SOS for special education
Expert believes teacher’s colleges failing neurodivergent students
Published:Sunday | October 19, 2025 | 12:10 AMErica Virtue - Senior Gleaner Writer
A call is growing louder for Jamaica’s teacher-training colleges to integrate special education modules – or even full majors – into their programmes to better equip educators to support neurodivergent learners from kindergarten to high school.
Dr Faith Alexander, former chief transformation officer at the Ministry of Education, says Jamaica’s education system is struggling to serve children whose brains function differently from the “typical” student. Many of these children enter schools undiagnosed and unsupported, resulting in worsening academic outcomes, especially in literacy and numeracy.
“What is happening in teacher’s colleges relative to the kids that we are seeing coming into schools now [is unacceptable]. They are coming with all the neurodivergences and teacher’s colleges are not preparing teachers to deal with students like that. Only Mico, if my memory serves me right, is preparing special education teachers and those are few and far between,” Alexander said in an interview with The Sunday Gleaner last week.
She urged that all teacher training programmes include at least some special education content, regardless of specialisation.
“Even if it’s mathematics, a special education component should be included to build awareness. A teacher ought to be able to spot it, so they can diagnose. Having spotted the tendencies, then what do I do? Not everybody is going to be the special education teacher, but give teachers the awareness and some tools to function,” she stressed.
This appeal comes amid renewed focus on the “science of reading” – a structured approach grounded in phonics and decoding, following what Alexander termed the failed experiment with whole language. That method, she said, encouraged children to rely on how words sounded rather than how they were spelled, resulting in a generation of students with weak foundational literacy skills.
“If you ask a primary school teacher, ‘Do you teach reading?’ They will say, ‘I stopped teaching reading’ – meaning, what we experienced, where you learn your alphabet, your sounds, your vowels, you blended, you decoded – that was passé, outdated. That was not done. Now, the world is returning to that – the science of reading,” she stressed.
SYSTEMIC PROBLEM
Alexander helps oversee the Grade Seven Academy programme at Holy Trinity High in Kingston and Newell High in St Elizabeth, targeting students who begin secondary school unable to read or do maths at grade level. She said the problem is systemic and must be tackled from early childhood.
“We’re seeing children as young as two years old who are on the spectrum, who are being identified as kids with special needs and that is where we need to look right now. The students that we are seeing now in schools come with a plethora of specific learning disorders, whether they are dyslexic, on the spectrum, and so on. If we are serious about the literacy and numeracy deficiency, then it’s that a place we need to start – at the tertiary level in training teachers,” she insisted.
Alexander pointed to the US state of Mississippi as a model. She said it was not done with a proliferation of gadgets. Instead, emphasis was placed on professional development, retraining teachers, embedding the science of reading in everything, holding people accountable, and moving from being considered the backward state to the miracle state.
“That where Jamaica needs to start,” she asserted.
The urgency is heightened by recent revelations. In June, it was reported that over 70 per cent of grade seven students at Pembroke Hall High were reading at or below a grade 3 level. Some couldn’t even identify letters. Education Minister Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon later promised that reading instruction would return to classrooms in September.
Shortwood Teachers’ College Principal Nadine Molloy supports Alexander’s position. She says the curriculum must be redesigned to meet the current needs of students, especially those with special education requirements.
“The results that we’re getting is clearly saying, ‘Hello! We have to redesign those modules to meet the needs – the special education needs – of the students. And in redesigning those modules, we will have teachers who are better able to treat with those students,” Molloy told The Sunday Gleaner.
NOT THERE YET
Molloy said Shortwood lacks three wings to be able to host a special education department, which would allow student teachers to get a degree in special education.
“We submitted to the ministry our information to have the Special Education Centre expanded, completed really, because it’s incomplete. I think it was opened in 2003 or something like that. We have an early childhood education centre. The building is incomplete, so in some ways, the programme is incomplete because we’re supposed to have a daycare centre and a resource centre. So three wings are missing from that building,” she said.
Meanwhile, retired principal of Campion College and executive with the Grade Seven Academy, Grace Baston, stressed that literacy strategies must also reflect students’ linguistic reality.
“I don’t see how any teacher of literacy or language in Jamaica can be effective in the Jamaican classroom, especially with poor black children, if they don’t have what Michelle Kennedy calls language awareness. That is, the awareness that this child’s mother tongue is not English, that the language I’m trying to get her to acquire is a foreign language; therefore, I must have enough of a grasp of the structures of the so-called mother language, and the structures of English so that as I’m teaching this child, without making him or her feel like an idiot, I’m affirming his or her tongue,” Baston explained.
There were two languages operating in Jamaica, and in the United States and Canada, a reading teacher, cannot be licensed or certified unless they also have certification and licensure in English, to speakers of other languages, she explained.
Beyond the educational benefits, Alexander pointed out that special education is a field with high earning potential abroad.
“Financially, people make oodles and oodles of money in special education. If you think about the great big United States or even England and Canada, there is huge emphasis on special education and services that are provided for children. So special education teachers are in high demand because of where the world is now,” she said.