Education reform must include special needs learners, autism advocate urges

RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­[email protected]

As the Gov­ern­ment moves to in­tro­duce a Con­tin­u­ous As­sess­ment Com­po­nent (CAC) for pri­ma­ry school stu­dents, an autism ad­vo­cate is urg­ing ed­u­ca­tion of­fi­cials to en­sure the new sys­tem is de­signed to ac­com­mo­date chil­dren with autism and oth­er learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties.

Founder of Sup­port Autism T&T, Dr Rad­i­ca Ma­hase, said while she sup­ports ef­forts to move away from ex­clu­sive re­liance on the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA), the re­forms must ad­dress long-stand­ing in­equities faced by neu­ro­di­ver­gent learn­ers.

“Every year around, this dis­cus­sion on SEA comes up, and I say, with­out a doubt, the SEA ex­am needs to be re­vis­it­ed and re­struc­tured,” Ma­hase said.

“I mean, in its present form, neu­rotyp­i­cal chil­dren strug­gle with this ex­am, much less stu­dents with autism and oth­er learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties. And I am not on­ly re­fer­ring to the stress brought about by this ex­am. I am talk­ing about the struc­ture of the ex­am it­self.”

Her com­ments come as Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Michael Dowlath con­firmed that the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion has fi­nalised plans to roll out the CAC from the new school term as part of a phased re­form of the pri­ma­ry school as­sess­ment sys­tem.

The Min­istry said the new frame­work is in­tend­ed to re­duce the high-stakes pres­sure as­so­ci­at­ed with the SEA by spread­ing as­sess­ment across mul­ti­ple years, rather than de­ter­min­ing sec­ondary school place­ment based on a sin­gle ex­am­i­na­tion. Of­fi­cials said the ap­proach is ex­pect­ed to pro­vide a broad­er pic­ture of stu­dent per­for­mance, con­sis­ten­cy and progress, while re­duc­ing anx­i­ety linked to one-off test­ing.

The CAC will al­so be sup­port­ed by ex­pand­ed school Wi-Fi in­fra­struc­ture and AI-en­abled learn­ing tools, in­clud­ing a SEA Math­e­mat­ics Past Pa­per plat­form de­signed to as­sist teach­ers and stu­dents in track­ing progress.

How­ev­er, Ma­hase said the re­form presents an op­por­tu­ni­ty to build a more in­clu­sive ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

“This is an ex­am which cer­tain­ly does not cater to the needs of chil­dren who learn dif­fer­ent­ly. Imag­ine every stu­dent is ex­pect­ed to com­plete the same cur­ricu­lum at the same time and pace and then write the same ex­am. This is why so many autis­tic chil­dren are forced to drop out of school, be­cause they just can­not keep up, es­pe­cial­ly when they don’t get ad­e­quate sup­port.”

Ma­hase ar­gued that the cur­rent SEA frame­work is “not flex­i­ble and fair enough for all types of learn­ers,” adding that con­tin­u­ous as­sess­ment could pro­vide a more ac­cu­rate re­flec­tion of stu­dent abil­i­ty.

“I be­lieve that bring­ing back con­tin­u­ous as­sess­ment will help. It will give a more bal­anced pic­ture of the child’s abil­i­ties. And for autis­tic stu­dents and those with oth­er learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties, this is es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant.”

She said many autis­tic stu­dents un­der­stand aca­d­e­m­ic ma­te­r­i­al but strug­gle un­der tra­di­tion­al ex­am con­di­tions.

“While some chil­dren strug­gle with writ­ten ex­ams, read­ing, writ­ing or pro­cess­ing in­for­ma­tion quick­ly, the con­tin­u­ous as­sess­ment will give them a chance to show what they know over time and in dif­fer­ent ways,” she said. “Many autis­tic chil­dren, for ex­am­ple, might not do well in a writ­ten ex­am. But those same chil­dren may do well when they are as­sessed in small­er as­sign­ments or through dif­fer­ent types of as­sess­ments.”