According to Article 62(3) of the Education Act, in order to give the best effect and ensure the implementation of the duties mentioned in the said Act, the Minister of Education is empowered to make regulations and policies and to give directives concerning the emotional and behavioural difficulties manifested by the students.
These include those directives that may be needed to provide for the services and resources which are required for the establishment of support zones within schools and learning centres outside schools. The above faculty on the minister's part presupposes the possibility of establishing the relevant parameters and specific criteria through which the allocation of students to such zones is to be effected. Considering that such criteria are not mentioned in the Act, it can be safely assumed that these can be established by means of the minister's power to make regulations and policies and give directives.
From an educational point of view, it is essential that such criteria would be laid down specifically for both students and staff. As far as students are concerned, there need to be clearly laid out criteria governing who is to be assigned to such centres. As far as criteria governing staff selection is concerned, the regulations, recommendations and directions, that are mentioned above, need to acknowledge that neither learning support zones nor learning centres can succeed unless staff are specifically trained and appropriately qualified in the teaching of students presenting social and emotional and behavioural difficulties. Ideally, the curriculum needs to be developed by the same team of professionals and be focused on the delivery of subjects that students deem both enjoyable and relevant to their own life-course evolution. Yet, to come up with something relevant, the students must see a purpose to their lives.
This is why to consolidate any educational inputs of this kind requires a programme of individual and vocational exploration based on personal counselling for all students on both an individual and group basis. This could be accompanied by psycho-educational inputs that would assume the form of family-based interventions carried out by appropriately specialised social workers and psycho-educators on a community level. On a family-by-family basis, counselling can be focused, for instance, around such issues as self-awareness and self-exploration, anger reduction, loss and grieving, victimisation, co-dependency, emotional incest, and violence reduction.
Social work interventions can be focused on monitoring change and to ensure that family members experience interrelationships between themselves that they perceive as self-validating and mutually enriching. The focus of social workers would thereby not be on such micro-level aspects as "home" or "school" or "work", or "leisure" but rather on the meso-level aspects of the existing relationships between any two of them, such as home-school interactions or school-work transitions. Further specialised programmes can be offered to school-aged students who have abused drugs or who present mental health challenges that manifest themselves as disruptive behaviour within a school setting.
Whatever interventions are made, these must be based on a holistic appraisal of each child's particular circumstances and have clear and focused goals from the outset to the evaluation stage of the work undertaken.
The learning centres may be based on models wherein students are taken out of mainstream schools from either September to January or from February to June so as to allow enough time for effective work to take place. It is proposed that this period would not be extendable. Ancillary interventions at a community level would nonetheless be continued, including psycho-educational and social-work intervention, with each child within his own family context. This is the system that is adopted by certain pupil referral units abroad. Exceptions can be made in the case of fifth formers who are due to finish school and who could thereby be allowed to spend the whole school year at the learning centre.
The learning zones may be based on learning support unit models wherein students are assigned to specialised classes in their respective mainstream schools. Having a similar family-centred and school-centred focus as the learning centres, their emphasis would be on providing separate short-term teaching and support programmes that are addressed to facilitate the reintegration of students into mainstream classes as quickly as possible. These learning zones should fall under the responsibility of a school inclusion team that is given appropriate inputs from different professionals. Ideally, empirically conducted, ongoing assessments of each child's progress would be adopted so as to ensure that the child is obtaining the utmost from his schooling. These assessments could be carried out by teams of assessors, some from among the school staff that houses the learning zone itself, and some from a specialised unit that can offer further input to this end.
The lack of specialised schools that cater specifically for girls with emotional and behavioural difficulties also deserves specific mention. Naturally, if learning support zones are to be established within primary school set-ups, these should assume a different pedagogic framework from those in secondary schools due to the different needs of the children concerned. Ideally, learning centres should cater for young people at secondary school level only, since taking a child out of his school at too young an age for a short while and then reinserting him in the school he previously attended could prove to be an experience that is more traumatic than it is cathartic.
In brief, for learning zones and learning centres to be successful, three essential criteria need to be satisfied. Primarily, they must be based on clear entry and exit criteria that are imposed upon staff without exception. Secondly, they must be manned by specifically and adequately qualified personnel. Thirdly, they must be based on supportive, interpersonal relationships between educators, students, families of students, and relevant outside agencies.
Dr Spiteri is a practising social worker and an educator. He is specialised in life-course transitions of at-risk youths.