Hi, I’m Kurt Fearnley, Paralympian and proud person with a disability
And I’m Sarah Shands, mum of a budding engineer with a disability
I built a place for my squishy mellow jellyfish made out of blocks
with little plastic diamonds in it so it’s pretty.
I need one of those. We all do.
This is Let Us In, a podcast series all about what it’s like to be a person with disability
living in Australia today. We’ve put this series together because it's time you knew a few things
about what life can be like for people with a disability. And a good place to start is
back in 1985. Nope no! Not that 1985, I’m talking regional Australia 1895, which is kinda like 1955.
I’m 4 years old. It's November and we’re in a little town in western NSW called Carcoar.
My brothers and sisters are at school, and it might be a warm and sunny day,
but I'm inside playing with my matchbox cars while mum’s doing the washing.
There's a knock at the door and there’s two people I have never seen in my life standing there.
Mum invites them into the kitchen and then ushers me out into the other room.
I knew they were there because of me. But I didn’t know why. I’m in another room,
desperately trying to listen to what they’re saying and I'm only catching bits and pieces.
It’s such a strange feeling, when someone is talking about you.
And you kinda know what they’re saying. But you also don’t. It just seems foreign.
These people were from the Department of Education and were there telling my mum
that there was a place for people like me. A special school for special kids. That sending
me to the local school would be too hard. How would I even get into the classroom? They’d ask.
Mum was shaken when they left. She pulled me in for a cuddle,
and then she went back to the washing, and I went back to playing.
Then there was another knock at the door. This time it was the principal from Carcoar
Public School, Mr L’Home. Mum brought him into the kitchen,
and again ushered me back into the other room.
But this time it was different. I knew they were talking about me. And I wasn’t worried at all.
Something about what he was saying made sense. And he also seemed so sure of what he was saying.
And all the questions those people from the Department of Education asked mum - like how
was I going to get around the school? He would just say, we’ll figure it out.
He didn’t see me as too hard. He knew that there was a place for me
in my local school with my brothers and sisters. The same school that
my grandparents went through. And he saw value in having me there.
I love that story, Kurt. But special schools work for some
families. So that might be your story, but it’s not everyone’s story.
Well firstly, special schools? They're not special. I feel really uncomfortable
with that term because we call them special schools to make ourselves feel comfortable.
We need to tell it what it is. We need to use real language. It's segregated education.
Okay, that’s a really loaded word and I guess I feel a bit uncomfortable about that.
No matter how uncomfortable this makes you feel.
It’s time to stop hiding behind the word ‘special’. I think it’s time we don’t feel okay.
So, I’m going to call it segregated education, because that’s what it is. And I’m not calling
it segregated education to offend you, or to disrespect the incredible work that the teachers,
principals and support staff do at these schools every single day. or the very real
challenges that led a parent to this choice. It’s not that at all.
So, what’s it about then?
It’s time we demand that we do better by our children and young people with a disability.
Because no child should be made to feel like they are too hard. Or that they don’t belong. And
those very same conversations we have today
were had about me 35 years ago. Or you may see that I’m easy right. I’m the easy case. I wasn’t
the easy case in '85. It’s the same conversation just happening to a different group of people
It seems really counterintuitive when you’ve got these schools that are full of specially
trained teachers that know how to teach kids with disabilities, they’re trained to do it.
So, it seems on the surface that this sort of investment in that part of the
education sector would lead to better outcomes for kids with disability.
Not according to the research. The segregated school settings actually
put kids on a path to lifelong isolation from their community.
Alright. Let’s look at why there are these segregated schools for children with disability.
Chris Peters, chose to send his eleven-year-old daughter to Darling Point Special School,
because mainstream school just wasn’t working for his family.
We knew that she had some issues and wasn't developing in comparison to other children.
She had fine motor skill issues. She had all these issues. But anyway, we thought, well,
you know, it might be just a different process, we just got to play catch up. And anyway,
she was at that school until we got to the point where she was one step away from being
removed from the school, because she was so disruptive. Not intentionally,
but she was very disruptive, very controlling, and she really a one-on-one education type kid.
And so, what made you think that this school might be right for your family?
I don't know what first made us come to Darling Point, but we came up to meet with
Charmaine and our daughter came there went into class and we had a look at it. And since then,
it's been absolutely fantastic. It is so the right place for her. She loves going to the school.
She very much needs one on one.
As a parent we want our kids to be happy and finding a school that they thrive in
is such an important part of this.
I built my career and my identity through what can be seen as a segregated sport,
wheelchair racing. And look, I love my Paralympic mob. We are a diverse and inclusive family. But
we grew out of a segregated family. And I know that things are changing. Athletics club, swimming
clubs have para participation in events too. And so, you can see that this issue is so complex. And
emotional. Because people with disability find belonging in their segregated spaces.
One of the main criticisms levelled at segregated schools is that they have low, really low
expectation of what kids with disabilities can achieve. This was the case for Luke Nelson.
I rolled out of school, and I couldn't read.
I couldn't write and I'd like to remind the listeners that I was 18
when I couldn't read or write. So that was, that was not a good experience for me.
Why don't you think you were taught to read or write at your school?
Because I believe that the expectations of people with disabilities in some places weren't that
high. And I think community expectations aren't that high. You get out of school, and sometimes
they go, okay, you'll go to a day service, you'll go somewhere else. So, the expectations
of having a job, you know, moving out of home or doing something like that, they just weren't there.
Luke’s right. Young people that go to a segregated school are excluded from
their community from a very early age. And this puts them on the path to day services,
Australian Disability Enterprises, the old, sheltered workshops – entrenching this isolation
and exclusion. And when mainstream school gets it wrong, it can lead to lifelong trauma.
David Roy has worked as a teacher for the past 30 years and when his son was diagnosed with autism,
they began early intervention programs through the Department of Education in New South Wales.
We discovered he was getting unexplained bruising, we discovered that he was
becoming quite traumatised, just having to go to this place. And we removed him. I apologise,
I still find this quite emotional. It came when - he likes chocolate. Okay, he had a limited diet
in those days of, you know, basically cheese, juice, chocolate. And we had some chocolate
in a kitchen cupboard in the corner. And we said, oh, go to the cupboard and get it. He refused to.
In fact, he ran away in tears. We're going what is going on here. And we had a child in tears,
scared of a cupboard in our kitchen. And he just started saying 'bad teachers'. And we found that the
children are put into small cupboards, and this was a cupboard it was an upright cupboard with a
like a walk-in door, but it was just shelves all the way out full of items for the classroom. And
you could literally stand in front of the shelves close the door and your back is against the door
What was it like as a parent, having that trust abused?
It's guilt. And I'm the most guilty because I am the parent who was a teacher saying,
No, no, they can't be doing the wrong thing. They're teachers, we don't do that. That was stupid of me.
What happened with the school and the teacher?
We did end up going taking legal proceedings. I can't tell you the result of those.
Because we had to sign a confidentiality agreement.
There is no denying that there are valid fears coming from the disability community about
attending mainstream schools. When mainstream school aren’t equipped to teach children with
disability, parents feel they have no other option but to enrol their children
in a segregated school. But what if we were to demand that the mainstream schools were better.
Genuinely inclusive and resourced to support our children with a disability, in their community.
We are the 15 – 20 percent of the population, and shouldn’t mainstream schools should reflect that?
Armstrong Creek School is in Victoria, and they are living inclusion. This mainstream school
has over 600 kids and 13-15% of the students has a disability. Evan Savage is the school’s principal.
We're very lucky with the new school, a lot of the environmental things have been done for us. But
we think about the instruction, so how we teach, what needs to change what's different? What's the,
what is it about the curriculum that's hard to access the environment? And then the last thing
we would focus on is, what is it about the student or the learner that, you know, might be inhibiting
them from being fully included? you know, a school would say, you know, what, if only we
could do this, we would be able to support that child better? Well, how do we plan for that.
Hannah Prentice moved her family from Melbourne so all three of her kids could enrol at Armstrong
Creek School. Its culture of catering to all children is particularly important for
her middle child, who has down syndrome, and was enrolled in a segregated school.
It was brilliant school; I can't fault it. They were amazing with her really, really good.
But she developed a lot of behaviours. She got quite aggressive for a little while there. She
developed things that she'd never done before. Like she started flapping her hands a lot. And
yeah, it was a lot of challenging behaviour that sort of started when she started at school.
Has there been an effect on your family of having all your kids in one school?
It's been a game changer for us. I think great for them inclusive point of view,
they don't notice disability. You know, they've got kids in their classes that have a wide variety
of different additional needs going on. And half the kids, they don't know that it's, it's a thing.
And this is what inclusion does. Disability becomes part of the fabric of what makes us human.
And not something to be ashamed of, or to hide away or to fear. And that
is really powerful for making our whole community inclusive.
But Armstrong Creek isn’t every school.
Why not? If Armstrong Creek is on the right track,
then why can’t we start to create more inclusive schools right across the country? Catia Malaquias
is the founder of All means All, the Australian alliance for inclusive education
When my son Julius was born, I was told, I think on day, you know, about a day later
that they suspected that he had Down Syndrome, I immediately started to ask the nurses in the
maternity ward for recommendations about the best special school saying you, you know, in my area.
My thought process immediately jumped from I now have a child with the disability that must
mean that this is where he goes. So, it's this assumption of special places for special people.
I am not a bad person. I was pretty ignorant person. And, you know, that is that
is, you know, like ableism it, which is, I guess, in a way, you know, there are different ways to
define it. But it's, it's the belief system, it's, you know, it, it reflects the belief
systems that we have about people whose bodies and brains don't conform to a certain idea. Now,
I was pretty lucky that I had people around me that started to challenge that. And I'm
also sort of quite curious, I then I started reading a lot and I was shocked, I tell you,
I was shocked to discover that the practice of actually separating out people with disability,
you know, does not have any support in terms of, you know, education research. So,
the practice of segregation is not evidence based. It is a historical practice.
But when a child with a disability turns five, they need to go to school. And so,
you have a choice to make. A segregated school or a mainstream school.
Parents are often put in a position where they just have to make Hobson's choice. It's either
this, you know, segregated education system, which is not evidence based, and creates a whole
bunch of problems, or it's a mainstream system where kids aren't being supported properly,
you know, having a really hard time, that is not a choice. But what disabled people
and advocates are fighting for is actually for an inclusive education system that we don't have yet.
So, what would creating an inclusive education system look like?
So, we're talking about transforming the education system to make you know, Schools genuinely
inclusive of diversity and difference, not just for students with disability, but for other
groups as well that have been traditionally, you know, marginalised in education systems as well.
So, what do the young people think? Margarita has worked as an advocate for
Children and Young People with Disabilities and thinks co-design or asking people with
disability what they think the solutions are, could be a good place to start.
Where I think codesign can really kick off and really have an impact is
in policies, in training programs, in government advisory in all of those foundation things that
build the structures and build schools to then be supportive of students with
disability. But I also think that within schools, co-design means that you can have
meaningful participation of students in the way that they are in that community.
So, what is stopping the education system from being genuinely inclusive? David Roy again.
I will say some of the mainstream schools are fantastic. And yes,
there are segregated settings, both within schools and our separate schools. One of
the reasons we have those is because the mainstream system is not built to include.
So yes, I understand why parents go to these segregated settings and want them because it's
the safest place for their kids to be. Even though we also know that segregated settings
are where abuse and discrimination is more likely to happen. But it's hard. Everything is a barrier.
So, while ever there is a release valve out there which is the segregated setting,
we will have segregated schools. That will give a chance for a kid with a disability
who goes through the mainstream setting to be labelled too hard.
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