Non-US Dopers: What's Up With Education For Special-Needs Children In Your Country?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In this article, Americans and non-Americans are sharing things that are positive about the US. One commenter says: “Access to public education for children with special needs is a right guaranteed by law. And those protections are stronger and the educational service for special needs children are better than in most of the rest of the world.”

I’d like non-US Dopers to flesh this out a little more, if possible. In your country do you have to find alternatives to public education if your child has special needs (mental retardation, cerebral palsy, etc.)? Does the public education system grudgingly accept them but not make accomodations for them?

I’ve never been a parent, let alone a parent of a child with special needs, but my general sense is that, yes, in the US, if you have a child with special needs, your local public system is going to accomodate them, willingly or not. What that means is going to vary by school district, but at a minimum your child is going to get an IEP (Individualized Educational Program), which the principal, your child’s teacher, your child’s teacher’s aide, the school nurse, the school counselor, and the school janitor are going to have to follow to. the. letter. And failure to make accomodations (ramps for wheelchairs, for example) will result in a lawsuit.

What’s it like where you live?

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Sweden.

By law, all schools, public and private, have to make accomodations for a great number of things. These range from physical (e.g. ramps for wheel chairs) to extra testing times for kids with ADD, spell check software for dyslexic kids, even at tests that are not spelling tests.

There’s a long list of things schools must do, and I don’t think this is the place to go into them. Suffice to say, a child with special needs will have the best schooling possible without any extra cost for the parents.

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In England (and I assume it’s much the same in the devolved administrations as well), the position sounds much the same as OP describes. There’s a process for getting a plan set up and agreed to meet a child’s needs, and sometimes disagreements can come to court:

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In China, you’re on your own. I moved to the US to get help for my daughter after paying a fortune for private special education in China.

There were plenty of education professionals in China that tried their best. But China has too many people, and education is an up or out system. Mediocre kids without special needs effectively get warehoused out of the system.