Education options

By Emma Sun
THE Insight Education Centre will be welcoming students from far and wide with a Bayswater family set to send their son to the school.
Naomi O’Brien, who helped Alan Lachman establish the centre, will be moving her nine-year-old son Noah, who currently attends a mainstream school in Boronia, to Insight.
Noah attended the previous school for blind and vision impaired children, the Burwood Education Centre, for a year before it closed in 2009, forcing him into a mainstream school.
Ms O’Brien said Noah had tremendous difficulty adjusting and struggled to learn within the mainstream environment.
“It’s been really hard for him to adjust into a mainstream school, in a class of 20 or so children where they don’t specialise to his special needs,” she said.
“He relies so much on his hearing and not his visual and because it is very noisy it is very hard for him to even understand what the teacher is relaying.”
Ms O’Brien said Noah missed out on opportunities to learn important skills such as using adaptive technology and a lot of foundational learning such as literacy and numeracy.
“He spends a lot of time with an aid in a separate room away from the classroom because he finds it so overwhelming in the other classroom,” she said.
“He spent his first year by himself most playtimes because socially, the other kids find it hard to understand him and he doesn’t get the games they play.”
She said Insight will provide the assistance and support Noah needs to improve at school and adapt better to his surroundings.
“He will be doing a bit of catching up and learning a lot of the stuff he missed out on, he’s nine and in Grade 1 so he’s obviously lost a few years of education just being pushed through the system,” she said.
“The aim is to just set him up for life, to deal with the everyday world and to be able to cope with situations in life, to be able to learn and find a way to fit in socially.”
Ms O’Brien believed that every blind and visually impaired child deserved the option to choose what kind of school they attend.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be the right option, but they should be able to be educated in both ways.”