Govt urged to recruit more Special Needs teachers

By Petride Mudoola

The Ministry of Education and Sport has been advised to recruit more teachers in Special Needs Schools to enable Students with disabilities acquire the necessary learning skills.

“Students with physical disabilities need extra ordinary attention in order to achieve their goals, however inadequate staffing has contributed to workload hence affected their education,” the Head teacher Kampala School for the physically Handicapped Juliet Tumuhairwe observed.

According to the Special Needs curriculum, the teacher to pupil ratio is 1: 10 however due to under staffing the teachers are forced to handle more than the required number of students she said.

Tumuhairwe appealed to the Ministry of Education to reduce the teacher to student ratio from 1: 10 to 1: 5 to enable learners acquire the necessary.

Tumuhairwe noted that, “Training physically disabled learners requires team work which Government has not paid attention to.”

She cited cases where a teacher is forced to cut short a lesson in order to assist a student since some of the disabled require support to access lavatories. She also suggested that the ministry should consider the type of disability of the students before recruiting teachers.

Regardless of the workload, special needs teachers are remunerated as ordinary teachers yet the work they execute triples that of their counterparts in the ordinary schools the expert noted.

Tumuhairwe appealed to Government to consider a pay rise for special needs teachers due to the fact that the management of students with disabilities requires individual support compared to their counterparts in the normal setting who are required to teach a class.

She added that Special Needs Schools were in urgent need of physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and speech therapists.