AUSPELD
Australian Federation of SPELD Associations
Patron: Dr Norman Swan
President:Max Coltheart
Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science
Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109
Email: max@maccs.mq.edu.au
Secretary: Pye Twaddell
PO Box 577
Spit Junction NSW 2088
Fax: (02) 9969 8948
Email: secretary@auspeld.org.au
AUSPELD President's Report - 2006
Professor Max Coltheart
The major AUSPELD event for 2006 was the Richard Lavoie National Tour. Richard Lavoie is a leading internationally recognised expert on learning disabilities whose enormous popularity stemmed from his first and still top selling educational video How Difficult Can This Be: The F.A.T. City Workshop. This AUSPELD sponsored Tour visited four States presenting 14 full or half day sessions to two plus thousand teachers, other professionals, school and government administrators, and parents.
While State SPELD Associations ran their State events independently of AUSPELD, AUSPELD, with a Sub-Distributor Agreement with Pubic Broadcasting Services in the United States, continues to market Rick Lavioe's resources to further AUSPELD's stated Constitutional goals, realising to end March 2007 a profit of $22,377.
In Rick's words: "I have worked with dozens of organizations that advocate for children with special needs. They offer guidance and assistance that supplement the services provided by governmental agencies. However, I have never witnessed an organization that has greater principles, programs, policies and potential than Australia's SPELD (Associations)."
"The SPELD Associations are currently positioned to make a significant and lasting difference in the lives of countless Australian children…and children yet unborn. AUSPELD can serve as a leader, a mentor and a beacon of hope in the field of learning disorders. Here in the United States, our misguided emphasis on accountability, high stakes testing and compensatory education has had a negative impact on children with special needs. AUSPELD is well positioned to prevent Australia from making similar mistakes."
Risk's words are especially significant in light of the Australian Educational Standards to the Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act which are now law, and the seeming reality of inevitable National benchmarking, curriculum and testing looming.
In 2006 SPELD NSW received a grant from the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) for the Primary Teachers' Skills Package (TSP). The TSP was released, as written in the February issue of Education Today, to help educators recognise and support students with specific learning difficulties. The objective is to offer teaching ideas and strategies that will enhance the learning of students who have different learning needs.
A stated aim in the submission for this project was to raise the awareness of AUSPELD. It was actually the national focus of this project which helped secure the grant. Promotion for the TSP, beyond the Education Today article, included half page ads in ACER's journals Teacher and Professional Educator and mass faxing all the 7850 primary schools across Australia, twice.
National Focus - AUSPELD was involved in two ways in the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy commissioned by the then Minister for Education, Dr Brendan Nelson: there was an AUSPELD submission to the Inquiry, and AUSPELD was one of the organizations that made up the Reference Group of the Inquiry. I represented AUSPELD at the reference group meetings. The documents produced by this Inquiry, including its recommendations, are available at http://www.dest.gov.au/nitl/report.htm
The response of the Commonwealth Government to these recommendations was to put out to tender a request for the production of resource materials. This tender was won by Curriculum Corporation, which has recently produced the resource materials and distributed them to Australian schools.
This response by the Government is currently proving controversial, with the Chairman of the original National Inquiry, Dr Ken Rowe of ACER, being quoted in The Australian (April 5 2007) as stating that that the resources were not at all aligned with the recommendations of the Inquiry.
