Call for help with mainland special needs
A mainland academic is calling for international help to professionalise special needs education in China.
During the 1990s, it was the government's goal to establish one special needs school in every county with a population in excess of 300,000, Deng Meng, associate dean of the College of Education of Huazhong Normal University in Hubei province, said. However, by 2006, there were only 1,605 special schools in the entire country.
Speaking at the University of Hong Kong this week, Professor Deng said more international help in areas like financial assistance and academic exchanges would be needed to strengthen the mainland's teaching expertise in special education.
'The support for students with disabilities shouldn't be limited by race or nationality,' Professor Deng said. 'For students with special needs in China, the social status is comparatively low and lifestyle is not good.'
He said special education in the mainland had been receiving growing attention since the mid-1980s and was slowly progressing into a new profession. Yet, due to a shortage of trained teachers and resources, the quality of special education was still largely unsatisfactory.
He called for structured teacher training and a flexible education system, which appeared to be the top priorities to address the pressing issue for the largest education provider in the world.
Most students with special needs have been studying in regular classrooms under the inclusive education policy, Professor Deng said.
In 2006, about 362,900 students were learning in special needs schools and the other 65 per cent with disabilities were studying in regular classrooms, he said.
Most teachers in regular schools in China would need to be given training in special education as a result, he said. Special needs schools were also important under the inclusive education policy as they could provide the expertise and knowledge for regular schools in caring for children with disabilities.
However, the training programmes for teachers in both areas were extremely limited.
The development of systematic training for teachers was largely dependant on the political will of local authorities, he said.
Professor Deng said the number of universities providing special education courses had increased from five to 10 under the higher education reform in 2000.
Most of the 34 middle level schools dedicated to training special education teachers were forced to merge with other institutions into universities, he said.
He also called for more support for schools in rural areas where basic teaching materials were out of students' reach.
'I have seen visually-impaired students deprived with outdated Braille teaching products,' Professor Deng said after visiting schools in Gansu, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia.
He said the need to develop a legal process to identify disabilities would be important as autism was yet to be officially recognised as a disability on the mainland.
'Teacher's ignorance of disability often fuels stigma and discrimination. We need more scientific approaches to fairly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of students,' Professor Deng said.
