Most older teachers not equipped to teach children with special needs

In 2011 the Swaziland Ministry of Education and Training formulated a policy on Inclusive Education. One of the fundamental objectives was to allow child with special educational needs (SEN) to enroll in the mainstream at their local schools and avoid a situation whereby the child is uprooted from his or her environment and made to start life somewhere else without the support of the parent and outside their normal environment. However, some teachers have come forward lamenting that they are not equipped to teach children with special educational needs, even though they want to, owing to the fact that they were not trained for it.

Local teacher training institutions have over the years started to put some emphasis on special needs, which teachers who have been in the field for longer say was not the case before. A teacher at a school in Mbabane, Muzi Shongwe* said there was lack of capacity building to empower teachers to better assist the learners. He trained at Southern Africa Nazarene University (SANU) and started teaching in 1994. Shongwe said in most government schools, there was lack of programmes and resources suitable for the challenged child, and the infrastructure was not conducive to the needs of the children. “The policy on inclusive education is a very noble initiative. But we lack political will. The policy only exists on paper. My heart bleeds for those children. Just like any other, they have a future. They have dreams. We cannot exclude them based on the special circumstances,” he said.

Ministry of Education and Training Senior Inspector for Special Education Needs, Cebsile Nxumalo disputed that the policy existed only on paper, asserting that schools that had embraced the principles of Inclusive Education were improving their policies, teaching and learning and resourcing approaches to cater for diversity in their classrooms.

Shongwe said the situation would improve if government capacitated teachers by either paying for or subsidising their studies in special needs training.  He also recommended that the National Curriculm Centre should design a relevant curriculum specific to the needs of the children and that resources must be provided to enhance the programmes. “My school has limited collaboration with Ekwetsembeni Special School. They assist with activities that can be assigned to the learners and how to manage them. We’ve also engaged inspectors from the Ministry on capacity building. Mid to long term, we encourage our staff members to enroll at the university. But before that happens, the children’s future looks bleak, sadly,” said Shongwe.

Responding to Shongwe’s grievance that there were no adequate resources to help children with special needs in schools, Nxumalo said resources were multifaceted. They could be financial, material, or otherwise, and the ministry encouraged schools to identify the specific resources they needed and then include those resources in their school development plan and budget.  “Where they need external support, they then make the SEN unit aware of the specific support they require.  The Ministry has over the years supported schools in this regard,” she said. Nxumalo also said there was no separate curriculum, adding that the ideal situation would rather be to modify and adapt the existing curriculum to suit the needs of every learner in the classroom. 

Nxumalo said all teachers who go through a Primary Teachers Diploma or Secondary Teacher's Diploma in all the teacher training colleges do Special Needs training from 1st to 3rd year.  “This has been the case since 2009.  Therefore, teachers now graduate with a good base on SEN issues.  In each primary school we therefore expect that there are one or two teachers who have done SEN. Furthermore, the SEN unit does run capacity building workshops for school. This means every year we select a few schools (primary and high schools) to benefit from the workshops. The number of schools to benefit is determined by the funds we have that year for running workshops,” said Nxumalo.

Although Nxumalo said since 2009 all teachers had been receiving SEN training, another teacher who graduated from Swaziland College of Technology in 2012 emphatically denied that he ever got such training. He, however, went on to teach at a special school. Fortunately for Mukelwe Dlamini*, he has since enrolled with SANU for a degree in Inclusive Education and Special Needs. “I was learning by doing and experimenting with the children because I had no clue how to teach them. Sometimes whatever strategy I used would win, sometimes not,” he said when quizzed on how he managed to teach the children with no training. Dlamini said the only special skill he possessed was that he could use sign fluently, which placed him in good stead with the deaf students at the school. He undertook to learn sign language for his own personal development even before he went for tertiary education. Since enrolling for the studies with SANU, Dlamini said he feels a lot more confident and empowered to teach learners with special needs. “Now I understand that learners are diverse and that the one-size-fits-all approach which I employed before is not necessarily the way to go. I am learning different strategies one may employ to teach my students,” he said. He added that he was grateful to SRA for sponsoring his studies, and that he was fortunate because there were many teachers who knew nothing on SEN, yet some of them were teaching such children.

Although there might be some advancement in equipping teachers for SEN, what is very clear is that there are many teachers that graduated before a proper roll out of the training that are still out in the cold. It is a genuine concern that should really be addressed with the seriousness it deserves, because the end result is a child with special needs who remains illiterate even as he attends school; all because his/her teacher doesn’t know what to do with him. In some circumstances, parents are requested to withdraw their child from school because the teachers have thrown in the towel on that child. Children might end up staying at home or being forced to commute to distant special schools. 

*Names changed on request