This article was originally published in 2018.
The Life Course Centre’s Dr Cain Polidano and Associate Professor Chris Ryan, along with their colleague Professor John P. Haisken-DeNew, have published a new LCC Working Paper titled ‘Early Academic Outcomes of Funded Children with Disability’. The authors propose that children with disability are commonly funded to support their learning in Australian schools, but a gap in knowledge of outcomes exists.
To address this gap, they assess the Year 3 NAPLAN results of children with moderate needs who were funded continuously from the beginning of primary school (government Victorian schools) under the Victorian Program for Students with Disability. Using data from the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC), the authors identified 5940 students who had a disability in their first year of schooling. Data on funding was matched to the AEDC and NAPLAN data to assess the outcomes associated with funding.
The authors found that only 34 per cent of funded students sat NAPLAN examinations, compared to 88 per cent of students with a disability who are not in receipt of funding. The authors suggest that a student’s funding status presents the student’s school principal with a visible way to identify and exclude them from examinations. This may be undertaken because of the principal’s belief that NAPLAN testing may be harmful for the student; or, they also suggest, this exclusion may be to improve the school’s overall NAPLAN scores.
The authors conclude that such wide exclusion of students with disability from NAPLAN reduces the opportunity to assess the effectiveness of programs that seek to support student learning.
You can read their paper, here.