SPECIAL NEEDS EDUCATION WITHIN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM

Underlying the organization of special education is the principle that mainstream schools should effectively meet each pupil’s needs, no matter their differences.

Both educational policies and practice aim at planning the appropriate setting within the mainstream education system that should allow the inclusion of SEN pupils in a way that restrictive measures only should be applied when every possibility of adaptation had failed.

Special education is organized in a continuity of responses between groupings/classes and specialized units, which support inclusion and work in reference schools. Only in exceptional circumstances when mainstream education has confirmed not to be able to supply pupils with the educational responses they need, are they allowed to attend special schools. Special education institutions are gradually changing into resource centres where specialized technicians and equipment and also teacher training are available to mainstream schools through partnership agreements.

Kindergarten/Pre-School
Early identification of special needs in young children is mostly a responsibility of the medical services and it enables the activation of intervention mechanisms even before children enter the school system. After the identification, the Ministry of Education provides special education teachers to support those children either in kindergarten/pre-school or at home.

Some multidisciplinary teams (including technicians from several ministries: education, health, social security) called early childhood intervention teams, work mostly with families. Their aim is to address the needs of the families as well as to strengthen their self-competences for active intervention in the strategies of support for their children.

Compulsory Education
Compulsory education covers 9 years of schooling and lasts from 6 years of age to 15, these limits are not applied to special education learners.
In order to adapt the learning process to the needs of these learners, the legislation foresees a set of measures for each particular case materialized in:
- providing the support of specialized professionals ( special education teachers, counsellors, mobility professionals, sign language trainers and interpreters, therapists, psychologists, and so on);
- the use of specific equipment and tools (books in Braille, books with enlarged characters, optical and hearing devices, adapted software, and so on);
- defining special conditions for the process of evaluation (type of test, type of pupils’ ways to express themselves, timetables, place and time of the test);
- differentiating the curriculum (by replacing, introducing, removing aims, contents, activities).

All the changes and adaptations appear in the Individual Educational Plan. Whenever the adaptations are considerable and do not fit within the national curriculum, a Individual Programme has to be made.

SEN learners’ academic progress depends on the items established for general evaluation according to the aims and competences in mainstream regimes.

If pupils have an Individual Programme theirs evaluation follows what is set on their Individual Programme, meaning that their progress does not depend on the competences set for the grade they attend and it allows them to stay in the same group/class.

Transition Period
The two last years in school, for the pupils with severe disabilities that put at risk their acquisition of the knowledge and the competences inherent to compulsory education, are a vocational training for the future active life. In this circumstance the Individual Educational Plan is called a Transition Plan where a project for the pupil’s future life is defined alongside his/her competences, abilities and desires as well as his/her parents’ expectations.

These pupils’ curriculum also aims to develop labour competences and to prepare them for employment within a certain professional field. In some cases these competences are developed inside the school, in other cases in workshops for professional training in connection with special education institutions and, in other situations, partnership with local enterprises is established to enable the development of labour competences in this context.