Saturday 19th March - Education that is Special

Sarah attends St Clements Special Needs School in Dingwall and as they know her so well it is possible for us to confidently put her to school a good number of days when she is not in hospital.
Some times in her day she will have brighter spells, these times need to capitalised upon.  Through her school Sarah receives stimulation, encouragement, loads of fun and much love.

Special Education is something we are no experts on but we have read and listened to various opinions and values including its comparison to mainstream education.

Every special child has unique needs but we certainly gain with Sarah being in a special needs school. Sarah has a significant gap cognitively from her peers in mainstream and so would constantly be regarded as the one to one. In St Clements she is one of the class and has a healthy competitive attitude with her class peers. Sarah has to learn to care, share work in groups and listen. In mainstream schooling she would almost always have to be put first because of her needs.

Her health issues make her vulnerable.  In mainstream she would have to be constantly with a one to one making her different again.  In St Clements it is shared and she enjoys all her Classroom Assistants being there for her, though not always being one to one.

Her education programme is so hard to get right as her health is so poor and so interrupted by hospital visits. We do hope for an in depth psychologist assessment to be done at the NCYPE.  The NCYPE was the centre which helped diagnose Sarah at the end of last year.  These tests would give a better insight as to where Sarah is cognitively and also would help better equip us and her school as to her learning abilities.  In addition for the future it would give a base line to work from and to refer back to.  The assessment is usually covered over a two week period and we are praying that we will get referred as there is no centre with this service for Sarah here in Scotland.

It was not easy to put Sarah to special needs school but life with Sarah is not easy and we do not think she has or will have an easy life so we will try to give her the best help with least stress.  We pray it all can maximise her learning abilities in an environment that is conducive for this.

It is unfortunate that despite all the needs of the children in St Clements they have such an old building. The St Clements staff do work well with the limitations placed on them due to the building.  It does seem like special needs education still needs more funding focus! 

Below a few pictures of Sarah at school