Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-25-Speech-4-217"
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"en.20080925.22.4-217"2
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"Madam President, a number of years ago two problems were identified with the European Schools. One was that they were lagging far behind in inclusiveness and integrated policies for special education needs (SEN) children. The other was that when parents would make an application to the school for a child with special needs, they had a practice of saying that they were not really able to meet their needs and the parents should go and find something else. This really was not good enough.
In December 2007, Parliament set money aside in its budget to ‘contribute to the financing of first-class education for SEN children and to promote the concept of inclusive education and that this sum is to be released upon presentation of a proposal for the launch of a pilot project for the SEN resource centre comprising qualified personnel with relevant experience and appropriate teaching materials’. In the time I have I will not go through the negotiations, the back and forth, that have gone on about this pilot project. What has come about is that the pilot project has become several half-posts in psychology and some other resources, but it is not what I would see as a pilot project: actual classes, integrated classes throughout the European Schools.
I feel it is time for us to be very clear about the goal. The goal is inclusion and the goal is to integrate children in a way that is possible for them. There are now 411 SEN pupils in the European Schools in the SEN project. This is 2%, and yet disability in the general population is 17%. We are still not allowing enough children with special education needs into the schools, so we are still missing out on 15%. I cannot believe the figure for the population of people entitled to those schools is different from that in the general population.
We certainly need to have a project and assess the situation but we could do that for ever – we have been looking at the situation for ever! It is time to move beyond the pilot schemes. It is time to make a real approach to children as standard practice in all the schools. We are a long way from doing that.
This is the other meaning of diversity. It is not just about languages and cultures: it is about peoples’ needs and their abilities and catering to the wide diversity of that as well."@en1
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