As a parent of a young adult with disability, I am finding it interesting, while on holiday in Scotland, to follow the debate within the Moray local council on whether it is necessary to concentrate youngsters who need additional help in special schools because of tightening budgets.

I read the news here well-knowing that about 600 youngsters in Malta are ‘statemented’ each year as requiring extra help. Is this not posing ‘a significant challenge’ to Malta’s schools too?

The arguments in Scotland follow something like this.

The CEO of Down’s Syndrome Scotland said: “If the council were to take a broad-brush approach and send every pupil with special needs to a specialised school then that would take us back years... We believe that children with disability can and do thrive in mainstream education and that, from having a disabled classmate, their peers benefit too. It helps children learn that we are all different and we all have different needs.”

Pandora Summerfield continued that “some children do benefit from being in a specialised school setting; it all depends on the child”. The spokesman for the Moray and Nairn branch of the National Autism Society said the move could be a boon for the area, provided that children were assigned to the school on an individual basis.

Glyn Morris, himself a parent, said: “A specialised facility could be incredible for some parents as it should mean that their children receive a better quality of care... A condition like autism has such a wide spectrum, careful consideration would need to be given on how to decide where each child should go”.

The arguments in Malta would, indicatively, go like this.

All politicians: “... let’s not rock the boat… too many votes are involved.”

All sensible public administrators: “What other benefits have to be foregone to allow the annual cost of learning support assistants for special children to rise to €20 million and beyond each year?”

Most parents: “Mainstreaming has certainly been good for our egos... indeed, additional costly support beyond the age of 16/24 is called for.”

The Malta Employers Association: “We are cynical about the preparedness for work of young adults with disability... and we cringe at the knowledge that our small State will have spent over €250,000 in additional support costs on each; it is not employers but educationalists who have condemned 90 per cent of them to long-term unemployment.”

Are we, in Malta, sure we can financially afford to brush aside the need for an erudite debate on this sensitive subject rather than rely on the mere superficiality of the facts that PN-led governments of the past two decades engaged some 2,000 LSAs for pre-16 special needs support and that this Labour-led government has now pledged effective job coach support post-24?

A ‘just’ society cannot continue to mismanage its public services for persons with disability

Will history not eventually judge us on whether we have sufficiently debated and adopted a less costly but more seamless life-long support programme, especially for those with the more difficult intellectual or mental health challenges?

When my Down’s daughter was being educated in England in the 1980s, nearly everybody who had additional needs automatically went to a special school.Like others of her cohort, she was also challenged by poor eyesight; she still cannot read and write but she leads a socially-active life and she keeps saying: “Dats, I’m happy.”

I have since been exposed to much in Malta due to my volunteering financial stewardship to sector educational NGOs for just under 25 years. I am, nevertheless, undecided as to whether I feel that it is time the Malta government partially revises the philosophy of choice of mainstream education based primarily on parents’ desire supported by a dose of individual politician’s patronage.

As an accountant and as one obsessed with social fairness and solidarity, I am inclined to favour public investment that is sufficient but not surplus to each one’s individual needs as determined by strictly independent multidisciplinary teams.

The purpose of this opinion piece is to make an appeal for academically-qualified experts in this field to come forward to suggest how the public monies that are available can be spread around more equitably than hitherto.

A society that wants to be considered ‘just’ cannot continue to mismanage its public services for persons with disability.

It costs the government over €60,000 to provide just one person with disability with residential care, sometimes for a duration that exceeds 30 years (€1.8 million per adult lifetime).

The partial day care that is offered within the State’s so-called ‘adult training centres’ are costing about €18,000 per person every year (which equates to €12.5 per hour or 75 per day).

The result of such financial inefficiency is that only about 50 persons can be afforded full-time care and only circa 400 intellectually-challenged people are offered out-of-home day care out of a cohort totalling almost 5,000 (92 per cent get no support at all).

Need we really spend so much on so few?

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