The AFA of public schools deplore the '30 minutes' on inclusive schools
"Broadcasts like Sunday's cause emotional damage," they denounce in a statement.
BarcelonaSince 2017, all Catalan children, regardless of their condition, must be enrolled in mainstream schools, and special education centers will have a support role and deal only with the most serious cases. 30 minutes This Sunday, however, he wanted to give a voice to "families, teachers, and mental health professionals who denounce that the inclusive school system in Catalonia is not being implemented with the necessary resources and flexibility." The result was a piece that has prompted the rejection of AFFAC, the federation that brings together all the associations of families of students in Catalan public schools.
As they explain in a statement, the focus of the report broadcast by TV3 "jeopardizes the work carried out over the years to ensure that the educational community and society as a whole understand that inclusion in the education system is not only a benefit for students with specific educational support needs." The organization believes that this was an outdated debate and regrets that, in its opinion, the 30 minutes suggests "that students with specific educational support needs can only be adequately served in special education centers."
AAFFAC recalls that other organizations have also expressed their support for inclusive education, including the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the European Agency for Inclusive Education. "Broadcasts like Sunday's cause emotional damage and impact society's collective perception of diversity. It is painful to hear speeches that speak of students with specific educational support needs as a source of violence, of troubled children who monopolize all attention," they lament in the note released on Tuesday.
One of the program's segments included the testimony of Laia de Eguía, a teacher at a public school in Barcelona. "Teachers can't do the work of two people," she complained, describing how she had to restrain children who ran away, scratched, or bit while attending to other students with dyslexia or who didn't understand the language. "This isn't inclusion; it's just people together, stressed and anxious," she reflected. According to the program's synopsis, "the report raises a fundamental question about what inclusion really means, and how it can be implemented with the real resources of our education system."
