Additional Support for Learning Assessment
1, Children have many basic needs ranging from things as simple as food and water to the need to feel safe and secure and to live within a loving home. Giving children a healthy balanced diet ensures that their body grows as it is supposed to and they can reach their developmental mile stones. It helps them to be able to concentrate and learn new things. Children need to be able to feel safe and secure were every they may be wither it be at home school or nursery this will help to give them the confidence to grow and become confident individuals as they enter adulthood. Feeling loved and happy is also very important to children as this too will help to boost their self-esteem and having good role models to help mould them into responsible young adults comes in here. Theorist Maslow believes that everyone’s most basic needs have to be met in order for them to progress through life starting with things such as food, water and shelter then moving up his hierarchy of needs to eventually reaching self-actualisation, another theorist who is Mia Kellmer Pringle says that there are four basic needs that need to be met for children from birth to ensure that they can grow and develop, these are 1, the need for love and security, 2, the need for new experiences, 3, the need for recognition and praise and 4, the need for responsibility she believes that if all children have this from birth then they have the opportunity to grow up and become what they desire. I believe in Mia Kellmer Pringles theory more than Maslow as I believe that people can move up through his hierarchy of needs without every need before being met, I feel Mia Kellmer Pringles theory is more realistic in the terms of what children need and that she states it doesn’t matter which order the needs are met as long as they are met then children will progress through life.
2. To have an additional support need it to require more help than what is regularly given, for example in main stream schooling a class will normally have one class teacher for 26 children, but if that class has a child with an additional support need then the teacher may have an assistant brought into the class ( A pupil support assistant) who will then help the child with the additional support need meet the requirements of the curriculum wither it be with class work or helping the child have social inclusion. In 1978 Mary Warnock had a report published called the Warnock report and it stated that all children must be included in the continuum of needs and that it was harmful and unfair to categorise children. Mary Warnock believe that in her time that 20% of children would need additional support and some point in their lives and that 2% would need the support for their entire lives, these percentages are much higher nowadays. After this came The Education (Scotland) Act 1981 which gave the education department the responsibility of children with additional support needs who would have normally been under the care of the health board. This Act stated that all children were legally entitled to an education changing the way things like assessments were done on children with additional support needs. Before the 1981 Act came into place children who were classed as disabled mentally or physically were assessed by a doctor and then put into categories of educable, trainable and uneducable. Children who were educable were sent to main stream school to have an education, children who were uneducable but trainable were sent to factories to be trained for work and children who were uneducable were sent to asylums to be cared for by the heath board. After this legislation was published children with additional support needs were assessed by a panel of professionals which would include doctors, health visitor, school teacher or nursery teacher etc. This also allowed for a record of needs to be kept for each individual child meaning that each person working with that child would know what their needs were and how to meet them. At this point in time parents of children with additional support needs were able to see the record of needs but had no say in it. Now that we have progressed as a society these types of things don’t happen children with additional support needs are entitled to an education the same as children who don’t have any additional support needs. As a society the way people with disabilities are treated and looked upon now is far better than it was back in Mary Warnock’s day when her report says thing like disabled people and handicapped and people used words like spastic and mongo to describe some people with disabilities nowadays these are not socially acceptable terms. As we have grown as a society so has legislation and in place now we have Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2009, within this act it gives parents the legal right to have a say in their child’s education, And I believe it helps to take away the stereotyping of children with additional support needs as with this and the Getting It Right for Every Child approach children are accepted as who they are and not what their disability is and they try their best to ensure that children who can cope with main stream schooling stay there with all the support they need. When a child has an additional support need it is said to either be a long term need or a short term need, long term being over 12 months and short term being anything up to 12 months. Long term needs are things such as Autism, dyslexia, spina bifida or cerebral palsy or cancer these conditions are things that children will need on going additional support with and may still need support right into adulthood. Short term needs could be things like bereavement, divorce, a broken bone, sickness or moving house things like bereavement and divorce may seem as though they could be long term needs but usually as much as it may effect a child it will become easier for them to cope with. Children with broken bones or sickness such as chicken pox may need the support as they may have missed school whist they were ill and may need the support to help them catch up with what they missed or moving house or school the child may need help to settle into a new place and meet new friends. These are all usually things that would not last more than 12 months therefore they are short term needs.
3. Society’s attitudes have changed immensely over time towards children with additional support needs as children now have total inclusion across the new Curriculum for Excellence 3-18. Before children only had some integration within schools and nurseries meaning that yes they were there in person and marked present on a register but they were not included in all aspects of the day to day life with in the nursery or class room. They didn’t have access to the same equipment or resources that their peers did. Within nurseries and schools now children with additional support needs are able to access the same things as their peers. Most schools and nurseries have been adapted to ensure they are accessible to children with disabilities, for example they have flat entrance ways or disabled access ramp for wheel chair users and most new built schools and nurseries will have lifts available to access. There are also specialist staff that will come into the schools and nurseries to work with children with additional support needs these range from speech and language therapist, occupational therapists to specific teachers who come to work with children who have English as an additional language. Changing the environment of the nursery or class room for children can also help wither it be by using visual aids for them or having a quiet place in the room for children who can’t cope with raised noise levels. Nurseries will make sure that they have resources that can be adapted to suit any child regardless of what their need may be. Having things like specialist chairs that you can adjust the height of so that children who use a walking frame or wheel chair can sit at the tables with their peers. I feel that society now is so used to hearing about and seeing people with disabilities that they don’t treat them any differently to how they treat others, people now are more sympathetic to someone’s situation and although it can be patronising it shows that they care even if they don’t have a full understanding of the needs the person with the disability may have. Disabilities such as Autism are becoming more known as more and more children are being diagnosed and the figures now show that 1 in 68 people in Great Britton are diagnosed with autism meaning that most nurseries and schools will come across this and it is now down to us as practitioners to share our understanding of such disabilities with children and their parents to ensure that society keeps growing and changing to help the total inclusion of people with disabilities.
4. There are two different models of Additional Support Needs these are the Medical Model and the Social Model. The Medical Model is the diagnosis or the illness it is what you get told from the doctor. The medical model is the hospital visits the child development centres it is the clinical side to the disability. It covers thing like the resources and equipment that may be needed dependent on the disability.
The social model is how society is adapted to ensure that people with disabilities are accepted and included within the world. The social model includes thing like voluntary organisations that are available to people with additional support needs and their families they can help with a number of things from help with benefits for the person with the disability to help them afford the things they may need for helping their condition such as with a child with autism there are many sensory issues involved and having the extra cash that is available from the government means that sensory things can be bought to ensure that the child’s life runs a little bit smoother on a day to day basis. The also offer things like the buddy scheme which gives parent and carers a break for a couple of hours to recuperate. The social model is also how we work as a society to change the attitudes of people towards people with disabilities wither the disability be visual or not. I feel this is an important part of the social model for people suffering from hidden disabilities as although their disability is not visible they still have it and people still need to recognise this and support them were needed..