Children with Special Educational Needs (SEN)
All children are entitled to an education regardless of their race, religion, sex or disability. Children with SEN in Uganda face many difficulties in their everyday life due to the severity of their disability, society’s misunderstanding and funding for specialist equipment and schooling.
The Soft Power Special Needs projects aims to overcome these barriers to give children a fighting chance to live a life like their ‘normally functioning’ peers.
Our emphasis is very much on empowering the community and teachers in sustaining a high quality education for all their pupils. We join forces with Ugandans to empower and create an outstanding education for children with SEN.
Specifically, the project aims to enhance and train teachers, therapists and the community in Special Educational Needs to provide a safe and well resourced learning environment. With support from you we hope to provide an education for pupils whom at present are kept at home and uneducated because of their disability. The children will enter into an integrated education system with their peers and will be provided with specialist equipment to aid their education and welfare.
The project best hopes of success lie in the time of professionals; Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists, Speech and Language Therapists and trained teachers in the area of SEN and those currently in training, to come out and volunteer in the field. Incorporated within the programme will be vocational training so the children can leave school with a purposeful skill to support themselves and their families. It's about empowering the individual and giving them the same access to education as other children.
The SEN project is also aims to support teachers through inset training and developing a new diploma course at the University in SEN. It's important to us to equip the teachers and trainee teachers with the skills, knowledge and resources to sustain and continue delivering a quality education to all children with SEN.
We are looking for enterprising and enthusiastic Physiotherapist, Occupational Therapists and Speech and Language Therapists to volunteer their services within the schools and community to develop programmes, assessment and training for teachers and parents. This would be a valuable element to your personal and academic qualifications and we would value your support.
Schools for initial targeting
Walukuba West and Kyomya primary schools are the first to be targeted. At present they have dormitories and cater for pupils of the Deaf and Hearing Impaired. (Sarah is busy learning a crash course in Ugandan Sign Language!) The SEN classes cater for children from the age of 5 up to 18+ with a teacher and support worker qualified in USL. They have few resources and the teachers lack the abilities and skills to differentiate educational tasks to cater for the wide age range.
Alongside these pupils we are looking to provide places for up to 20 children with physical and intellectual disabilities. So with this comes disability awareness for existing pupils, teachers and parents and teacher training workshops in delivering an appropriate curriculum.
The recruitment process will involve visiting children in their homes and assessing their educational and health needs (so if this is something you are interested in come and volunteer your skills).
So with plenty of exciting hands-on work to be done and no time to be wasted.......we need your support to make this project a reality.
If you are interested in volunteering on this project, please email volunteering@softpowereducation.com
Update - Disability Awareness Training
The children at Walakuba West Primary School took part in Disability Awareness sessions run by Soft Power Education. The sessions helped the children to gain a better understanding of different types and causes of disability with the aim of promoting inclusion. The hands-on sessions got the children involved in activities to experience the difficulties of having a visual impairment; losing the use of the arms; using a wheelchair or crutches; or being unable to communicate by speech. The children also learned about successful and famous people who have disabilities and that we should focus on the ability, not the disability. A huge thank you to volunteers Heather and Orla who led these workshops and to all the other volunteers for their help.
Update February 2010
January has seen the beginnings of a much needed outreach service to meet the needs of the 250 children with disabilities we have so far registered. We have been working closely with Jinja Parents Network Association, SiteSavers and The Epilepsy Association in order to combine our services of Education and Occupational/Physiotherapy.
We have been concentrating on the Budondo Sub County of Jinja and are very excited to say that we have set up our first SEN parent support committee in Kyabirwa village, Budondo.The committee consists of parents who have disabled children themselves and they will be the much needed link between Soft Power Special Needs Project and the community. The committee mobilizes families for registering of their disabled children, sensitization on disability awareness and epilepsy, which is delivered by Sarah or Romeo and Norman –Outreach Project Coordinator and an Occupational Therapist.
The new term has begun at Walukuba West Primary School with the addition of 6 new pupils into the residential SEN unit. The teachers are currently being trained by Sarah and Romeo in basic ICT skills, a communication method called Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) and writing effective lesson objectives and plans.
The children with physical disabilities are being assessed by our Occupational Therapist, Norman, and experiencing their first physiotherapy sessions in our bright and well equipped soft play/therapy room.
What is so encouraging is the parents and the communities welcoming our services with open arms. In the time Sarah has been working here in the field of disability she has seen a positive shift in people’s attitudes towards disabilities.
Soft Power Education has just completed a wide scale research project across Budondo Sub County and one of the areas targeted was disability. The research flagged up the need for more services both in terms of NGO support and government support, Disability Awareness training in communities and schools and the need for empowering communities to act in gaining education and health provisions for their disabled children.
So it was encouraging to see that the work that the SEN project is doing is what the communities need and want.
It is so important to work hand in hand with the parents, communities, local politicians and the Ministry of Education and Sports in order to succeed in a effective empowering and sustainable manner.
We would like to thank everyone who has supported this cause and those who are continuing to do so through monthly standing orders, but as you know more funds are always needed to reach the many children we have on our register. Our two staff are just part time at the moment and we could meet twice as many children’s needs on the outreach if we could make them full time, so please fill in a standing order form or if you feel you can increase your current standing order please do so!
A big thank you to Pyramid Consultants www.pecs.com for providing extensive resources and Elephant Thoughts for funding www.elephantthoughts.com