Borderline cases: children falling into the gap

Hello guys. Let's get back to a serious topic today - I have an old friend from Singapore who has been in touch and we have had a really long conversation on Facebook discussing the condition of her son who is 5 years old (turning 6 this year). Let's call the boy Joe - not his real name and the mother Mrs V. She is very concerned about the development of her child and is running out of options, thus she wanted me to explore if he would be better off in the British education system. I will summarize what she has described to me about her son Joe and the challenges they face.

How will 'borderline cases' cope in the education system?

"Joe is turning 6 later this year but he doesn't have the mental age of a 5 year old - more like that of a 3 year old at best. He is really struggling at kindergarten and the teachers don't know what to do with him - we're not just talking about learning languages or mathematics, the boy struggles to even perform most simple tasks like getting dressed. I have tried everything: being nice, being strict, using rewards, being encouraging, punishing him - nothing works, nothing gets through to him. He is extremely slow to respond to even most basic instructions, like his IQ is very low and even the simplest of tasks are really big challenges. Most 3 year old would be capable of responding to instructions like that but Joe can't even function at that level - he can't do anything for himself, all he does is cry a lot and the teachers in the school in Singapore are telling me to send him to a special school for mentally disabled children. He cries a lot as well and often wets himself. The teachers don't know what to do with him.

My husband and I don't know what to do - we're both highly educated professionals with good jobs, graduates from good universities and we don't know why Joe is like this. Sure we have sought all kinds of professional help but every psychiatrist or expert has a different opinion and nobody has any solutions. There isn't anything drastically wrong with Joe apart from simply being, well, stupid and slow. The education system in Singapore has been a disaster for him as all the kids in his kindergarten are far more developed than him - he hasn't got the social skills to have any kind of meaningful social interaction with any of the other kids and I have observed him at school: whilst the other children play with each other, he either stares into space or just cries. I have been dreading the day I have to register him for primary one in Singapore as it would be a total disaster - he can't function and will fail everything for sure. I am wondering how the British system would treat a child like Joe because if it will make a difference, my husband and I are willing to try anything. Can you tell us more about how the British education deals with children like that please?"

Is the Singaporean education system just wrong for Joe?

Since Mrs V has presented me with a complex situation, I have turned to my friend Katie (not her real name, to protect her identity) who is a very experience primary school teacher. I have since put Katie directly in touch with Mrs V (yay, the power of social media) but I have turned our discussion into an interview to help present this to Mrs V and summarize what I have learnt about this rather complex issue.

Limpeh: Katie, could you tell me more about how the British education system copes when it comes to dealing with children with special needs? What have your experiences been like in this aspect?

Katie: I'm not sure the British system is any better with coping with children like that I'm afraid - we do get children like that in the school where I currently work, as well as with previous schools I have taught in. There is an evaluation done by medical experts to determine whether a child has special needs or not - this is not a job done by the teaching staff in the school, but the child is sent away to see this so-called expert and I'm not happy with that. You know, as teachers we spend most of the week with that child - we know the children so incredibly well, yet our opinion doesn't count because we're just teachers and it takes a doctor who has never met the child before to offer a professional diagnosis? Sometimes the results surprise me. You can have kids who are deemed to have special needs being surprisingly able to cope with the challenges of school; and then you have the opposite, you have kids who are clearly messed up one way or another, who have a below average IQ, but they are deemed to be 'borderline cases'. This is ludicrous of course, because it splits children up into two convenient groups: educationally normal vs special needs.

Limpeh: So you have kids who fall into the gap, when there is this dichotomy, ignoring the shades of grey.

Katie: Yes. I have seen a lot of kids who are deemed 'borderline cases' - that simply means that the experts recognize that the kids will need some help to adapt to life in school and some aspects of school will always be a challenge for the kids in question, but because they are not messed up enough, they are not deemed 'special needs' and so they are in the worst possible situation. The kids who are certified to have special needs, okay, they are then flagged up in the system and the school can then have right to ask for more resources from the government to help these kids. So for example, we can justify employing another teaching assistant if the child clearly needs more attention and help in the classroom. I'm not sure what the system is like in Singapore, but it does look like your friend is not given the help she needs because her son is probably not messed up enough. Being simply 'slow' is not a disability - to be perfectly blunt, we have always had people around us who are somewhat slower than the rest: we used to call them 'stupid', but it seems very un-PC to use that word these days. But resources are limited - some children are simply slow and for want of a better word, stupid: they don't have special needs. That refers to a certain set of medical conditions where the child is so severely affected that s/he is considered disabled and requires special assistance.

Limpeh: What happens then in these cases?

Katie: For the parents of these 'borderline cases', oh my - the onus is them placed on them to get the help their children need on the private market. If the parents are rich enough, then they will be able to buy the kind of extra therapy and help their children need. Not that there is any 'cure' or 'solution' - these experts help 'mitigate' the situation at best, really. You have to understand, these experts cannot 'cure' any of these kids, they can at best help them cope better with the challenges of life and make everyday tasks seem less of a challenge, so they can get through the day with less stress. Like in the case of Joe, you can't cure his condition and turn him into a straight A student. Get real. But there are cases where the parents are poor and don't have the money to pay for these expensive therapists and experts, so the kids are not given any extra help outside school and their situation often gets worse with time - the kids will struggle to stay in school or complete their education. Once they leave the school system, I shudder to imagine what happens to them. Most just end up living at home with their parents into adulthood, unable to get a job or integrate into society. I do feel sorry for the parents because I have seen the kind of stress they have to go through.

How will Mr & Mrs V cope with Joe's needs?

Limpeh: What happens then in your classroom, when you have to teach a 'borderline case' child?

Katie: (Sighs) Goodness me. It is like walking a tight rope in terms of establishing the right balance: when you have a child like that in the class, you can be tempted to spend 50%, even 60% or more of your attention on that child because that child just can't learn as fast as the others. But then in a class of 30 students, that means one child gets more than half my attention and the other 29 children have to share less than half of my time, attention and energy. That's not right - the parents of the other children have paid school fees just like everyone else, why should the quality of their children's education suffer just because they have a 'borderline case' like that in their class? If they were in the next class which doesn't have a 'borderline case' child, then they are able to learn a lot more effectively. You think the child suffers, the other classmates suffer as well, because if I am trying my best to help that 'borderline case' child, I am inevitably neglecting the other children who are more capable - that's not right, is it? Why should they be punished or penalized like that? But who do we blame then - the system? The government?

I have to discipline myself - I set myself goals to achieve: I have to cover this much of the syllabus within this lesson. I am not going to allow myself to slow down and miss my targets just because I have a 'borderline case' child in my class. Once I know I am on schedule and am not going to miss my target for the day, then I can give the 'borderline case' child more attention and help. If I am behind schedule, then I just have to tell myself, "tough, that kid is going to stare into space, not understand what the hell is going on and I can't go over there and help him. Not today. Too bad." I don't like doing that, because if you allow the child to fall too far behind, then the child will fail the exams and end up retained a year. It's not like these children don't have the IQ to learn anything - they can learn something, give them a chance and they will learn. But we have to recognize that they learn a lot more slowly than normal children and trying to then integrate them into a classroom full of normal students with the best of intentions is a total disaster at times.

Katie has to teach a mixed-ability class.

Limpeh: Well, I would have thought that a solution would be to put the 'borderline cases' in a class of their own and then the teacher can teach the same lessons at a much slower pace, a pace which is appropriate to the learning ability of the students.  I guess that's a rather Singaporean approach to the matter as we regularly stream students to group them according to ability. That's why I am wondering if the British system is better?

Katie: That is not done in the UK - I am not saying that the British system works better or am I condoning it. I'm just saying that it is not done in the British system and you tend to have mixed ability classes, at least in primary school anyway. Well, I can see the benefits of our system - you can't dump the borderline cases in a class where the expectations are so low that the teacher teaches so little that the kids walk away barely literate. You simply have to integrate these kids into mainstream society at some point, at some level and it is easier to start at primary school. How do you expect these 'borderline cases' to live and work alongside others in society if you start isolating them away from everyone else at such a young age? What is the alternative then? Do you have an alternative?

Limpeh: So is Mrs V going to be better off moving her child to the British system? Would it help their situation?

Mrs V has little faith in the Singaporean system.

Katie: Not really. To be honest, I can't tell for sure as I have never met her child, if her child can be diagnosed as 'special needs' then there will be resources in the British system to enable children like that to get a decent education. But if the child is classified as a 'borderline case', then quite frankly, pulling her child out of Singapore where everything is familiar and putting the child in a British school, where everything foreign, different - that's a massive shock to the system for any child. I'm not sure how well her child would be able to cope with this kind of transition and you are removing the child from an existing network of family members: grandparents, uncles, aunties, family friends etc. That is probably a far bigger factor for me to recommend against uprooting the child as the British system would not be any kinder to the child. The solution is ultimately money: if your child is a 'borderline case', then money can buy you a lot of the extra help the child needs and would make some difference.

Limpeh: Tell me please about some of your experiences with borderline cases.

Katie: Well, I have taught a child who was very sick - he had MS (multiple sclerosis) and also suffered from epilepsy. His spine was also deformed so he had a long list of medical conditions. When I was first assigned to teach the class he was in, I was given this long list and told, "you should be aware of this" and I was shocked at what I saw on that list. But I was told that the boy was educationally normal - that means that whilst he was very sick, he should be able to learn like everyone else. That was not the case at all. The medicines he has been prescribed had some very strong side effects on him - there was a period when he was given some medicine to reduce the incidence of epileptic seizures, that meant he was dozy, unable to focus in class, awake but barely lucid. There are good days and bad days. And there were very, very bad days when we couldn't do anything with him because of those side effects of the medicines. On top of all that, he was also being bullied by some of the other children in the school as well. He was a very unhappy boy at school, to say the least with all of these different factors that prevented him from learning well.

What is the right way to deal with such borderline cases?

After a few years of going through school like that, he fell behind the rest of his class so much that he couldn't follow the lessons. He hated the lessons - because it left him feeling confused and stupid, so he would get very distracted and he lost all interest in learning. The teachers struggled to deal with his behavioural issues - he became very disruptive in class and whenever the teacher got angry with him for misbehaving in class, he would claim, "I'm not feeling well. I feel sick." He knew the moment he played that card, the teachers would allow him to go rest instead of forcing him to say, participate in a maths lessons. All those problems, they are all connected, they compound each other - yet the child is certified educationally normal and thus not 'special needs'. We get told all these stories about Stephen Hawking being physically disabled and has ALS, yet he has a most brilliant mind - well, this child is no Stephen Hawking. His IQ may be normal, but there's just no way he can learn in a normal school but what do you do with a child like that? Put him in a padded cell with loads of sweets and chocolates? I don't know. I have no answers. His parents don't know what to do with him as his behaviour has become totally impossible as he gets older and I'm worried about that child. I'm also worried about his mother - she is a little lady: he has been hitting her and I've seen the bruises on her. How can children like that be classed as 'educationally normal', I ask you? How is this right?

Limpeh: What about the parents of these children then? How do they cope?

Katie: It depends, every case is different. Depending on their education background, their social class, their cultural background, religion, family experiences, every parent reacts and copes differently with this kind of challenges. Most want the best for their children, of course. But, in some instances, I have struggled with parents who go into denial.

Different parents react differently to these challenges.

Limpeh: Really. How so?

Katie: The classic case is when the parents spend a lot of money on some kind of therapy, so the therapist keeps telling the parents just what great progress the child is making because they don't wanna say, "I know you've paid me a lot of money, but I'm barely able to make any difference. In truth I really can't help your child." No, they want to give the impression that they are good at their jobs and can justify charging a lot of money. So the parents come away with a false impression that their child has made great progress - that's all a pile of lies of course. Complete bullshit. The proof of the pudding is whether or not the child can actually learn in a classroom environment - that's where I can see whether or not progress has been made and if I don't see much progress, I have to be honest with the parents. And that's when they turn around and accuse me of being a bad teacher, because they have effectively paid a therapist to tell them how great their child is. They can't help it - they are irrational because it is human to prefer listening to encouraging good news rather than face the ugly truth. I used to get angry with them - now I just feel sorry for them.

In my experience, society is conditioned to be kind and encouraging to these parents - when you see parents struggling with children like that, what do you do? You say nice things to them, you don't say things to put them down or tell them that there's no hope for their children. But what this kindness does, is that it leads to parents having all kinds of false hope - that their children will 'grow out of it' and somehow the problem will go away by itself or that there's a cure for it. Of course it doesn't work like that - but you have no shortage of kindhearted people offering encouraging advice on no basis other than their willful desire to say something nice. None of this 'encouragement' is based on evidence or medical science of course - yet these nice people mislead these parents with their encouragement. There are days when I struggle to find something nice to say to the parents when they come to me and ask them how their children are doing - I can't be too negative of course, but I never say anything nice for the sake of being nice. I feel that it all becomes fairly meaningless when people are just saying nice things to each other out of social decorum. But to be fair, most parents are pretty good and they understand what I have to go through.

How can we react as a society to such children then?

Limpeh: Thank you very much for sharing your insights with me.

Katie: That's okay. Good luck to your friend Mrs V and Joe.