Ed Support Thoughts

Our students are very lucky to have the benefit of a variety of therapists working with them; some funded by the government through Disability Services Commission (DSC) or National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and some funded privately by parents.  Increasingly, therapists visit the students at school, work with them there and train staff in how to work with them.  We provide (as much as we are able in our little school) a small area for them to work individually with various students, some of them have weekly visits at times.  Therapists also have individual meetings with staff and give them written reports of their findings with ideas for how to work with students in class, objectives to be added to their IEPs and so on.  This all works well.

However, our experience has shown that all of this additional work being put in at school to help a student may be in vain if the parents are not also using similar strategies successfully at home.  We have seen an increase in the number of parents who have a limited understanding of the disability of their child or emotional regulation or behaviour modification and sometimes have no interest in having therapists attend their homes (they have the concept that ‘all that stuff can be done at school’).  Many therapists do at least seem to make attempts to work with parents at home but others seem content to come and do what they do just at school and of course this also fits in well with their working hours.  However, if parents are unwilling or unable to interact consistently with their children at home, any therapeutic work carried out at school will have a limited impact long term.

Therefore, I believe that we need to be careful not to fall into complacency.  It would be easy to take the money from DSC or NDIS, spend funds on teaching school staff (who may already be highly trained) how to work with their students and meanwhile neglect the more vital task of educating and training parents to work with and interact effectively with their children.   At Mount Hawthorn ESC we have seen that the educational and behavioural successes for a student are highly dependent on the effectiveness of parent input and, without adequate procedures being consistently in place at home, outcomes are likely to be limited.

For all these reasons, I would like to see that NDIS stipulate that a mimimum portion of all therapies (maybe 50%) should be delivered at home with the active input of parents.  It seems to me that otherwise there is the risk that considerable funding will be basically wasted, with a system that looks good and busy but is neglecting a fundamental and essential part of the process, namely involvement of parents in the therapy, training and education of their children.