Children with Down's syndrome or other disabilities fare far better in mainstream education than in special schools, according to a leading British researcher and practitioner.
Research has shown that Down's syndrome children attending "normal" schools are 2-1/2 years ahead on spoken language and three years ahead in reading and writing, compared to their peers in special education, Prof Sue Buckley of the University of Portsmouth told a recent seminar in Galway. Even though special schools in Britain had improved dramatically, their pupils were not doing significantly better, she said.
Prof Buckley's message applied to children with all abilities, she emphasised. "Obviously if you have children with visual impairment or with multiple difficulties, extra resources will be required to fit out buildings and provide support. However, my personal opinion is that we shouldn't have any totally isolated schools, because children learn best when they learn with and from their peers."
Prof Buckley, the mother of an adult daughter with Down's syndrome, is a retired professor of developmental disability at the University of Portsmouth and director of research for the Down Syndrome Educational Trust in Britain.
She has been researching the development of children with this condition since 1980, and is also director of the Sara Duffen Centre for Excellence, established for children and adults who have the condition worldwide. The centre is named after a child whose father discovered that his daughter could remember the printed word from the age of three and who was being educated in a mainstream school. "As a result of his theory, we found that there were enormous benefits to be gained from making the child's first language visual," Prof Buckley explained. "To prove he was right, we took in a child who was very quickly learning 30 words a month."
It was one of many theories challenged by Prof Buckley, and her husband, Prof Ben Sacks, who is a developmental psychiatrist, recently retired from Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School in London.
"We had been told that children with Down's syndrome never had proper grammar and that this was linked to the extra chromosome that causes the condition. We found that this wasn't true when we used the visual system of learning with young children."
When her now 32-year-old daughter, Roberta, was born, expectations about the survival and quality of life of children with this condition were very different. "The key is hearing, and proper speech and language therapy early on to address this. Children with Down's syndrome have difficulty learning language because of their restricted aural skills.
"It is clear now that children with Down's syndrome can understand a lot more than assumed and just have problems communicating. We have to work very early on with young babies to influence their listening memory, and so if we can get children reading early, we can accelerate their spoken language."
In 1988, Prof Buckley and her colleagues began putting children with the condition in mainstream schools in Hampshire and promoting inclusion. From 1988 to 1997, the charity paid for a psychologist to act as support in each school. This is now government funded.
"Last year, we collected data on teenagers with Down's syndrome, comparing those who went to mainstream schools and those who went through the special education system. We found that the former group were 21/2 years ahead on average in reading, and 80 per cent of them were understood by strangers. They were 3-1/2 years ahead in reading and writing. These children had assistance in the classroom, and for the policy to succeed the school must be enthusiastic."
The work of the Down Syndrome Educational Trust has been so successful that the British government intends to train another 40,000 teaching assistants for this purpose.
Ms Connie Ni Fhatharta, chairwoman of Galway County Council, described how the "inclusion" approach had come about in a small and accidental way in a Gaeltacht area of Connemara.
"Parents in the Gaeltacht area didn't want their child leaving home for a special school in Galway where he wasn't going to learn his native tongue. It worked until the child was 14 years and then there was nowhere to send him except to the special school." Ms Ni Fhatharta stressed that she had nothing against special schools, but there was a need for a wider debate.
The opening forays in the debate were made by the Galway branch of the Down's Syndrome Association in a meeting last Tuesday with the Minister for Education, Dr Woods. The meeting, which was arranged by Fianna Fail Senator Margaret Cox, pressed the case for Galway to be made a pilot area for educating Down's syndrome children in the mainstream system.
Senator Cox's sister, Jennifer, has Down's syndrome. Jennifer has been taught in the Mercy Convent in Galway at primary level and is starting her secondary education at the Presentation Convent in September. Senator Cox said the meeting was "very positive" and the Minister seemed to be open to the idea.
Dr Tiernan O'Brien, chair of the Galway branch of the Down's Syndrome Association, said that Galway had the highest inclusion in the State for children attending primary schools.
"The main difficulty is in convincing secondary schools to accept the idea. As Prof Buckley said, if you have a principal who is keen, mountains can be moved. Otherwise, obstacles are constantly found en route."
