ECCWC302A Inclusive Practice and Principles in Early Childhood

For this assessment will need to prepare a report, based on the following scenario:

 

You are an educator in an early childhood service with children aged 0-5 years. The children and families in your setting are diverse and as a result you need to ensure your curriculum and pedagogical practice is reflective and inclusive of this diversity.

Currently you have 30 children attending across the week, and the additional needs situational context is:

three (3) culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) children – Mandarin, Turkish and Arabic,
two (2) children with challenging behaviours – ADHD & Oppositional Defiance Disorder,
two (2) children with speech and communication difficulties,
one (1) child with Autism,
two (2) children with disabilities – Downs Syndrome and Cerebral Palsy, and
three (3) children with chronic health issues.

Your report must address how you are going to work with your team, other professionals and families to develop an inclusive educational setting and curriculum that will facilitate, extend and enrich learning for all. It must also consider current government funding; the National Quality Standards; the importance of plans for the service and individual children, behaviour management plans; pedagogical practices; curriculum development; and environment provision.

Introduction

The basic human right towards the foundation of equal society is inclusion in the domain of education (Cook, Klein & Chen, 2015). According to the reports published by Richter et al. (2017), inclusive education can be defined as a concept where the children with special needs are given education in mainstream schools. The United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) first introduced this approach in the year 1996. UNESCO highlighted that inclusive schools are effective in addressing indifferent attitudes nurtured by the healthy children and individuals towards the children with additional needs (Australian Research Alliance for Child and Youth [ARACY], 2012). This inclusive practice helps to promote equitable education to all irrespective of mental or physical disability which is the main concept of this assignment. The following assignment will highlight inclusive pedagogical practice set-up with 30 different children under the age group of 0 to 5 years. All these 30 children are with additional healthcare needs like challenging behaviour, communication difficulties, Autism, Down’s syndrome, and Cerebral Palsy. Among these children 3 are from culturally and linguistically diverse communities and another 3 are suffering from chronic health issues. The assignment will initiate with funding and national quality standards in Australia for inclusive pedagogical practice. After discussing the issue, the assignment will highlight the organisational and professional support helpful in setting up diverse set-up and special skills required by an educator in order to successfully adapt under this diverse set-up. The succinct discussion of all these points will help to analyse the importance of inclusion and how this inclusive practice can be applied on diverse settings. 

Current Funding

According to the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education (2018), the disability and inclusive program helps to generate support finding and to help children with special needs in community to take part in early childhood education program like any other health children. The overview of the inclusive program is provided below

Program components	Brief Description	Key dates
Introduction of strong equity funding	$6,600 per year funding for children with special needs and disability and are registered under community pre-school for 600 hours per hour	Collection of data on 28th of February to 27th of March 2018 and payment on April 2018
Additional fund raising for children who demands high need support in order to cope with their disability	This mainly includes emergency funding for the children with special needs and demands high end support in order to indulge into educational practice.	Application is accessed in order to align with the overall payment schedule during the tenure of April 2018
Minor capital funding	This funding helps to support specialised organisational requirement like resources and tools in order to support children with special needs	This concept is in developmental stage and will be applied on 2019

Table: Overview of the funding program in NSW government

(Source: NSW Department of Education, 2018)

The principal funding is used to recruit teachers and educational officers for implementing personalised learning and support for the children with disability or special needs in their class rooms. The funding is also given in order to provide assistance to the classroom teachers. This assistance will be given through the application of professional learning and to liaise with the parents, family of carers and other employees of the schools. Integration funding support of NW is provided to deliver additional support to the students with moderate to high level of support requirement. This additional support is helpful to easy adaptation of the children with special needs or physical disability under NSW public school set-up (NSW Department of Education, 2018).

The government of Australia also has National Disability Insurance Scheme for the children with special needs. A child is a participant under NDIS scheme of section 28 of the NDIS Act published on 2013. However, as per the provision, the documentation of the evidence, highlighting child's disability is not required. NDIS mainly covers the medication and health-related expenses. Inclusion Support Programme (ISP) also list under the current funding for early childhood care for the children with special needs and any form of physical disability. ISP mainly promotes tailored interventions (Australian Government Department of Education and Training, 2017).

National Quality Standards for Inclusive Education

There are 7 distinct standards under Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (2017). The 1^st domain is educational program and practice and it is directed towards maximizing children learning and development. The 2^nd domain is children health and safety and thus provides emphasis on quality education along with improvement of health. The 3^rd factor is physical environment and mainly promotes safe surrounding where children feel safe and secured. The 4^th factor is proper staffing and arranges in order to give children individualised care. 5^th factor is effective relationship with children in order to increase the sense of attachment. The 6^th domain highlights collaborative partnership with parents to increase quality outcome. The 7^th factor highlights proper leadership and governance. Observance of these 7 standards helps in comprehensive re-structuring of the inclusive practice under childhood education.

The element of 1.1.2 of standard 1.1 aligns with the requirement of the children with additional healthcare needs or with disability. The standard 1.1.2 promotes children-centred approach for designing the learning program. This children-centred approach is based on ideals, cultural competencies, specific interest of the children and their individualised strengths. The element 3.2.1 of quality standard 3 promotes inclusive environment to engage children in diverse activities. The element 5.1.2 promotes respecting rights and the dignity of the children along with giving preference to their cultural needs irrespective of their disability. The quality area 4 and 6 also upholds improvement of overall quality of educational needs of children with disability and additional needs (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2017).

Professional and organisational support

The professional and organisational support for culturally and linguistically diverse children (CALD) between the age group of 3 to 5 years is speech-language pathologist (SLPs). SLPs will help the children to work on their communication, language, vocabulary and dialects and thus helping them to adopt with the Australian originals (Crawford & Candlin, 2013). However, SLPs requirement will differ among children coming from different cultural background, Arabic, Mandarin and Turkish. It is the duty of an educator to bring co-ordination among the SLPs and the children from diverse ethnicity. The educator will also assist the SLP to help the children in their language and communication gaps (Crawford & Candlin, 2013).

Professional support for children with ADHD is mental healthcare professionals. A mental healthcare professional will provide comprehensive behavioural support and thus will help to recover from mood swings and increase the level of attention (Tarver, Daley & Sayal, 2014). A mental healthcare professional will work in association with an educator to devise the learning plan for ADHD children and thereby helping them to work on their concentration (Tarver, Daley & Sayal, 2014).

Children with speech impairments will require SLPs to work on their stammering problems, difficulty in collecting thoughts or making a complete sentence (Enderby, John & Petheram, 2013). Professional support for autistic children will be a trained paediatrician who will help in early recognition of the disease and a psychiatrist with proper counselling will help for chronic management of the disease (Enderby, John & Petheram, 2013). An occupational therapist will help with managing fine motor skills and implementing daily activities to life (Enderby, John & Petheram, 2013).

Children with Down’s syndrome have genetic abnormality and suffer from hearing loss and neuronal impairment and thus professional support will include trained audiologist. An audiologist will implement audio-logic interventions (Shields et al., 2013). Children with cerebral palsy can be effectively handled by physiotherapist. A trained physiotherapist will help to evaluate the muscle strength and muscle tone and thus helping them to work on their hand-eye co-ordination (Shields et al., 2013).

The professional support for children with chronic disease includes constant presence of emergency care nurse in order to monitor their vital statistics in a periodic manner. There must be an active set-up for proper medical equipment in order to provide immediate support at the time of emergency (Ball et al., 2013). Proper counseling of parents by pedagogical experts will help to improve the home based interventions and framing of welcoming environment will help the children to suffer from less social exclusion (Burke, 2013).According to the Burke (2013), building inter-professional relationship to support inclusion helps in building competence of families and thus promotion child’s health and well-being. Inclusion of parents in the care plan helps to judge the family perspective. Importance of proper educators in the early childhood development of children centred care plan and at the same time helps to helps in proper evaluation of the implemented intervention (Burke, 2013).

Pedagogical practices and the skills

In order to handle children with ADHD and ODD, it is required to adopt a strength based and nonjudgmental approach for providing care or teaching to these children. The initial approach is to arouse motivation in children (Bryant, Bryant & Smith, 2015). A child can be made attentive by the use of visual activities or visual aids or by the help of the hand instructions. It is necessary to reduce the potential distractions for reducing the barrier between the learning and the child (Galloway, 2018). 

Children suffering for speech disability can be taught individually or in groups. In order to help children with speech difficulties it is necessary to reduce unnecessary noises as much as possible, provide them with verbal clues, and speak clearly and deliberately. Another step is to provide a conducive environment that would encourage the children to accept another child with special care needs.

For children with autism spectrum disorder it is necessary to follow certain instructions such as use of the visual aids with simple pictures and signs, Avoiding long string of verbal conversations as children with autism spectrum disorder normally face with problems with remembering of the sequence (Koegel et al., 2012). An educator will be able to generate the confidence in these children by encouraging having control over their life by identifying their strengths rather than the weaknesses (Sharma, Loreman&Forlin, 2012).

In order to include children with Down’s syndrome, they should be allowed to access to the curriculum alongside the peers (Malt et al., 2013). Full inclusion of the curriculum in required for improving the numeracy and the literacy skills. Inclusive children needs to learn with their non-disabled peers with individual support. Parents and the teachers needs to do more for ensuring that friendship with the non- disabled peers carry on outside the school.  Although the affected children have additional educational needs, they might also have same educational needs of their own age. They make progress if they are fully included and accepted with the feeling that they are a part of the ordinary community. The social acceptance might have profound impact on the self-esteem of the affected children. The behavioural approach should differ with age. Liasidou, (2013) has opined that the children suffering from cerebral palsy should be encouraged with independence. Obstacles should be removed such that the student can freely move from the lessons to the lessons.

Conclusion

In conclusion it can be said that apart from the policies and the funding of the government. The educators taking care of the needs of special child should be properly trained to develop special skills and responsibilities and should be acquainted with an allied range of teaching skills. Furthermore, the ambience of the educational institution should be non –discriminative with adequate amount of workforce including a multidisciplinary team who are unbiased.

References

Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (2017). National Quality Standards. Access date: 8^th October. Retrieved from  https://www.acecqa.gov.au/nqf/national-quality-standard

Australian Government Department of Education and Training. (2017). Inclusion Support Programme  Guidelines 2016-2017 to 2018-2019. Access date: 8^th October. Retrieved from: https://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/170606_-_inclusion_support_programme_guidelines_-_updated.pdf

Australian Research Alliance for Child and Youth (ARACY). (2012). Inclusive Education for Students with Disability. Access date: 8th October. Retrieved from: https://www.aracy.org.au/publications-resources/command/download_file/id/246/filename/Inclusive_education_for_students_with_disability_-_A_review_of_the_best_evidence_in_relation_to_theory_and_practice.pdf

Bryant, D. P., Bryant, B. R., & Smith, D. D. (2015). Teaching students with special needs in inclusive classrooms. Sage Publications.

Burke, M. M. (2013). Improving parental involvement: Training special education advocates. Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 23(4), 225-234.

Cook, R. E., Klein, M. D., & Chen, D. (2015). Adapting early childhood curricula for children with special needs. Pearson.

Enderby, P., John, A., & Petheram, B. (2013). Therapy outcome measures for rehabilitation professionals: speech and language therapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy. John Wiley & Sons.

Galloway, D. (2018). Schools, pupils and special educational needs. Routledge.

Koegel, L., Matos-Freden, R., Lang, R., & Koegel, R. (2012). Interventions for children with autism spectrum disorders in inclusive school settings. Cognitive and Behavioral practice, 19(3), 401-412.

Lewis, R. B., Wheeler, J. J., & Carter, S. L. (2017). Teaching students with special needs in general education classrooms. Pearson.

Liasidou, A. (2013). Bilingual and special educational needs in inclusive classrooms: some critical and pedagogical considerations. Support for learning, 28(1), 11-16.

Malt, E. A., Dahl, R. C., Haugsand, T. M., Ulvestad, I. H., Emilsen, N. M., Hansen, B., ... &Davidsen, E. M. (2013). Health and disease in adults with Down syndrome. Tidsskrift for den Norske laegeforening: tidsskrift for praktiskmedicin, nyraekke, 133(3), 290-294.

NSW Department of Education., (2018). 2018 Disability and Inclusion Program. Access date: 8^th October. Retrieved from: https://education.nsw.gov.au/early-childhood-education/operating-an-early-childhood-education-service/grants-and-funded-programs/disability-and-inclusion-program

Richter, L. M., Daelmans, B., Lombardi, J., Heymann, J., Boo, F. L., Behrman, J. R., ... & Bhutta, Z. A. (2017). Investing in the foundation of sustainable development: pathways to scale up for early childhood development. The Lancet, 389(10064), 103-118.

Sharma, U., Loreman, T., & Forlin, C. (2012). Measuring teacher efficacy to implement inclusive practices. Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs, 12(1), 12-21.

Shields, N., Taylor, N. F., Wee, E., Wollersheim, D., O'Shea, S. D., & Fernhall, B. (2013). A community-based strength training programme increases muscle strength and physical activity in young people with Down syndrome: A randomised controlled trial. Research in developmental disabilities, 34(12), 4385-4394.

Tarver, J., Daley, D., & Sayal, K. (2014). Attention?deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): an updated review of the essential facts. Child: care, health and development, 40(6), 762-774.