Saturday 20 May 2017

Disability funding shame

The revelation earlier this year that hundreds of thousands of students with a disability are in school without any additional funding to support their education has been reinforced by new statistics.

The Nationally Consistent Collection of Data (NCC) for 2016, released this week by the COAG Education Council, showed 12.4 per cent of all Australian school students — about 470,000 students — received some form of support due to a disability that required additional funding.

That is more than double the number currently getting federal and state government assistance for their education, according to figures from the Productivity Commission.

The gap in funding for 2016 was virtually unchanged from the year before — 269,000 students with a disability are in school without any additional funding for their education.

Samuel Weston, 15, is one of those students.

"I really wish the Government funded people like me. Because otherwise if they didn't, these people would continually struggle," he said.

Samuel lives with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder. He is now at TAFE after studying for three years at Patterson River Secondary College in Melbourne's south.

While at school, he attended classes with an integration aide — an education specialist who sat with him.

From Huffington Post

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