Special touch making a big difference

The first crop of graduands from Northlight School which passed out recently marks a significant step in Singapore's move towards attending to children with learning disabilities.

These are children who would have dropped out of society - they failed their Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) twice or more if not for the second chance they had been given.

Some will continue with their education at Institutes of Technical Education specialising in one of four fields:
mechanical services, electrical services, food preparation and services or retail operations.

The rest will start work, but still with some hand-holding from their teachers to ensure that they are able to cope with the stress of working life.

Instead of 200 "failures" who would have been a burden on society, the special school has turned out 200 useful and productive members.

For subsequent cohorts, what can be done to help them even earlier, so that they won't fail their PSLE in the first place?

Many of these children are of normal intellect. They are not kids with low IQ. But they do have problems.

The truth is 15 per cent of children of normal intelligence in every cohort have learning disabilities.

Early intervention can make a critical difference to these children, said Professor Ho Lai Yun of Singapore General Hospital.

Aside from Northlight, which was set up two years ago, and Assumption Pathway the other vocational school catering to PSLE dropouts that was set up last year to meet the growing demand, Singapore is moving upstream in helping such kids.

It wants to identify these children early to provide them with help so they can remain in mainstream education.

Prof Ho a senior neonatologist who also holds positions at the Medical School KK Women s and Children's
Hospital and the Ministry of Health, said these are children with normal IQs who have trouble coping with the standard teaching format at Singapore schools.

Their learning disabilities could come in many forms.

The best known is probably dyslexia, where the child has difficulty reading because some numbers and letters of the alphabet - such as b and d, or s and z - appear similar to him.

If they are taught early how to cope with this they are able to compete with normal children in mainstream schools Without early intervention, they end up lagging behind their peers.

Similarly, some children are more "clumsy", said Prof Ho, including some top students at elite schools like the Raffles Institution.

They have poor motor skills and would keep walking into doorways, tripping over kerbs or knocking into tables.

In class, they have difficulty writing in a straight line, so their sentences crawl all over the page.

In the past, teachers would dismiss them as lazy or deliberately not trying instead of realising that their brains work differently. Some of these children might actually be brilliant, said Prof Ho.

Similarly there are children who somehow are unable to cope with mathematics. But they are not losers in other areas such as language, sports or the arts.

Catering to their special needs in mainstream schools can "shift the odds in their favour", he said.

Otherwise, such children might end up as dropouts, become gangsters or even runners for drug smugglers.

"Have you ever encountered a stupid gangster?" he asked, making the point that these are people of at least normal intelligence.

Good early intervention could turn them into useful productive members instead of being disruptive to society.

Some people complain that this is too little, too late.

True, if these programmes had been set up decades ago, many more people could have been helped. But it is costly and the nation had other priorities then.

In the past, doctors had concentrated on keeping children alive. Today, Singapore's 2.31 deaths per 1,000 babies is the best infant mortality rate in the world. The infant mortality rate is defined as the death of an infant before the age of one.

Among toddlers and older children few die of infectious diseases, thanks to the comprehensive childhood immunisation programme.

So it is time to turn the attention to helping kids with other problems, such as learning disabilities.

Children are important to Singapore, which is facing declining births. Ensuring that every child is given the best opportunity means society loses fewer of them.

The Ministry of Education wants to have one in 10 primary school teachers and one in five seconday school teachers trained to indentify and help kids with special needs by 2011.

It is also training and deploying special needs officers, counsellors, psychologists and social workers to mainstream schools to see that no child is left behind.

For those who have falled through the net and are unable to proceed to secondary school, there are now Northlight and Assumption. Among the first batch, only about
20 students dropped out.

One of the first things these schools do is to foster the children's self-esteem, which has been badly battered by their recurrent failures at school.

They then try to train them in areas they are interested in, such as cooking or hairdressing for example. All are useful vocations, said Prof Ho.

"It would be a terrible waste for a society to lose up to 15 per cent of each cohort because they had not been given the opportunity to develop according to their individual talent," he said.