IES Lund, which opened in 2013, currently has a special needs education team consisting of ten employees for the school’s 699 students in year four to year nine.
“We put a lot of resources into systematically identifying the needs of younger students and we have become good at identifying challenges quickly. For example, we have noticed that dyslexia often spills over into mathematics, and we have therefore ensured that all classes have access to a special needs teacher in the subject,” says Per Ola Olsson, principal at IES Lund.
The special needs education team is led by Jennifer Jansson, who has worked both at IES Lund and in the field many years.
“We realised early on that we had a lot of students with special support needs, who came to us when they had had problems in other schools. For example, we get students in year four who lack the most basic knowledge of the core subjects. This is one reason we have learnt so much about how to meet the needs of these students, become skilled at developing a systematic way of working and assistive tools, and have become so swift to act,” she says.
According to Ms Jansson, an important aspect of special needs education is that students should not feel left out of the mainstream class. Special needs education teachers therefore always start in the classroom and then sit with small groups of students and work on perhaps reading comprehension or mathematics.
“The greatest reward for us is when a student with significant challenges manages to qualify for upper-secondary school and leaves us with self-confidence and faith in the future,” she says.