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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 14 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Mr Speaker, this report was a unanimous one. The inquiry provided a very valuable opportunity for the committee to talk to the community, to professional organisations and to the Government about what is happening in our schools for children who have a disability. We are at a time when we are seeing a much greater inclusion of children with a disability into the mainstream system. There is still a lot of debate about what is the best way to educate children with a disability. Some people still believe that it is much better to have a special setting; other people believe equally as strongly that inclusion is absolutely beneficial and must be the way that the education occurs.

The debate is a really healthy one. I think that it needs to be supported, acknowledged and progressed because I would think that all in this Assembly and in the community want to see the best possible outcomes achieved for people in our community who have a disability. In working on the issues of education and how to support children with a disability, obviously it is of critical importance to be clear about what we are doing and that we are doing the best we can, because our actions will have a huge impact on the ability of those people to function in the community as they grow into adulthood.

The inquiry was a good one. It was very useful. I hope that the Government will see this report of the committee as a constructive report. Whilst we did find inadequacies in what is happening at the moment, I believe that most of the recommendations - I hope all of them - will be very useful to the Government as it moves forward. We have been able, through the committee process, to identify areas that certainly do need work. We have made suggestions and I look forward to a positive response from the Government on them.

Briefly, the big issue that came out of the inquiry was the need for a whole-of-government planning system. This proposal came from the Community and Health Services Complaints Commissioner in a formal way, but we actually received lots of submissions from parents who are trying to deal with the system and who feel that it is fragmented and is not coordinated. The Community and Health Services Complaints Commissioner saw as an urgent matter the need to put in place a whole-of-government planning process involving health and education at the least. He suggested that such a plan should include an accurate assessment of the number of severely disabled children coming through the system and the funding implications and of the provision of case managers covering the coordination of services other than education, such as speech pathology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, social work and respite care. He also made other recommendations about what that system-wide planning would involve.

That is a key recommendation of this inquiry because the reality for many parents is one of great difficulty and services do not appear to be coordinated nearly well enough. That, of course, is something that often comes up in inquiries into social issues in the ACT. It came up in most of the inquiries I participated in during the last Assembly and it came up in this one. It is obviously an ongoing challenge for governments to try to coordinate their work across departments.

Another important issue that came out of this inquiry was the availability of therapy. The committee made a number of recommendations on that, including the need to review the staffing mix in special schools to enable a stronger and more secure therapeutic presence

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