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 The Supreme Education Council has launched a new program to provide extra learning help for students who need it, ensuring that all students can find their place in Independent Schools.
Underlying the Individual Needs Program are the beliefs that Independent Schools must provide the education that meets the needs of students, and that the SEC curriculum standards should be taught in such a way as to be accessible to all students. The program is not restricted to functional disability, but includes learning difficulties and behavioral problems as well. It aims to improve both the teaching and learning processes of students with special needs, and to ensure parents’ engagement in that learning.
Sabah Al-Haidoos, director of the Education Institute, said the Individual Needs Program is oriented to school operators, individual needs specialists, school social workers, and all the educational partners at the Independent Schools.
The Individual Needs Program provides technical assistance to the Independent Schools in addition to fostering cooperation among parents, education stockholders, students, and the broader community. At the same time, the program introduces teachers and educational specialists to a more appropriate means of teaching students of individual needs.
In the first phase, the 2006-2007 academic year, four Independent Schools are participating in the program: Al-Khaleej Al-Arabi Model Independent School for Boys, Abu Baker Asedeeq Independent Primary School for Boys, Khalifa Primary Independent School for Girls, and Al-Markhiya Primary School for Girls. Additional schools will adopt the program in the coming years, after the experience of the initial four is assessed.
Selection of the first four was based on the availability of qualified teachers and special needs students in the four schools. In addition, the schools have previous experience in dealing with children with individual needs and are piloting a variety of programs which the SEC is developing in cooperation with the Academy for Educational Development (AED). AED is an international organization the SEC is working with to boost and develop a systematic program to provide educational services for individual needs children.
The first year’s objectives are to build the abilities and skills of teachers, administrators, and parents so that they interact effectively with the students, and to promote the services offered by the community to students and schools.
 At Al-Markhiya School, the Individual Needs Program coordinator is Maha Al-Maadheed, who said approximately 30 students are involved. She welcomed the fact that those students are now taught in the regular classroom, in contrast to the past when they were taught in a separate room.
“No one can ignore the psychological effect that results from learning in exile. On the other hand, when students learn in the classroom, this will help them be more accepted and build character. It can strengthen their weak points and teach them the discipline of the classroom, and, moreover, they enjoy the educational benefits of the integrating process,” says Ms. Al-Maadheed.
Al-Markhiya set up a special team to implement the program, which brings together the school principal, the deputy director of academic affairs, the individual needs coordinator and her assistant, a psychology specialist, class teachers and parents. The school has conducted a workshop on specialized education.
Al-Khaleej Primary, meanwhile, was chosen because of its previous experience and special treatment of individual needs students. Latifa Al-Ziani, the school social worker, and Saiema Khalid, the school specialist in learning difficulties, supervised the plan's implementation. The school has diagnosed, analyzed and identified individual needs students by using a coloring and drawing system. Most of the individual needs students of Al-Khaleej were facing difficulties in reading Arabic and in comprehending the meanings of words. Each student of Al-Khaleej in the program has a separate plan and file and the school has held training courses for other Independent Schools on methods for learning Arabic and English.
The Individual Needs Program is also working with the pilot schools to build an information-based system containing data on the range, nature, and severity of students’ functional and behavioral issues. This inventory is considered ground-breaking as a tool for classifying individual needs students. The Qatar Inventory of Student Functioning (QISF) is built on the World Health Organization’s International Classification for Functioning, Disability, and Health. Rune Simeonsson, a professor at the University of North Carolina in the U.S., is working with the SEC to design, implement, and analyze the resulting QISF data.
Careful analysis of the pilot QISF data will allow the schools’ student case study teams to make more informed decisions about the student and provide information to design a student’s individual education plan. QISF data will also inform the Evaluation Institute as it works to build an assessment system designed to best determine any individual needs student’s knowledge and skills.
The Education Institute’s Curriculum Standards Office has held a number of training workshops and programs about QISF and classroom functioning behavior for Individual Needs and Professional Development Coordinators and a broad group of teachers and parents. The workshops were designed to inform individual needs stakeholders about their roles and responsibilities. At the same time, training helped the individual needs coordinators in the four schools to understand and know their roles. The four selected schools implemented the program gradually at the beginning of the school year and are now continuing to fully apply it.
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