second, the special school system. Both systems had their own understandings of teaching and learning. A clear by-product of that history was the understanding that anyone who could not succeed in the ordinary sector should be moved to the special sector, irrespective of the severity of his or her perceived problem. This followed logically from the individual deficit model, which paid scant attention to the system deficiencies that militated against effective learning. It was this type of thinking that influenced the majority of teachers and educationists.
Inclusive education requires of us to move away from the dual system we inherited from apartheid, to a single system in the long-term. This involves changing or radically revisiting entrenched notions and understandings of teaching and learning that excluded many learners from ordinary education. Interventions at a systemic level must create the conditions for a single system. Thus a substantial period of time is being spent on advocacy, production of new knowledge, adaptation of the curriculum, and the development of human, physical and material resources.
Inclusive education as an approach is beginning to influence various programmes in the national and provincial education departments. These include quality assurance, whole school evaluation, further education and training, early childhood education, adult basic education and training, and educational management and governance development. Thus the underlying message and emphasis of mainstreaming disability and addressing barriers to learning is beginning to be heard.
Understandings of an inclusive system are taking hold throughout the system as a result of several initiatives. Our advocacy programme, which involved visits by our officials to provinces, districts and schools, informed key role players about Education White Paper 6 on Special Needs Education.
We have involved university personnel, provincial departments, disability movements, and teacher unions in the development of concept documents to ensure that there is common understanding among us. I would like to take this opportunity to thank higher education institutions for adopting inclusive education for their programmes. We are also impressed by the number of post-graduate students at universities who are conducting research in the area of inclusive education.
Inclusive education also formed a key feature in the training of Grade R to 6 teachers in ordinary and special schools during the orientation on the Revised National Curriculum Statement in 2003 and 2004. We will be targeting Grade 7 to 9 teachers next year.
As we move towards inclusive education, the large number of disabled out-of-school children and youth has concerned us. During our advocacy campaign, we have encouraged provinces, districts, schools, universities, community organisations and the disability movement to assist us in reaching these children. The place of these learners is not one of isolation in the dark backrooms and sheds. It is with their peers, in schools, on the playgrounds, and in places of worship where they can fully be part of local communities, enjoying the freedom we fought so hard for.
Our approach in mobilising all our people to join us in equalising educational opportunities for all has been characterised by partnerships. We have, for example, facilitated closer working relationships between our provincial departments of education and the disability movement and many NGOs. DEAFSA, provincial officials and university academics have, for instance, been encouraged to jointly address the issue of the lack of sign language interpreters.
We have recently completed an audit of all special schools. We now face the challenge of repositioning these schools to perform a new role within an inclusive education and training system. I must add here that special schools have an important role in the new system. There is no intention whatsoever to abolish special schools, as we have heard from many who have not given themselves time to read our policies and who, as a result, have a narrow understanding of our approach to inclusive education. Provinces are currently looking at those schools that have been disadvantaged with a view to expanding and improving facilities to cope with more children that require support.
With the assistance of key stakeholders throughout the country, we have adapted the National Curriculum Statement (Grades R-9) to meet the requirements of inclusion. The adapted curriculum provides guidelines on the adaptation of learning programmes, work schedules and lesson plans to accommodate all learners in an inclusive education system; the adaptation of learning area statements; and the use of inclusive teaching, learning and assessment methods.
We will field test this adapted curriculum in the full-service schools and the special schools/resource centres I referred to earlier. We will then put them out for system-wide implementation, taking the lessons of the field test into account.
The Department of Education recently commissioned a service provider to develop a report on the physical and material resources that will be required in the full-service schools. We will use the report to provide the necessary assistive devices and other mechanisms that will make these schools accessible to all. By the end of the year, we shall have trained staff in all full-service schools, district-based support teams and special schools/resource centres.
I would like to emphasise the pivotal role of higher education in ensuring the success of inclusive education in our country. Besides the training of teachers and related personnel, it is important that learners who are disabled have access to higher education. Together with the Council on Higher Education, we have commissioned research on issues related to disability and higher education. This report will be tabled shortly.
In concluding, I am sure that you are aware of the magnitude of the task. I want to take this opportunity to invite all stakeholders to support us in this challenging task that lies ahead. It is not possible to complete this task without partners. Telkom, for example, made a substantial investment in providing Braille facilities and training in some of our special schools. Danida has assisted with transporting officials to the training centre in which training in Braille was provided. Some of our most disadvantaged schools have benefited from this exercise and these Braille facilities are open to community members as well. I also wish to express our gratitude to Danida and the Finnish governments, who have sponsored our pilot projects.
It is against this background that I want to invite the higher education institutions to continue to participate actively in the production of new knowledge, to develop a research agenda that is consistent with White Paper 6 and to be centrally involved in the important task of creating the space and possibilities for an inclusive education and training system.
I thank you
Issued by: Ministry of Education
9 July 2004
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