Abstract

Some children need extra help to access the curriculum in both early childhood education and school. For children with special education needs, being in high-quality early education settings can mean more than cognitive and dispositional benefits that can have long-term effects. It can also mean access to professionals who, if appropriately qualified and supported, can identify and assess needs for additional support, and offer support and information to parents. We have heard concerns that some children with special education needs and their parents are turned away from, or made to feel unwelcome at, some early childhood education services. It appears that sufficient professional education and development may not be available for all those working in the early childhood education sector to feel that they can identify and work effectively with children with special education needs. We note that these concerns may indicate breaches of the Human Rights Act 1993, and think it likely that families of children with special education needs are being disadvantaged. Our key recommendation is that there is sufficient initial education and professional development to support an early childhood education workforce that can identify and work effectively with children with special education needs. We also recommend that information gaps are urgently addressed. These changes can be met within existing baselines. Advocacy and support services should be made available to parents of children with special education needs. This could cost up to $10m per annum.

Recommendations

The ECE Taskforce recommends:

21. development of policies that would ensure that children with special education needs are able to access suitable early childhood education services, including:

a. ensuring services have sufficient support, resources and well-qualified staff to identify and work effectively with children with special education needs;

b. making parents and service managers aware that being refused enrolment in an early childhood education service on the grounds of their child’s special education needs, or not being allowed to enrol for as many hours as other children, is a breach of the Human Rights Act 1993; and

c. considering ways to strengthen accountability mechanisms to ensure services comply with the Human Rights Act 1993, including considering amending the Education Act 1989 to enable the Minister of Education to
direct an early childhood education service to enrol a particular child, as she may do in the compulsory schooling sector

22. the development of better processes for capturing information about this group: for example, how many children with a special education need enrolled in early childhood education services are also receiving early intervention support

23. the introduction of the requirement that early childhood education initial teacher education providers ensure their programmes include sufficient study of special education to promote early identification of needs and appropriate teaching practices for children with a special education need

24. the employment or contracting of agents to assist parents of children with special educational needs to locate appropriate early childhood education services for those children and arrange places for them, along with ongoing monitoring for suitability and transition to school

25. as an interim measure, until a new funding system that includes additional targeted support for children with special education is in place, the Equity Funding mechanism for children with special education needs is reviewed to ensure that this funding is being well allocated, and if not, another formula is proposed.

Introduction

The Education Act 1989 defines ‘special education’ as “education or help from a special school, special class, special clinic, or special service”. This definition is operationalised by the Ministry of Education as the provision of extra assistance, adapted programmes or learning environments, specialised equipment or materials to support children and young people with accessing the curriculum in a range of settings. An operational definition of the characteristics of children who require special education, termed early intervention in early childhood education, also exists (see below) and covers a full spectrum from severe physical disability to psychological or intellectual impairment. Children with special education needs may also have an impairment or be disabled in terms of the New Zealand Disability Strategy’s definition.

Special education needs are child characteristics. Thus children from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds or of parents with disabilities do not of themselves necessarily have a special education need although their risk of having one may be heightened. Essay 4: Achieving Access for All Children addresses the access needs of children from other, traditionally under-represented groups, such as those from low SES backgrounds.

For children with special education needs, accessing high-quality early education settings can mean not only cognitive and dispositional benefits, but also access to professionals who, if appropriately qualified and supported, can identify and assess needs for additional support and offer support and information to parents.

It is important that children with special education needs receive the services they need at a younger, rather than an older, age because evidence shows that this is more efficient. This is because “advantages accumulate; so do disadvantages”[1]. Our key recommendation is that there be sufficient initial education and professional development to support a workforce that can identify and work effectively with children with special education needs. More about this is discussed in Essay 10: Improving Staff Education and Professional Development.

We note that, at present, there are not enough suitable early childhood education places in many parts of New Zealand. This means that services can often choose their clients, rather than the other way round. While this is no excuse for discrimination, in our view, a sector with sufficient supply and well qualified staff is an essential pre-condition of access for all children.

Relevant Policy Design Principles

This essay will address the policy design principles of:

• ensuring efficient use of government funds
• ensuring access for all
• encouraging sector collaboration
• promoting innovation across the sector, and
• creating a predictable environment for service providers.

Background

Statutory provisions

There is no entitlement to early childhood education under New Zealand law, and therefore no existing requirement on any early childhood education service to take any child. However, it is unlawful to discriminate against children in early childhood education settings on the basis of a disability. The Human Rights Act 1993 applies to ‘educational establishments’ including early childhood education services and prohibits discrimination on a range of grounds, including disability which is defined in section 21(1)(g) as:

(i) physical disability or impairment

(ii) physical illness

(iii) psychiatric illness

(iv) intellectual or psychological disability or impairment

(v) any other loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological, or anatomical structure or function

(vi) reliance on a guide dog, wheelchair, or other remedial means

(vii) the presence in the body of organisms capable of causing illness.

Several of these grounds are extremely relevant to accessing early childhood education services. The definition of special education used by the Ministry of Education’s Special Education Policy Guidelines is noted above.

The New Zealand Disability Strategy (NZDS) states that “disability is not something individuals have. What individuals have are impairments. They may be physical, sensory, neurological, psychiatric, intellectual or other impairments”[2]. The NZDS contains two objectives that are relevant to early childhood education: Objective 3: Provide the best education for disabled people; and Objective 13: Enable disabled children and youth to lead full and active lives.

Ministry of Education services

The Ministry of Education provides specialist Early Intervention (EI) services to children from birth to school age who have a

a. developmental or learning delay

b. disability

c. behaviour difficulty, or

d. communication difficulty

that significantly affects their ability to participate and learn at home or in an early childhood education setting.

This definition aligns with the discussions of terminology for disability and special education need referenced above. The services available through EI include in-depth assessment by specialist staff, development and six-monthly review of an Individual Plan (IP), and ongoing support for parents, child and early childhood education service (if used) from specialists employed or contracted by the Ministry. These specialists include:

a. Early Intervention teachers, who may work with parents, teachers, or directly with the child

b. Education Support Workers (ESW) (children with high needs only), who will work with the child in the early childhood education service

c. Resource Teachers of the deaf or visually impaired

d. Educational psychologists

e. Speech language therapists

f. Music therapists, and

g. Kaitakawaenga (Māori cultural advisers).

Equity Funding

In addition to EI services, the Ministry provides some targeted funding to services who enrol a child with special education needs through Equity Funding, the only funding stream targeted to children with particular characteristics. Equity Funding is about $13m per annum, available for a range of needs including special educational needs, paid to community-based early childhood education services located in decile 1-4 communities.

According to most recent data, just over 1000 early childhood education services received Equity Funding for special education needs. (The total was $1.4 m, just over 28% of the Equity Funding distributed.)

Equity Funding is a very small proportion of overall government funding to a service and services have considerable discretion about spending. It is not clear how effective the special needs component of Equity Funding is at supporting children with moderate special education needs.

Eligibility for this component is based on an estimate of the socio-economic status of families attending a service, and we have concerns that eligibility is not well matched to enrolments of children with moderate special education needs.

Resources available in the schooling sector

We have found that most resources available to schools to support children with special education needs are either available to early childhood education as well (for example the resources from Group Special Education, and the Positive Behaviour for Learning Action Plan), or are matched by early childhood education-specific funding. For example, Early Intervention services have policy purposes analogous to the Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Scheme for children with very high needs; and Equity Funding fulfils a similar function to the Special Education Grant paid to all schools in respect of children with moderate special education needs. Resource Teachers of Learning and Behaviour, however, are available in the schooling sector, but are not available to early childhood education services.

Reducing barriers

EI services are available to early childhood education services, where EI specialists can provide support to all staff. We note, however, our strong belief that this should not mean that early childhood education teachers are encouraged to abrogate their responsibility to support every child in their care to access the curriculum, which is explicitly designed for the inclusion of children with special education needs. In our view, having sufficiently resourced and qualified staff is an essential pre-requisite of a quality early childhood education sector that is accessible to all children.

EI services for around 12,000 children are contracted and funded annually. We attempted to assess their sufficiency but found this difficult. While Statistics New Zealand estimates that there are about 15,000 disabled children in the 0-4 population, there are also estimates that around 10% of the general population has a specific learning disability. If this ratio holds true for the 0-5 population, this would mean about 31,500 children. However, this whole-of-population estimate could include those with more moderate learning needs, such as attention deficit disorder, which do not necessarily manifest until later in childhood, and therefore do not necessarily qualify for EI support (either through lack of severity or simple absence in the early childhood age group). Because there is not a clear match between the definitions, and no specific legal definition of ‘special education needs’, we are not certain what proportion of the potentially eligible group of children is accessing EI, but note that the figures above could be considered range parameters.

A second confounding factor is that it is not possible to know how many children receiving EI services are also participating in formal early childhood education. These are important information gaps that need to be addressed in order to inform policy and service delivery development.

We have also become aware of some barriers that are faced by children with special needs and their parents in accessing early childhood education. From information presented in submissions, certain cases dealt with by the Ministry, and anecdotal evidence, we consider that barriers include situations where services may:

• enrol children with special education needs but then allow them to attend only when their Education Support Worker (ESW) is also present (in some areas the Ministry of Education limits funding for ESW time to 15 hours per week)
• discourage from attending children with special education needs but who are not entitled to EI support
• avoid engaging with low-SES or itinerant families.

The effects of some of these barriers could be to reduce access by up to 50% of the subsidised hours potentially available.

Submissions Summary

We received an important submission from IHC New Zealand Ltd, a major community-based organisation providing support and advocacy for people with intellectual disability and their families. We also met with IHC staff to discuss their submission. IHC has advised us that

anecdotal evidence suggests that some early childhood education of childcare centres are less than welcoming of children with disabilities and actively discourage families from enrolling in their service. In some of these instances, centres say that this is because they do not have the resources to meet the needs of children with disabilities.

We welcome IHC’s contribution and have drawn on it in developing our proposed policy direction.

Proposed Policy Direction

Support for families with children with special education needs is vital to achieving a fairer and better quality education sector. Our recommendations in this essay are closely linked to those contained in Essay 4: Achieving Access for All Children. They are premised on the idea that access includes suitability, or a match of service to needs. We believe that early childhood education services need encouragement and support, including through Government-supported education and funding, to serve children with special education needs, who can benefit hugely from accessing high-quality early childhood education.

The primary policy response to remedying the current situation is therefore, in our view, additional education and support for early childhood education teachers, in identifying children with special education needs and working effectively with them and their families/whānau.

Our proposed funding model contained in Essay 3: Reforming Funding Mechanisms will ensure better financial incentives for services to enrol children with special education needs in a limited supply market. Creating financial incentives is very important in a market setting, where early childhood education services are free to accept or decline any family (while respecting the Human Rights Act and other laws).

One submitter said, ‘My son has special needs. If the kindergarten teachers didn’t have their vast knowledge, experience and qualifications, he wouldn’t be able to be the best that he can be, and would struggle when he starts school.’

The supply of places for children with special education needs could also be increased by improving awareness by parents about their right to not to be discriminated against when accessing early childhood education for their children with special education needs; and expanding the Ministry of Education’s Early Intervention (EI) services to include a group of professional agents to assist parents of children with special educational needs to locate appropriate early childhood education services for those children and arrange places for them.

We see value in such professional support being made available, to parents who wish to have it, to assist with identifying and establishing suitable matches between the needs of their children and available services. This group may be able to be connected with other services and agencies working in the area such as CCS – Disability Action and the Ministry of Health’s Local Area Coordination Model, and it should promote interdisciplinary teams working in the best interests of the child. However, we recognise that this service will not be wanted by all parents and families, and that it should not duplicate or crowd out existing services.

Additional monitoring of early childhood education services’ compliance with the principles of the Human Rights Act, linked to funding or licensing, may also be required; this could be achieved through a low-compliance, high-trust mechanism such as attestation. Consideration could also be given to allowing the Minister of Education the ability to direct an early childhood education service to enrol a particular child – this need not be restricted to children with special education needs.

Anticipated Outcomes of the Policy Change

Ensuring all children can access early childhood education will have positive consequences for New Zealand. Among other things:

• providing early childhood education to children with special education needs means we will use Government funds efficiently, because there is clear research evidence that early intervention is far more economically effective than intervening in later years, such as when children are in compulsory schooling;
• supporting services to provide for all New Zealand children, and informing
  parents that children with special education needs have the same right to access early childhood education as any other group of children, will help to ensure access for all
• requiring all services to provide for all New Zealand children, and offering
  incentives to do so, will encourage sector collaboration and promote innovation across the sector as services recognise that there are many different sources of expertise that could be combined to help all
• requiring all services to provide for all New Zealand children and developing funding and requirements to achieve this will help create a predictable environment for service providers.

Cost Considerations

We anticipate that encouraging more acceptance of children with special education needs in early childhood education will increase cost pressure on the system, although the primary response, improved education, should have little cost as existing initial teacher education and professional development resources could be used better. We expect the creation of a workforce as recommended in recommendation 24 to be costly – approximately $10m per annum. However, early and appropriate interventions in the life of a child can often reduce the need for more expensive (and not necessarily as effective) interventions later during the compulsory school years. Additional costs will also be incurred by augmenting the Ministry of Education’s Early Intervention services with a group of professional agents to assist parents of children with special educational needs to locate appropriate early childhood education services for those children and arrange places for them.

The Change Process

A more detailed discussion of the phases and rationale for phasing referred to in this section can be found in Part One under Leading Change Processes.

Recommendation 25, involving a re-examination of Equity Funding in the interim, requires immediate action.

We see no reason that the recommendations from this essay, particularly b) and c) under recommendation 21, could not be included in phase one of the change process. They are relatively simple to action, and should have an immediate impact.

Recommendation 21.a, around resourcing, will need to be included alongside the new funding system, which is to be designed in phase two and implemented in phase three.

However, we also recognise that recommendations 22 and 23 may require some time to implement well. In particular, recommendation 24, regarding agents to assist parents of children with special education needs, could require a new workforce and require some dedicated expenditure. Recruitment and teacher education would need to occur, and it is entirely possible that the proposal could not be fully implemented until phase two.

References

1. Heckman, J. J. & Masterov, D.V. (2004). The productivity argument for investing in young children. New York, NY: Committee for Economic Development, p3.

2. Ministry of Health. (2001). New Zealand Disability Strategy. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Health, p1.