Inclusion, the national model of the Individualized Education Plan has been sent to schools. Azzolina: "It was an awaited document, the result of collaboration with the school world and associations"
The new national model of the IEP arrives in schools, the Individualized Education Plan, for pupils and pupils with disabilities. The long-awaited document was sent this morning to educational institutions, from infancy to upper secondary school, accompanied by specific guidelines. This is the document that contains the individualized planning for each student and each student with disabilities to guarantee their scholastic inclusion: necessary professionalism, support tools, educational-didactic interventions, objectives, evaluation methods. The IEP will be drawn up by the Operational Working Group for Inclusion (the GLO) involving the entire team of class teachers, families, health professionals.
"Provided by a law of 2017, the new IEP remained in the works for a long time, without ever reaching it - remembers Minister Lucia Azzolina -. When I took office we immediately set to work, with the ministerial structures and, in particular, with those involved in inclusion, to issue a tool capable of helping to improve the quality of inclusion. We have worked closely with associations representing pupils and pupils with disabilities, with schools, with teachers. From today a new chapter opens for inclusion, which remains central to us. Not surprisingly, we have foreseen in the budget law just approved a plan for the recruitment of 25 thousand support teachers ”.
The IEP revolves around strengthening the principle of taking charge of the pupil by the whole school community. For this reason too, the budget law, in addition to the support recruitment plan, provides for funds for adequate training on the issues of inclusion for all staff. For this year, schools will be able to continue to use the templates already drawn up or update them after receiving today's note. In any case, the new IEP model will have to be adopted in the next school year and used already for the so-called provisional IEP to be prepared, for new students, by next 30 June.
The plan is built around four axes, the results of which will then be observed:
- Dimension of Socialization and Interaction
- Dimension of Communication and Language
- Dimension of Autonomy and Orientation
- Cognitive, Neuropsychological and Learning Dimension
Following the observation of the school context - which introduces the new bio-psycho-social perspective of the ICF -, of the professional and instrumental resources available, of any existing barriers (including architectural), the didactic objectives, tools and necessary aids, strategies and ways to create an inclusive learning environment. The IEP explains the methods of teaching support, including the proposal of the number of hours of support for the class, the methods of verification, the evaluation criteria, the inclusion interventions carried out by the teaching staff in the classroom and in specific projects, evaluation in relation to individualized planning, any interventions of hygiene and basic assistance, the proposal of professional resources to be allocated to assistance, autonomy and communication.
The Ministry will organize, as has already happened for the reintroduction of descriptive judgments in primary school, special training sessions on the new model, to support schools. From this afternoon onwards, a page dedicated to the topic with FAQs for school staff and families will be available at the address www.igianato.it/inclusion-e-nuovo-pei/. The Ministry is also working on the preparation of an IT tool for compiling the IEP capable of interacting with existing databases, part of the digitization project that is radically modernizing the Ministry to improve the work of schools and relations with families.