Sep 22, 2026 · 19 min · 9 segments
As always, Henry is delighted to speak with Dr David Roy, lecturer & researcher in Education & Creative Arts at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. In this podcast, Dr Roy discusses a wide…
David RoyGuest
Henry GrossekHost
there was a time if we look back historically where we had special schools and we had degrees in special we called it in those days special education it would be The term now would be inclusion.
That all went by the by, but we keep reading again and again about too many cases of where that's not working.
We're not going to be able to do inclusion in the way that we want to do it if we keep schools running the way that we currently do, which fundamentally haven't changed that much in the last hundred years.
And at the moment, there is not the financial nor the, I guess, political will necessary to make that radical change the way they have done in certain European countries.
And if you're going to have much more complex needs of students, then teachers need to have more time with those students, which means smaller class sizes, which we're not going to get when we currently have a workforce problem.
But that workforce problem is partly because as a community we don't really value education the way that they say do in Luxembourg or Finland or other countries so we need to fundamentally change the way that we treat teachers we respect them the way that we actually value the degrees and the qualifications they have and then we need to change the actual structures of schools where smaller class sizes more collaboration with other teachers more staff all these things have to fundamentally change and because they're not then we're actually having an increase of what you call those special schools.
They're actually called schools for specific purposes, SSPs, and we have them for high achievers, we have them for sports, we have them for creative arts, we have them for behaviour and mental health, and we also have them for disability.
We stick kids with behaviour challenges in with kids with disabilities, and guess what happens? The kids with disabilities develop behaviour challenges because that's who
Should there be any such thing as a special setting to use the old term school? Or should all students go to a regular school, a mainstream school that caters for all children? Ideally, we want
In fact, in the comparison I've been doing with research recently between New South Wales and Singapore, Singapore is much more default mainstream.
there was a time if we look back historically where we had special schools and we had degrees in special we called it in those days special education it would be The term now would be inclusion.
That all went by the by, but we keep reading again and again about too many cases of where that's not working.
We're not going to be able to do inclusion in the way that we want to do it if we keep schools running the way that we currently do, which fundamentally haven't changed that much in the last hundred years.
And at the moment, there is not the financial nor the, I guess, political will necessary to make that radical change the way they have done in certain European countries.
And if you're going to have much more complex needs of students, then teachers need to have more time with those students, which means smaller class sizes, which we're not going to get when we currently have a workforce problem.
But that workforce problem is partly because as a community we don't really value education the way that they say do in Luxembourg or Finland or other countries so we need to fundamentally change the way that we treat teachers we respect them the way that we actually value the degrees and the qualifications they have and then we need to change the actual structures of schools where smaller class sizes more collaboration with other teachers more staff all these things have to fundamentally change and because they're not then we're actually having an increase of what you call those special schools.
They're actually called schools for specific purposes, SSPs, and we have them for high achievers, we have them for sports, we have them for creative arts, we have them for behaviour and mental health, and we also have them for disability.
We stick kids with behaviour challenges in with kids with disabilities, and guess what happens? The kids with disabilities develop behaviour challenges because that's who
Should there be any such thing as a special setting to use the old term school? Or should all students go to a regular school, a mainstream school that caters for all children? Ideally, we want
In fact, in the comparison I've been doing with research recently between New South Wales and Singapore, Singapore is much more default mainstream.
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