PSEI is a project founded and funded by the CareTech Foundation to develop Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND) resources for mainstream schools in Pakistan. Through the Foundation’s grant-commitment of £100,000 over three years, PSEI will:
- develop a screening system, similar to EHCPs in the UK;
- provide learning and development resources for staff so that they are better able to deal with students with Special Needs;
- establish quality standards and training for assessors in schools; and,
- develop a SEND curriculum.
According to UN estimates, 1 in 4 people in Pakistan is likely to experience some form of challenges related to mental health or disability, which in population terms amounts to 50–60 million individuals. For a young population (60% of Pakistanis are under 35), this means that there is an increasing demand for clear mental health and, indeed, SEND support in schools. Currently, schools are often outsourcing resources from unverified foreign providers that only offer generic training without a comprehensive support package. Pakistani NGOs and schools have told us that they often refuse children with SEND issues due to the lack of expertise of staff to properly support such students. This means that very few schools admit children and even fewer have the expertise to manage children with disabilities to an acceptable standard.
Bringing in expertise from the CareTech Holdings Ltd, one of the UK’s largest adults and children’s social care providers, the programme will partner schools in the UK and Pakistan together to provide one-on-one support. In the first cohort, the Foundation has signed-up five schools in Pakistan to work closely with five CareTech Ltd’s schools to perform a knowledge exchange and offer access to specialist training resources used by British social care staff.
PSEI will introduce screening tools to help identify children who may have SEND so that teachers can effectively offer learning pathway tools that have been tried and tested in the UK context over many years. For children who are found to have SEND needs, the programme will put in place measures for the training and quality standard of assessors. These tools, tested by the paired schools, will help in the personalisation of content to fit the needs of the Pakistan mainstream schools in the long run, particularly helpful as the programme matures and broadens in its reach.
To date, PSEI has established an Advisory Board of local disability leaders from a variety of backgrounds and appointed a full-time Senior Programme Manager who will manage the in person engagement and delivery. The programme benefitted from the support of COSARAF Foundation in its early stages when the Sheikh family charity seconded its Pakistan Director to help establish the Initiative, as well as engaging local schools in Pakistan with which they have a relationship.
With the commitment of partners in Pakistan and UK, PSEI aims to provide the key educational platform to deliver independence to a generation of young Pakistanis thanks to SEND-confident and SEND competent teachers across Pakistan.
As stated by CareTech Foundation CEO, Jonathan Freeman MBE:
“This Initiative has the bold objective of developing an educational framework to enable young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities to flourish that we hope, in time, will be adopted by the Federal Government of Pakistan. This will be life-changing for so many children and their families. The aim is to start with five schools but every year more will be added as we scale our efforts. We will continue to bring on board specialist partners to help us develop the best resources and report on our work. We need local support to do this so I ask everyone to join us in making PSEI a success.”
