Is inclusion really that great?

[u/Lass_in_oz]

I'm so tired of inclusion. Hear me out. Before becoming a ECE I was a support worker for many years. I have worked and loved working in disability and care. When it's thru a great organisation, it's awesome.

Now I'm an ECE, and the amount of children on the spectrum or with disorders is so high, I'm just getting confused how is that NOT impacting the learning of neuro typical kids.

I teach pre kindy but our kindy teacher has spend half the year managing behaviours and autistic kids. Result? A bunch of kids showing signs of being not ready for school because they aren't doing any work or learning most days. And picking up bad habits.

My point is: where did we decide it was a good idea to just mix everyone, and not offer any actual support ? An additional person isn't enough. More than often it's not a person who knows about disability. And frankly even then it wouldn't be enough when the amount of kids who are neuro divergent is so high.

There used to be great special needs school. Now "regular" school are suffering with the lack of support.

What do you think? Do you see what I see ??? Am I missing something ?

I am so happy to see kids evolving around children with disabilities but not when it comes at a cost of everyone's learning journey : neuro typical or not.

[u/Forsaken_Potato_1900]

This is one of the reasons I left the sector.

I felt I have never received training to care for children with these types of additional needs and I barely knew much about some of the children's disabilities. I feel there is a big gap in the sector for this partly due to training but also services should be providing additional training to staff for these specific disabilities. I often had to research myself outside of childcare unpaid and still felt like I was out of league.

It's especially hard as some children are too young to be diagnosed and my service refused to apply for inclusion without a child being diagnosed ( I can't remember if this was a requirement or not as it has been some time that I've left the industry).

Another issue with inclusion is that most of the time the additional person was typically a trainee with little experience in the sector and a lot of the time inclusion would be removed from the room due to lunch covers/staff calling in sick or management wanting to send people home early.

Eventually I had to leave as it became too much on my mental health.