Provedor de Justiça Europeu

Dear Sir,

Attached I send you some comments I made to the above document 2002/D/442. This document gives you an impression of the school climate and attitude towards the SEN pupils and their parents of the administrators of the European Schools in Brussels.

Unfortunately, I do not have an electronic copy of the doc. 2002/D/442, but you could ask Mr. Bernard Vervaecke, Vervaecke (bernard.vervaecke@eursc.org) to send you a copy of the document.

As a parent of a SEN pupil I can assure that it is nerve-wrecking to try to live with the constant threat of the School kicking your child out as soon as it finds a good excuse.

I hope you can put pressure on the Commission to make the European schools more friendly to their users irrespective of their different ways of learning things.

Yours truly,

Birgitte

Birgitte Holst
Member of the SEN Working Group of the Parents' Association

Comments on Mr. Rieff's "Rapport sur les actions en faveur des enfants à besoins spéciaux (SEN) dans les Écoles européennes (ref. 2002/D/442)

Réunion du 13 mars 2002 / Centre Borschette

Concerning page 6 (...impossible pour un élève SEN d'aller jusqu'au BAC ..)
The number of SEN pupils reaching the BAC is bound to increase as some of them are of perfectly normal intelligence, but are affected by various personality disorders that disturb their learning process while still allowing them to learn with help. When these adverse effects are neutralized by a skilful SEN teacher and good cooperation between teachers, SEN teacher and parents, the pupil may be quite successful academically.

Concerning the last paragraph on page 7 (Cependant, pour que la procedure ...)
In Luxembourg, during various different advisory group meetings in the autumn of 2001, the representative of the SEN Policy Group (Rieff) referred a number of children who were candidates for the SEN programme, to get special help by the Learning Support teacher of the relevant section. As the children had learning difficulties that were serious enough to require quite a number of hours of help from the LS teacher, who nonetheless did not get an increase in the number of LS hours on his/her timetable, this approach led to an impossible situation for the LS teachers who thus had to dedicate a large number of hours to a small group of children and were forced to neglect the children with minor difficulties.

Such an approach is unacceptable. If the LS teacher only has a fixed number of hours per week, there is a limit to how many children with learning difficulties he/she can cope with. Either the LS teacher should be allocated more hours or the children with the most serious difficulties should be referred to the SEN programme and get their own SEN teacher.

Mr. Rieff seems to assume that all SEN children are produced in the home country and exported to new countries. However, in quite a number of cases the parents have accepted a job as EU officials before having even conceived their SEN child.

This being said I do agree with the line that the most serious cases cannot be handled by a mainstream school like the European school and should indeed be referred to specialized schools either in the country of residence or in the home country.

Concerning top of page 8 (..une surenchère des périodes .... représentants des associations des parents ...)
The parents' representatives are free to express their opinion on the basis of the guidelines laid down in the SEN document 811-D-1999. If they wish to support for example the number of hours of SEN requested by the class teacher rather than the lower number of hours offered by the representative of the SEN policy group, they are free to do so.

This attempt to shut up the parents' representatives who have a lot of experience after having attended numerous advisory group meetings is unaccaptable.

Concerning page 8, 6.0.c:
Improvements:
Again and again I meet parents of SEN children who are very poorly informed by the school about the details of the SEN programme, for example about their rights, obligations and possibilities. The school will not hand out the SEN document 811-D-1999 or any other written information which the parents could study in depth at home at their ease. The school in Luxembourg fails to attach article 1 to 8 to the SEN convention to be signed by the parents. Thus they are not informed about their possibility of appeal in case of disagreement.

In the proposal of the school doctor of Brussels I, one very important expert party has been forgotten, namely the parent(s). The parents are usually the best experts of their child.

The parents should play a much more active role as they are the people who know their child the best and they should be much better informed by the school.

I fully support the Scandinavian proposal for a SEN coordinator in each school. Such a coordinator is badly needed especially in the secondary section where there is no RT/LS support teacher.

Page 9, d)
I fully support the creation of small teaching groups for pupils who cannot cope with the stress of the usual large classes. Many of these children have normal intelligence, but become disruptive due to the sheer stress of being in such large groups of children.

Page 9, g)
Very important point. Whenever the SEN pupil is able to follow the normal curriculum and get marked on the same conditions as the other pupils, this should of course be acknowledged and the pupil should be integrated back into the normal system no matter whether the pupil continues to be in the SEN programme or not. The ideal situation is of course a SEN pupil who is fully integrated among his/her peers and manages to follow the normal curriculum with the help of the SEN teacher.

Birgitte Holst
Luxembourg