A teacher aide works with students in an Auckland classroom. Photo: RNZ / John Gerritsen
A teacher union is calling for a $2.5 billion boost to support for children with disabilities, including $1b to put a teacher aide in every classroom.
The Educational Institute said the five-year total would help transform the school and early learning systems so they were fully inclusive of children who needed support.
In a report out on Tuesday, NZEI Te Riu Roa, proposed incremental increases in funding over each of the next five years.
It estimated that by 2029 its proposals would add $788m to the annual education spend.
It included the government footing the full cost of teacher aides, hiring 11,111 more teacher aides to ensure all classrooms had one and funding a further 1100 learning support coordinators.
It also called for doubling the number of early intervention teachers, education support workers, psychologists, occupational therapists, special education advisers and speech language therapists by 2029.
The report said its recommendations were based in part on the previous government's review of high needs support conducted between 2021-23, which found that for every seven students receiving support, a further three had unmet needs.
It said early intervention should be a priority and support should follow children seamlessly, rather than stopping when they moved from early childhood education to school.
A member of the NZEI's governing council, speech-language therapist Conor Fraser, told RNZ learning support for children with disabilities was the most pressing problem facing teachers and principals.
"Learning support is coming up across the country, across age groups, from early childhood through primary and secondary. It is coming up as the number one issue for everyone who works in education," she said.
Fraser said demand for learning support had grown significantly in recent years and accessing help for children was tougher than ever.
"Kids that used to receive specialist support services five years ago are no longer receiving that support because it seems like the bar is being raised in order to manage the demand," she said.
She said waiting times were unacceptably long.
"I've seen recent examples where there's a family waiting to hear from a speech therapist and it's just clocked over 12 months," she said.
Fraser said there had been plenty of reviews of the sector, most recently by the previous government, and it was time to act on their recommendations.
"There's been lots of reviews done over the years. I think that's the thing that we know we don't need ... We know these issues have been well traversed. This is now at the point that it's time for action," she said.
"We've been putting band aids on the system and we know that specialist services are understaffed. We need to double the workforce of specialist roles for learning support coordinators, resource teachers of literacy, resource teachers of Māori, people who work in learning support within the Ministry of Education. We know the demand is completely outweighing what's being provided, so it makes sense to meet kids where they're at and provide that specialist support."
A significant proportion of the NZEI's proposed spend would go on increasing the number of teacher aides.
Fraser said they were invaluable.
"Teacher aides are the backbone of our schools and the funding for them is really inconsistent and unpredictable. They're working with kids that require specialist support, but we've got 54 percent of our teacher aides are on insecure fixed-term contracts, so by dedicating teacher aide funding to have a teacher aide in every classroom just allows for security and consistency for kids who need support through a teacher aide."
The government had indicated it would make changes to the learning support system this year.
Education Minister Erica Stanford late last year told RNZ that parents and teachers said the learning support system was not delivering the right service to the right child at the right time.
Stanford said she was working on strengthening the system through practical changes and effective targeted investment.
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