People with Disabilities in Ireland
4th Floor Jervis House
Jervis Street
Dublin 1
Telephone: 01 87 21 74 4
Fax: 01 87 21 77 1
Email: info@pwdi.ie
AUTISM campaigners were shocked at the end of March after the parents of a six-year-old autistic boy lost a test High Court action to try to secure funding for Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA) education.
The court case could have implications for all people with disabilities according to autism campaigners, in particular the many other parents seeking similar types of specialised education for their children. Almost 330 young autistic children are on waiting lists for 12 ABA schools around the country, all of which are run on a pilot basis. Several hundred supporters of Irish Autism Action (IAA) demonstrated outside the Four Courts before the judgment.
In October 2002, Seán Ó Cuanacháin was diagnosed as having autistic spectrum disorder and it was said he would require appropriate services from both the health board and the Department of Education. An educational psychologist assessed Sean in November 2003 and recommended that he should have access to ABA tuition for 30 hours a week, an adequate and appropriate education which, according to Seán’s parents, was not provided.
Instead, the eclectic and model A programme of education being provided by the State was concluded by Mr Justice Michael Peart in the case to be “appropriate autism-specific educational provision” and on that basis, he declined to make orders requiring the State to fund an ABA programme. “The light of learning has been all but extinguished
for Seán today,” said a tearful Yvonne Ó Cuanacháin, Seán’s mother from Arklow, Co. Wicklow, after the judgement.
Ms Ó Cuanacháin said in a statement that she and her husband Cian would have to go home and face Seán “knowing the progress he has made with ABA” and that the eclectic and model A programme “will not meet his needs but will essentially damage our son”.
Independent MEP Kathy Sinnott said the court's judgment in Seán Ó Cuanacháin's case could roll back some of the rights established in her son Jamie's landmark case in 2000.
She said her son's case established the right of children to primary education appropriate to their needs, as assessed by a relevant expert, but the Ó Cuanacháin case appeared to give the State the choice in relation to education provision.
Fine Gael MEP Mairead McGuinness, a member of the European Parliament’s Intergroup on Disability said: “We are frequently told that our State services are going to be based on the specific needs of people. This decision flies in the face of that assertion. What we have now is a family, all families of children with conditions such as autism, having to accept whatever the Department of Education tells them they need rather than what they actually need.”
Many families with autistic children favour the form of tuition known as applied behavioural analysis (ABA), which looks at the requirements of each individual child and tailors schooling methods in a bid to improve the child’s skills and IQ levels.
It is usually carried out on a one-to-one basis and therefore expensive but campaigners maintain that failure to diagnose and treat autism from an early age results in even greater costs to the state later on.
“If you invest early in ABA, the chances of not having to avail of full residential care for children later on are increased,” said IAA chief executive Kevin Whelan.
Since February 2004, Seán has been attending a pre-school in Co Wicklow on a part time basis for 14 hours a week. Previously he had access to state funded ABA but for less than half of the required hours. When judgment was reserved in July, State funding for the ABA provision ceased.
The Department of Education favours an ‘eclectic’ approach incorporating a number of teaching techniques, including ABA, in mainstream and special schools and maintains that research, “does not support the exclusive usage of ABA as a basis for national educational provision”.
However, a British scientific study, which was presented at the first annual conference of the Psychological Society of Ireland's division of behaviour analysis the same week as the hearing argued that Applied Behaviour Analysis was the best way to educate autistic children.
The research, conducted by Prof Bob Remington of the department of psychology at the University of Southampton, compared ABA intervention versus an eclectic treatment for two groups of autistic children and found the results extended the findings of earlier studies, clearly showing that children receiving ABA intervention do significantly better than children receiving eclectic treatment.
While the two groups didn’t differ when measured before treatment, after two years the researchers found significant differences between them.
“The group who received ABA had on average IQs that were higher than the other group by just under 15 points, a big leap when we consider that the average normal IQ is 100. There was a similar difference in daily living skills. Essentially, the children in the ABA group got smarter and became more well-adjusted in terms of daily living,” said Prof Remington.
"There was also substantially more language development in the group that received ABA," he added.
Many of the challenging behaviours associated with autism, such as destructiveness, aggression and self-injury, the most distressing symptoms of autism for sufferers and their families were also reduced.
“ABA is very effective for these sort of challenges, but its main focus is as a way of teaching a range of behaviours that allow the child to be more effective in terms of understanding the world and other people. It's based on individualised assessment, so each child's programme is tailored to their particular strengths and needs as those change over time.”
Professor Remington made the point that although an expensive treatment, the money invested early in the child's life is saved throughout their life as an adult. “The spending is all in education, but the savings are in social services and long-term care.”
Dr Geraldine Leader, chairwoman of the Psychological Society of Ireland's division of behaviour analysis and a lecturer in the department of psychology at NUI Galway said there was a huge demand in Ireland for ABA intervention for children with autism and there was no study in autism literature that supports the effectiveness of the eclectic approach.
“The Government's policy is to open eclectic units around the country. Yet it's a fact that there is little or no scientific evidence supporting the eclectic model,” she said.
“There are hundreds of children with autism in Ireland who urgently need ABA intervention. The department’s lack of support for ABA – the only science-based approach to the treatment of autism – is misguided, misinformed and ultimately anti-scientific."
Previous Article >> | Next Article >> | List of Articles | Back To News Page