Dept aims to improve education for PWDs

THE Department of Education has made great strides in aiming to improve inclusive education for Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) by braille materials for vision impaired children in grade eight.
Speaking recently on the last day of a five-day disability inclusion workshop in Port Moresby, Allan Jim, the assistant secretary for the teacher education division at the Department of Education, listed a number of ways in which the department was trying to be more inclusive.
“We are starting to braille materials for those in grade eight, giving a child who’s blind the opportunity to progress,” he said.
“We are also working with our measurement services division, to give children with special needs extra time during exams to complete their papers well.
“I would like to encourage each and everyone of us to partner together to see how we can bring children with disabilities to nearby resource centres and enrol them so that the department can continue to provide an education for them.”
The department was currently working on ways to see how children who may have reached a certain age or progress in their education, could be streamed into the vocational sector, so that they were trained with some form of skills to earn an income.
This was just an example of one of the ways the DoE was working on to give PWDs equal opportunities to give back to the community.
At the workshop, representatives from 20 provincial Organisations’ for Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) had mentioned how the main agency responsible for implementing the national disability policy had not been carrying out its mandated responsibilities.
“We have just completed the PNG Melanesian sign language, which will be launched alongside inclusive education in new and existing resource centres,” said Jim.
The Australian government had also been instrumental in helping the by supporting the eight inclusive education resource centres in Port Moresby with aids and devices for PWDs and children with special needs.
Jim said in terms of the DoE, they had received a lot of good testimonies from PWDs of the support given to them and he recognised that PWDs and children with special needs had a lot to contribute to the country.
Recognition, funding and support from the Department of Community Development and Religion remained an ongoing struggle for provincial OPDs.
Department secretary Jerry Ubase said that he would like to see disability inclusion be a unified response among all pillars of the disability network because it was a shared responsibility.