| Description of good practice: |
Schools divisions that make up the 17 regions of the Philippines are headed by SPED (special education) supervisors. The supervisor’s primary role is to provide professional development activities to SPED and regular classroom teachers. However, the scope of duty provides for all types of disabilities with intellectual disabilities being just one-third of these activities. The Department of Education reports that there are 648 special education centres and regular schools offering SPED programs in the country. From over 2000 SPED teachers in 2013, numbers increased by 50% in 2018; however, only about 10% were assigned to secondary schools. Since teachers are tasked with supporting students with disabilities, students with IDD are identified at the beginning of each school year and then reported in the LIS. The data are then used for planning including allocating teachers’ duties and school support.
The programs and projects for supporting students with disabilities include upgrading of SPED centres to learning resource schools, training of regular and SPED teachers, and provision of technical assistance to teachers. For example, in one of the 227 schools divisions, with over 38000 students, there are only 253 students identified as learners with disabilities. At 0.66%, that would be a much lower proportion of students with disabilities compared with other countries and suggests a possible underreporting of students requiring learning support.Twenty-five percent of these learners are enrolled in a special school and 32% in an inclusive program. Clearly, the majority are not receiving inclusive education.
In September 2019, the Philippine Department of Education launched the Transition Curriculum for Learners with Disabilities in different packages (not publicly available). This curriculum is based on a program implemented in Ireland. There are five transition program packages available for students with disabilities. Common to all these packages is the aim of supporting these students become functionally literate and holistically developed Filipinos.Students’ activities are based on the transition program and their Individualized Educational Plan (IEP). So, in the main-stream classroom, the teacher follows a separate plan for the student in order to address the student’s needs. A separate curriculum for learners with IDD is counter to inclusive practice.
Research in the Philippines into inclusive education highlights the factors that are key to effective inclusion such as leadership support and the positive attitude of teachers towards mainstreaming students with disabilities. Another study undertaken in the Philippines found a lack of teacher training to support students with disabilities in regular classrooms. Although teachers express willingness to accept students with learning support needs, they feel that they are ill equipped and that inadequate resources will impede effective inclusive practices. Research conducted outside the capital, Manila, reports the limited assessment strategies employed by teachers, hindering the adoption of inclusive education to students with disabilities. Furthermore, effective inclusion of students with IDD is built on effective classroom practice in general. As noted earlier, in the Philippines, this is an area of required attention. The persisting challenges noted in develop-ing countries are significant in the implementation of inclusive education in the Philippines. These include poor quality teacher training, limited number of teachers, and inadequate classroom resources.
Inclusive education in the Philippines is being implemented by creating programs that categorize learners according to their differences. This action is considered exclusionary as it labels the learners with their differences and segregates them from regular schooling. As presented by the data above, the large number of students with learning support needs poses a challenge in Philippine education. This suggests the greater need to support teachers in improving the achievement of students in regular classrooms including students who are more at risk for exclusion.
The Philippine Department of Education recently released the revised K to 12 basic education guidelines. A new component of this document is the Inclusive Education Policy Framework for Basic Education, released as the Fifth Annex to the Basic Education Guidelines. This 13 page annex outlines the laws that support inclusion as a right of every individual under disadvantaged circumstances. Teacher professional development for inclusive education is provided to schools through DepEd programs such as teacher induction, in service trainings, and learning sessions. Learning sessions take the form of regular in school sessions for teachers and staff. The teacher-leader or school head determines the learning needs of teachers and then conducts learning sessions to support teachers to improve learners’ achievements.
In two studies from the Philippines, it was reported that administrators and instructional supervisors emphasized the need for training and additional resources to fully implement inclusive education in their schools. Formoso (2019) proposed that supervision tools specific to special education should be developed to help school leaders advance instruction for students with disabilities in regular classrooms.
There is a growing number of teacher-researchers as a result of the campaign of the DepEd in strengthening its research culture which includes inclusive education as one of the three cross-cutting themes in the Basic Education Research Agenda. The role of teacher/researchers is crucial in the implementation of inclusive education in the Philippines. Efforts to promote inclusive education in various dimensions of education such as in curriculum, programs and projects and recruitment are observable based on the uploads in Department of Education portals. However, whether these efforts are research-based or purely experiential remain unclear and need further inquiry. While progress towards provision of inclusive education is evident, a significant issue for equitable provision of inclusive education in the Philippines is the presence of civil unrest. Schools in war torn areas in Southern Philippines present evidence for inadequate support from the government. Besides its geographical characteristics, the situation is exacerbated by the continuous conflict between armed groups and the government. |
