The Highest Needs Review: Empty aspirations or a step in the right direction?
By Rebecca Park, CCS Disability Action National Marketing, Communications & Fundraising Advisor. This article was published in our Summer 2023 newsletter, Reflections | Ngā whakaaroaro.
Children with additional learning support needs have the same right to receive a good education as every other child, but New Zealand’s system has allowed many children to fall through the gaps. Under the current learning support model, Principals report feeling frustrated at not having the resources to provide adequate support to their students, parents are struggling to navigate a fragmented and often complex system, and children are regularly being excluded from learning environments.
Following an 18-month-long review process with a dedicated Advisory Group and over 1,100 submissions, the government has recently announced changes to its learning support system.
While the changes identified in the Highest Needs Review are being presented by the Ministry of Education as “substantial”, details of what this will look like haven’t yet been made clear, and there are some who remain sceptical that the new model will truly address the challenges they cope with.
Children with additional support needs face poorer education outcomes
Children with additional support needs have been consistently failed by New Zealand’s current learning support system, with provisions such as the Ministry of Education’s Ongoing Resourcing Scheme (ORS) only reaching those deemed to have the highest needs in the country.
According to recent research from the Education Review Office (ERO) in partnership with the Office for Disability Issues and the Human Rights Commission, disabled children are regularly being excluded from education or asked to stay at home. The report found that one in five parents had been deterred from enrolling their disabled child at a local school, and a quarter were encouraged to keep their child at home[RP1] . In addition, almost a third of disabled students reported feeling they did not belong at school.
It's clear that urgent action is needed to improve education for children with additional support needs and the number of students who fall into this category is rapidly increasing.
Despite this, government funding has continued to fall short. Appropriations in Vote Education for the 2022/23 financial year revealed that the government plans to spend $1,052 million on learning support, which is $2.7 million less than it planned to spend in the previous year. Special Needs Intervention funding is where the majority of this cut has come from, with a $2.4 million drop in planned spending for 2022/23 compared with the 2021/22 budget.
School Principal Denise Torrey, who is also the current head of the Primary Principals’ Collective Bargaining (PPCB) union and former President of the New Zealand Principals Federation, says this has been a long-standing issue.
“Catering for disabled children has been under-resourced for years and years,” she says. “The government claims they’ve been increasing their investment over the last five years and that’s fantastic, but the number of children with additional support needs has also risen dramatically.”
She reveals that the resourcing disparity has caused “pure frustration” for many in the education sector – and funding isn’t the only challenge.
“One of the biggest problems that we have is the lack of expertise. There’s a shortage of Educational Psychologists and Speech-Language Therapists, so that bank of experts you need to wrap around a child just isn’t there.”
Trish Grant, former Director of Advocacy at IHC, a service provider for New Zealanders with learning disabilities, echoes this sentiment.
“There’s been significant underinvestment for decades, so it’s really time to budget for a quality inclusive education system where all students get what they need to learn at their local school,” she says. “And it's not just about the dollars, it's about how you ensure teachers have the knowledge, skills, confidence and capability to teach all students.”
“Our perspective is that disabled students experience discrimination and disadvantage at school because of problems to do with assistance and the structures of education. We need to re-examine whether the current funding policy is the right one because it does create winners and losers.”
Government announces new support model following Highest Needs Review
The Ministry of Education undertook the Highest Needs Review from 2021-2022, with the aim of ensuring that children and young people with the highest support needs can achieve their full potential in education by providing access to the right support, when (and for as long as) they need it.
An Advisory Group made up of 16 people with subject-matter expertise and lived experience worked with the Ministry to identify options and solutions over this 18-month period. Their main concerns included more resourcing and support, a review of the ORS and professional learning related to students’ needs. They also discussed priorities such as the need for a tamariki- and whānau-centred approach, better transitions, consistent communication across groups and clearer and more accessible information for parents.
Bernette Peters, National Manager of Intensive Family Services at CCS Disability Action, was one of the representatives in the Advisory Group. She says the review has been a long time coming and it was clear to all Group members that a major shift was in order.
“We identified quite early on that something significant had to change, and it needed to be quite a bold, brave kind of step,” she says. “I think there's a real tension there because the system's broken and we haven't really done anything to address that.”
“One of the key points that came out in the discussions was that the current support system is clunky, and too many children are falling through the gaps. We acknowledged the need to break down each part of the system to see what was and wasn’t working, and be a little bit more creative around how we identify the types of support each child needs.”
Following the completion of the review, Associate Minister of Education Jan Tinetti announced that the government will develop a new mixed model approach to ensure the support system is better fit for purpose.
The model will be based on seven key building blocks for change, which Tinetti says will “require time to develop and implement effectively and require significant and ongoing new investment.”
The building blocks of the new mixed model system:
A new service delivery system;
Customised tailored supports;
An integrated and inclusive schooling network;
Learning supports for Māori and Pacific students and their whānau and families that are developed by Māori and Pacific people;
A confident, capable workforce with the capacity to respond;
A new funding model to support a tailored and flexible approach; and
Stronger integration with other agencies.
The government has yet to confirm the specifics of how these changes will evolve and what funding will be allocated, with the next step being to outline a business case to be presented in June 2023.
A mixed reception for the new model
The response to the government’s proposed changes has been varied. While any progress is welcome, many are disappointed that there are no estimates for funding and resourcing at this point.
Denise Torrey describes the model as “aspirational” and is excited to see the emphasis on partnership with Māori and Pasifika but has reservations about how it will be realised.
“We're going to have to resource to a much higher level, and not just increase it in line with the number of kids with support needs coming in. We need to see a big dollop of funding if we want to achieve this model,” she says.
Likewise, Trish Grant celebrated the announcement but says she has further questions around investment. “There will need to be a lot of work in the Ministry to build a business case for the kind of investment that’s going to be required to implement those recommendations.[RP3] And it should be a significant investment that will last for the 10 years the plan is laid out for.”
She would also like to see a greater focus on the human rights model of disability, which recognises that disabled people have the same rights as everyone else in society. “This approach needs to underpin the policy so that it's based on what any child needs to access the curriculum, belong and be valued as a learner,” she says.
If the changes come to fruition, it may be a step in the right direction for New Zealand’s learning support system, but the model falls short of the Highest Needs Review Advisory Group’s recommendations. The members emphasised the need for a more Enabling Good Lives (EGL) approach and argued that the action has to be bolder if it is to be truly transformative.
Feedback from the Advisory Group specified the need for a single assessment process supported by a centralised resource centre; a more skilled and stable workforce to support the system; a focus on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the EGL principles, Whānau Ora and the UNCRPD; and a better way of monitoring and evaluating progress.
“It feels like they’re attempting to patch up a system that we already know is broken,” says Bernette Peters. “We just can’t see how it could be successful.”