APPENDICES
2.2 The state of School Psychological Services
2.2.5 Components of School Psychological Services in South Africa
2.2.5.3 Learner support services
These are services framed by the Department of Education’s policy – Building an Integrated Education and Training System (Department of Education, 2000) – offering support in promoting learners’ well-being. These are support services which are neither learning areas, nor learner wellness services. They offer supplementary support to learners, especially learners
manifesting physical, intellectual, behavioural and academic or learning disabilities or problems.
They are inclusive education, learner support, remedial and parental involvement.
2.2.5.3.1 Inclusive Education (IE)
White Paper 6 (Department of Education, 2001) is a policy statement – a political resource and legislative framework – which led to the introduction and implementation of inclusive education in South African schools. Inclusive education is about providing schools with capacity to serve all children. This means that schools should welcome all learners, regardless of their characteristics, disadvantages or difficulties. The rationale for the introduction of inclusive education was the belief that the right to education is a basic human right and the foundation for a more just society. “It is a means of enabling mainstream schools to serve all children in their communities, its focus being on learners who traditionally were excluded from educational opportunities – also learners with special needs and disabilities” (UNESCO, 2001, p. 4). The Salamanca Conference had to deal with the situation in which children with special educational needs were experiencing barriers to their education, and existing policies were incapable of addressing the “problems and barriers they encountered in schooling which could not be overcome simply by developing separate systems and schools for children with special educational needs” (UNESCO, 2001, p. 3). The slogan the youth used during Apartheid was,
‘separate cannot be equal’ resonates with separate provisioning for learners with special needs.
The conference argued that schools should,
“accommodate all children regardless of their physical, intellectual, social, emotional, linguistic or other conditions. This should include disabled and gifted children, street and
working children, children from remote or nomadic populations, children from linguistic, ethnic, or cultural minorities and children from other disadvantaged or marginalised areas
or groups.” (UNESCO, 1994, p. 6)
The inclusive schools
must recognise and respond to the diverse needs of their students, accommodating both different styles and rates of learning and ensuring quality education to all through appropriate curricula, organisational arrangements, teaching strategies, resource use and partnership with their communities (UNESCO, 1994, pp. 11-12)
The conference felt that IE was the most effective means of combating discriminatory attitudes and creating caring and welcoming communities. Learners with disabilities or special needs are not intellectually inferior to learners without disabilities, they are just different. Lomofsky and Lazarus (2001), maintain that “inclusion is more than just mainstreaming as it is regarded as a moral issue of human rights and values important in the creation of an inclusive society, and reflects a move from a deficit model of adjustment towards systemic change”. Inclusive Education benefits learners by not using disabilities to segregate learners but as ways of including them at every level of educational practice, provisioning education for disabled learners based on what is needed to support them, empowering them by developing their individual strengths and weaknesses to participate critically in the process of learning, making facilities and resources more accessible to all learners, and introducing strategies and interventions to assist teachers to cope with a diversity of learning and teaching needs to ensure that difficulties are overcome (Department of Education, 2005).
Riddel and Brown’s (1994) contention sums up the essence of inclusive education when they say that:
“the aims of education for children and young people with disabilities and significant difficulties are the same as those for all children and young people. They should have opportunities to achieve these aims to associate with their contemporaries, whether similarly disabled or not and have access to the whole range of opportunities in education, training, leisure and community activities available to all” (1994, p. 79).
According to Donald et al.,(2002, p. 32), inclusive education comprises two major thrusts to address barriers to learning, namely, prevention and support. Such barriers can either be based on contextual disadvantages, social problems or individual disabilities and difficulties in learning.
Prevention is directed at transforming educational institutions and curricula to facilitate access to education for all learners, irrespective of their different learning needs. Support, on the other hand, focuses on providing support to schools, staff, parents and students with specific learning and developmental needs. These thrusts mean that every level of the system must be developed to accommodate diversity and to provide supportive teaching and learning environments for all.
The policy of inclusive education acknowledges that differences are to be respected and discrimination eliminated; that learning can occur in various ways and at different paces; and that the active participation of learners is encouraged and supported appropriately at all levels of the teaching and learning process.
Like everybody else, learners with disabilities should have unlimited access to School Psychological Services. Psychological services utilised in an inclusive setting are assessment and the identification of the learning disability, the level of support required and whether it can be provided in a normal school, a full-service school or an ELSEN school (DoE, 2001). Inclusive education can also be viewed as a policy which facilitates the achievement of an objective of School Psychological Services of making services available to all children irrespective of their barriers to learning they experience. Kauffman, Bantz and McCullough (2002, p. 150) maintain that, all children should be entitled to whatever services they need, and this kind of education should not require highlighting children’s differences. Children must be seen as more alike than different, all entitled to the same high-quality education. What we now see as difference or special must become routine, accepted as part of the normal such that the stigmatization and separation of children is avoided.
According to the NCSNET/NCESS report (1997), appropriate and effective education must be organised in such a way that all learners have access within a single education system that is responsive to diversity. Education should be about creating the least restrictive environment for all children.
Inclusive education is seen as a political resource for providing the appropriate context for the proper implementation of School Psychological Services. As Colby et al., (2000) put it, reducing all forms of discrimination is critical to quality improvement in learning environments. Hence, the School Psychological Services Programme, including school counsellors and other health professionals, should be the vehicle through which Inclusive Education is advocated (defended),
implemented and seen to bear fruits. According to Van der Elst (2008), “inclusive education is about transforming schools from centres of learning to inclusive centres of learning, care and support, where support is provided for children vulnerable to exclusion or marginalisation and where barriers to learning are overcome”. Such supportive environments will require learner support (or remedial) educators, counsellors, and psychologists, who, apart from screening, identifying, assessing learners and making referrals will have basic counselling skills. As Erhard and Umansky (2005), counsellors are expected to be proactive leaders and advocates for the success of all learners in schools, provide high quality services to learners with disabilities, create a healthy climate in the schools and serve as an essential resource for learners, educators, parents, and administrators. However, studies by Naicker (2000), Muthukrishna (2002) and Ntombela (2006) identified the lack of capacity as one of the factors affecting the implementation of inclusive education in South African schools. Ntombela (2006) cautions that it is highly presumptuous of the DoE to expect a two-hour workshop to deal effectively with a complex issue of inclusion and simultaneously capacitate educators to implement Inclusive Education. Although it is cumbersome to prepare educators for the implementation of Inclusive Education, the idea behind its conception is commendable.
2.2.5.3.2 Learner support
Learner support is part and parcel of the White Paper 6 on Special Education (Department of Education, 2001). Although the National Committee on Education Support Services (NCESS) report spelt out the government’s intention to challenge the status quo of exclusion of learners with special needs from mainstream schooling, the present education system still disadvantages
those learners who are experiencing learning barriers and developmental challenges and, as Waghid and Engelbrecht (2002) put it, “there is need for the system to transform towards the development of a system that accommodates and respects diversity and the vigorous participation of all social partners, role players and communities so that social exclusion and negative stereotyping can be eliminated”.
Learner Support as framed within Inclusive Education provides time and assistance to a learner to realise his or her potential (Naicker, 2000, p. 3). In order to achieve this, White paper 6 on Special Needs Education (Department of Education, 2001), creates such space “by acknowledging that all children and youth can learn and that all children and youth need support, enabling education structures, systems and learning methodologies to meet the needs of all learners, acknowledging and respecting differences in learners, whether due to age, gender, ethnicity, language, class, disability, HIV or other infectious diseases, making it broader than formal schooling and acknowledging that learning also occurs in the home and community, and within formal and informal settings and structures, changing attitudes, behaviour, teaching methods, curricula and environments to meet the needs of all learners, and maximising the participation of all learners in the culture and the curriculum of educational institutions and uncovering and minimising barriers to learning” (Department of Education, 2001, p. 16).
In tandem with Inclusive Education, Outcome-Based Education (OBE) was developed with matching the principles. According to Naicker (2000, p. 3), “OBE has three premises, namely:
all learners can learn and succeed, but not on the same day in the same way; successful learning
promotes even more successful learning and, schools control the conditions that directly affect successful school learning”.
It implies that “all learners have the capacity to learn and achieve their full potential but that cannot happen in the same way or within the same period. Learners should progress according to their age cohort and time should be allocated to a learner who requires additional assistance. If a learner needs assistance the learner does not have to be kept back in the grade”. All learners, experiencing learning barriers or not, are entitled to academic, social and emotional support, and schools should have programmes in place to make all these possible.
Muthukrishna (2002) argues that building capacity within schools is critical and dependence on the limited number of available professionals for support is not feasible. Schools should therefore capacitate themselves with support structures, one such structure being the school-based support team. The role of the team includes facilitating the development of an ethos in the school that values learners, facilitating the on-going analysis and identification of barriers to learning and participation, facilitating processes to address and minimise barriers to participation, developing links with and access community resources, facilitating whole school development and school- based teacher development programmes, facilitating parental involvement, building school community partnerships, and twinning with other schools to form school clusters to share expertise, and material and human resources and plan joint programmes (Muthukrishna, 2002, p.
7). Collaboration between schools and communities will enable schools to fulfil their mandate of providing learners with the best support, but as Dunbar-Krige et al., (2010) points out, schools generally find it hard to maintain their communities as partners in education.
School Psychological Services are about preparing young people to perform well academically and face life’s challenges head on. Psychological Services, School Guidance and Counselling, and learner support services are all bound by similar principles and are therefore meant to achieve the same goal in schools – helping learners to succeed in school by responding to their needs and removing (or attempting to remove) any obstacle thwarting the development of their full potential. They are all essential components of School Psychological Services and as such they share a common purpose and serve to achieve the same goals. Most importantly, these services complement – not replace – each other.
2.2.5.3.3 Remedial intervention
The word “remedy” means “to cure, supplying a remedy, intended to correct or improve deficient skills in a specific subject” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2011). Wall (2006) defines intervention as “an interaction between two people to bring about change, which must be planned carefully to ensure effectiveness and appropriateness”. Bunning (2004), on the other hand, sees intervention as a shared aim to instigate and achieve a change in a child’s existing situation by utilising a defined strategy or approach. It involves selecting and using an optimal method to arrive at a desired outcome. Remedial education, also referred to as developmental education, is defined as support services in basic academic skills which addresses the needs of a diverse population of under-prepared learners with programmes designed to address deficiencies in reading, writing and maths. The terms ‘remedial learner’ and ‘remedial education’ are social constructions that have strong negative connotations (Astin, 1998). Just as in medicine one gives
a remedy to cure an illness, so in education there must be something wrong with the student who needs to be ‘remedied’. It focuses on the resolution of psychological or emotional distress, psychopathology, mental health concerns, or medical disorders.
Placement in a remedial education class is recommended for a learner who has “(i) low performance in reading, (ii) low performance in mathematics, and (iii) an inability to verbally express ideas or write or dictate a meaningful sentence” (Astin, 1998). According to Astin (1998), “there are at least three aspects of the remedial concept that are misleading. First is the use of categorical terminology to describe a phenomenon that is relativistic and arbitrary. Most remedial learners turn out to be those who have the lowest scores on some sort of a normative measurement – standardised tests, school grades and the like, but the cut-off is arbitrary.
Secondly, the ‘norms’ that define a ‘low’ score are highly variable from one setting to another.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the problem with the concept of remedial student is that there is little, if any, evidence to support the argument that these learners are somehow
‘incapable’ of learning, that they have markedly different ‘learning styles’ from other learners, that they require some radically different type of pedagogy, or that they need to be segregated from other learners in order to learn”.
It is for the reasons given above that remedial education has been re-conceptualized as learner support. Hence, the so-called remedial schools are now called ELSEN (Education for Learners with Special Education Needs) schools and remedial educator called a learner support educator.
2.2.5.3.4 Parental involvement (Home-school link)
Hill and Tyson (2009) define parental involvement as “parents’ interactions with schools and with their children to promote academic success” (2009, p. 741). It is narrowly seen as “the participation of parents in regular, two-way, and meaningful communication involving student academic learning and other school activities”. Parental involvement can be divided into two frameworks, namely, school-based involvement strategies (e.g., volunteering at school, communication between parents and teachers, and involvement in school governance), and home-based involvement strategies including engaging in educational activities at home; school support for parenting; and involvement between the school and community agencies. Parental involvement can be described as the willing and active participation of parents in a wide range of school and home-based activities (Van Wyk & Lemmer, 2009) or a dynamic process whereby educators and parents work together for the ultimate benefit of the learner (Davin & Orr, 2007).
According to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF, 2000), “positive early experiences and interactions are vital to preparing a quality learner as higher levels of parental involvement that includes parents reading to young children is associated with higher test scores and lower rates of grade repetition in primary school. This implies that effective and appropriate stimulation in a child’s early years influences the brain development necessary for emotional regulation, arousal, and behavioural management”.
“The home environment is a powerful predictor of school learning for learners – their level of achievement, their interest in learning, and the number of years of schooling they will attain”. As a consequence, there has been an increase in the development of family participation in
education (Christenson & Buerkle, 1999). According to The Family Strengthening Policy Centre (2004), parental involvement occurs when parents actively, critically, resourcefully and responsibly contribute to promoting and developing the well-being of their communities.
Adolescents, as Gouws et al., (2000) argue, need their parents to be there for them to provide moral and emotional support when necessary. Lack of parental interest and support may have negative effects on the adolescents: poor school-work, low self-esteem, poor social adjustment, and deviant and antisocial behaviour. As Samara and Smith (2008) point out, with increasing rates of bullying putting schools in the spotlight, parents involvement can be used as a strategy to reduce it.
According to Louw (1991), parents influence their children’s ability to adjust to the school environment. They therefore have an important supporting role within the framework of School Psychological Services. This sentiment is shared by Gutkin and Conoley (1990, p. 209) when they say that if school psychologists hope to bring any about meaningful improvements in the lives of children, they will have to exert meaningful influence on parents and teachers. By providing treatment to children through primary caregivers such as parents and teachers, indirect services provide psychologists with a vehicle for influencing and modifying both the significant adults in children’s lives and the children themselves.
The purpose of parental involvement is to demonstrate the importance of collaboration or teamwork between schools and the communities they serve. Bronfenbrenner’s theory contributes to the notion that children and families are members of multiple environments and that “nested connections” exist between children, families, schools and social service agencies (Christenson,
1999, p. 715). According to Chen and Gregory (2011), “ecological systems theory describes multiple levels of influence on child development in which the home and the school exert unique as well as combined forces on the growth of an individual”, with Epstein, Sanders, Simon, Salinas, Jansorn, and Van Voorhis (2002) referring to the two “separate settings ‘overlapping spheres of influence,’ with distinct roles but common goals”.
Research studies reported that parents who participate in their children’s schooling frequently enhance children’s self-esteem, improve their children’s academic achievement, improve parent- child relationships and, help develop positive attitudes towards school and a better understanding of the schooling process (Sowetan, August 25, 2009, p. 9). Concurring with the Parental Corner (Sowetan 2009), Chen (2008, p.1) lists the benefits of parental involvement as enhancement of academic performance, better classroom behaviour; improved reading skills and improved educator morale. However, Chen (2008) identifies time constraints as the greatest barrier to parental involvement.
Ramey (2009, p. 5), listed “five most important things for parents to help children achieve success, namely, making sure that they are prepared for school; sending happy children to school as children who feel loved and happy make good learners; not getting too involved in school, and grades matter but they are not the ultimate indicator of a child’s value”. It is important for parents to partake regularly in school activities and maintain two-way communication with the school about their child’s academic performance.