17 October 2022

Discover how the Special Education Resource Unit (SERU) supports the engagement, access, participation and learning of diverse learners. SERU is made up of a team of former teachers as well as disability experts who can provide advice, support and resources for educators about how to educate learners with additional needs. In addition to experience and insight, they have rows and rows of tools and resources that educators and parents can borrow and test out. SERU Manager Rachel Scheuboeck shares how teachers and families can access their support.

Show Notes

• Statewide Inclusive Education Services (SIES) (formaly SERU)
• Programs for students with special needs (staff login required)

Transcript

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders, past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education. Today we're going to hear about the Special Education Resource Unit, or SERU. It's made up of a team of former teachers and disability experts who can provide advice and resources for educators about how to support learners with additional needs.

Rachel Scheuboeck is the manager of SERU and she joins us on the phone now. Welcome, Rachel.

Rachel Scheuboeck: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Rachel, this is a bit of an unusual job. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do and how you ended up there?

Rachel Scheuboeck: I've been teaching, I think for about 27 years now, which is all horrifying to admit. I started off as a general teacher working in a mainstream site.

I've also worked in disability units and in a special school. I then worked as part of support services as a special educator and then as a manager, and I ended up at SERU as the manager about two years ago. And I guess the other part of my journey, which probably might give you a bit of a sense as to why I get a little bit passionate about this area is the fact that I have an 18 year old son now who has a disability as well. So, I was in disability before I had a son. But, it's not just professional, it's personal too for me.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. And so, the combination of personal and professional there is really brought you into quite a, an interesting place and fascinating insights, I guess, into what it means to educate a child with specific needs.

Can you tell us a little bit about what SERU actually does?

Rachel Scheuboeck: The reason I feel for me it's a really, really good fit is we are a service that supports not only our education department staff, but also families. It's really exciting to be part of an organisation which is quite unique in South Australia.

I'm not sure that there's another sort of organisation quite like us within Australia. We have a resource library which educators can use and access lots of different types of equipment or resources or reference materials or assistive technology. We've also got access equipment.

So, for students who might need some help around personal care, perhaps if they need a change table, they might need a hoist. They might need a specialised seating tool just to help them sit in the right position so that they can access their learning. We also have support through assistive technology, so for those individuals perhaps who have a physical disability or might have a vision impairment, we have support through a technology that might be on a laptop or an iPad.

That supports them in their access to education. We've also got some services that come out of our SERU as well. We've got the early intervention, deaf and hard of hearing support, which is for students from birth all the way through to school. And we've got a number of teachers and a speech pathologist who support families, young children and babies. We also have a conductive education service, which is quite unique and again, it's one of those services that a lot of people don’t know a lot about, but it really is concerned with physical movement and supporting movement through education. And conductive education is run out of three sites.

We have three conductors at the moment who support us. They all come from Hungary, which is where the training originates from. They provide support around getting the most out of students' physical needs and helping them to be as independent as they can. And the last service that we have is our inclusive practice team, which is our teacher team, which provides a lot of support around helping parents or educators to find resources that might have more of a chance of sort of supporting the student. And also providing training and development for teachers and SSOs.

Dale Atkinson: So, if you're a teacher listening to that, and that's such an extensive range of services and resources that are available, if you are listening to that and thinking, well, actually there is something that I could really use some assistance within this specific area. How do they go about getting help from SERU?

Rachel Scheuboeck: Well, there's probably three ways that they can access us. They can either give us a call and our fabulous admin staff will direct you in the right direction. You can just ring up and say, look, I'm looking for advice or support in this area, and they'll put you onto probably the best qualified person.

You can also use our web. We have a website, and through that we also have like even a catalogue of all our resources so you can actually even order things and borrow things through the website. And the third way is actually to physically come down and visit us. We are located on the same grounds as the Fulham Gardens Primary School, and we're at Henley Beach. We're not overly convenient for everyone, but we're in a great spot we think, near the beach.

But there is an extensive resource library here and you can come and have a look and see what we've got.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. So, plenty of access points for any teachers out there interested in getting some assistance. Can you talk to us a little bit about what the experience might look like from start to finish for a teacher who gets in touch with you?

Rachel Scheuboeck: To register to be part of the library service it's a free service to all education department and staff. So, you can easily come in and register or we can send you out a registration form. It's also a free service for all families, regardless of whether they're part of the education department or the private sector. So, we do offer that support to all families to support their child with a disability

Once you've registered, you'll get a code. So, you can actually go on and use our online catalogue. You can see all the resources that are available, which teachers might use for things like trial and evaluation. For example, an OT might suggest that you try a wobble stool or a wedge to support a child who fidgets and isn't able to sit very still.

So, you might look and say, Oh look, I don't want to go out and buy one of those, I'd like to try it first, so you can ring up SERU, you can go on our website. You can say, have you got a stool that I can borrow so I can trial it? We can send one out. It all works through the courier, so you don't actually have to physically come on site.

It is great if you do come on site because you'll get to see lots of things, but you certainly don't have to. That way we can service all country locations as well. The courier goes out widely and we can get all resources out to the country or out to different sites or locations within Adelaide.

Dale Atkinson: One of the experiences in education in this area is the identification, I guess, for teachers that perhaps a student has a need but not an understanding of how to satisfy that need. Is that something that you can help with?

Rachel Scheuboeck: Absolutely. One of the things that we do try and do, we've got a number of staff in our teaching area who are our inclusive practice team, and those staff have amazing skills and expertise and experience. Most of the staff that we have here, have worked in a range of options.

All our admin staff know exactly who the right people are with different skill sets and different expertise. We have staff here who are really good in the learning difficulties area for those students who might have dyslexia. Or might be really struggling with their understanding of supporting their written skills or their reading skills.

We also have teachers here who are pretty well experts in the area of augmentative communication. One of our staff here has worked extensively within special schools and has a really, really good understanding of communication and supporting children's communication need. We also have teachers here who have done extensive work around personalised learning.

We have teachers who have worked really closely in support services and been special educators and worked really closely with a range of schools. We've got two teachers here who are experts in the area of inclusive technologies, and they will do family consults, they'll do teacher consults, they'll support finding the best fit for a child because there's lots and lots of inclusive technologies out there.

But what we need to do is actually find the best fit for the student. So, they're feeling in control. And we've also got staff who have expertise in the area of inclusion. So, it's a really wide range of skill sets, and you know, we also have people who've just got that broad overview of having worked with students with specific or significant disabilities or physical disabilities or autism.

So, we can really use skills of the people here to support teachers who might be at that point of like, what do I do? I've got a child, I'm not seeing any growth. How can I support them in their learning?

Dale Atkinson: What times of the day can teachers get in touch with you and parents get in touch with you?

Rachel Scheuboeck: We're open every day. On Tuesdays we close a little bit earlier because we have staff meetings, so we close at 3pm on a Tuesday, but every other day we're here from 8.30am to 5pm. In the school holidays we close at 4pm because we tend to find that people don't come in after about 4pm anyway. But we're available all school holidays and any day of the week up until five o'clock, except for on the Tuesday.

Dale Atkinson: Can you actually, just on a personal level, can you just describe one rewarding, memorable experience that you've had in the role?

Rachel Scheuboeck: Oh, I'm not sure I could think of one in particular. I know that there's so many things that happen on a daily basis, which I find incredibly rewarding. We had a situation recently in 2020, soon after the pandemic was announced, and we had number of parents that contacted us about online work for their child.

They'd been given some plans or programs from their teachers, but we have to remember at that point, teachers were trying to teach and do online learning. So, what they were able to produce for parents was not of the quality of what we're doing now, because they didn't actually simply have the time. So, teachers were providing a program, but it wasn't necessarily always differentiated. At that point, we had a number of parents that contacted us and said, my teachers given me, these ideas and these activities, but my child can't do them and I don’t know what to do.

And so, we actually as a team sat around and looked at some of the advice and ideas and then came up with some differentiated activities that the parents could try. And that was actually one of those points that you realised the parents were so grateful and we found that they kept coming back to us and saying, look, I've got this and I've got that.

It's not the case anymore because I think teachers are doing an amazing job of actually providing that wide variety of resources. There's a lot of things out there for parents with disabilities. But in that very, very early timeframe, we felt that we had a really amazing opportunity to really support parents and to support teachers.

And we ended up getting teachers contacting us as well, saying, I'm trying to send all these things out to my students. Can you help me with how I might differentiate this to some of the learners in my class who aren't going to be able to do it? So that was one experience that I think, you know, you think about these times where things have been a little bit tough and I think it sometimes brings out the best in everybody, and it was a really lovely opportunity to really work closely with some schools and also some families, and then getting that feedback of how that had gone and being part of that loop that, yes, this was working and thank you, that was helpful and helped my child to feel that they could participate.

Dale Atkinson: That's a really great illustration, I think, of what SERU is really all about, which is meeting the child, the teacher, and the parents at their point of need and providing that real expertise over the top of it, isn't it?

Rachel Scheuboeck: Yep. And it was having our extensive resource library, we were able to just package things up and say, come and pick them up from the door, or let's send them in the courier so that people had things that they could grab from their hand, you know, they could grab immediately and have, and could actually put into place straight away.

Dale Atkinson: So, what advice would you give to an educator who's listening to this today with a learner with some additional needs that they haven't experienced before?

Rachel Scheuboeck: What I can say is it's really important to take time, to get to know each individual student.

It's really important to know what motivates them and how to engage them, knowing what skills they have and what are their next opportunities. Listening without judgment and if they can't communicate effectively, giving them a tool or a device or a system, otherwise you get your unwanted behaviours.

Those sorts of little bits of insights really help us to direct and support and come up with some ideas and to work hand in hand in saying, perhaps this resource, or have you thought of this? Or is there something we could do to support you here? In that area of special ed, I've worked in it for many years, obviously, and it's one of those careers that I kind of fell into, not by choice, but I fell into it.

But I've stayed by choice. It's been the most rewarding place to have worked. I've met the most strongest, resilient, amazing individuals in my classes. And yes, they've often been challenges and at times it's been really, really hard. But keeping those realistically high expectations and never making assumptions is really, really important.

And it's one of those jobs where there's no two days are the same. We've got these amazing kids. It's such a rewarding place to work. And you know, it's one of those careers that I've found, I've been able to really have that sense of actually really making a difference. So, I would say, you know, you have to at times ride the wave.

At times it seems all overwhelming, but the benefits and the, that sense of actually finding that right resource or helping that student to actually overcome some behaviours or helping them to learn something are those moments that make it absolutely amazing and the most rewarding job, I think.

Dale Atkinson: Rachel, I couldn't wrap it up any better than that. Thank you very much for your time. That's Rachel Scheuboeck from the Special Education Resource Unit. It's down at Henley Beach, located on the grounds of Fulham Gardens Primary School. It's a team of former teachers and disability experts who can provide advice, support, and resources for educators about how to educate learners with additional needs.

Teachers can ring SERU at any time to talk to an expert. Actually, there are specific times, but they'll be in the show notes along with other information on how to get in touch. They can talk to an expert, go down and visit them, get a whole bunch of ideas and tools and resources to help that learner for free. And the child can try some of these tools out in the classroom. Find out what works for them before the family, or the school has to commit to buying them.

Rachel, you and the team are doing fantastic work. Thank you very much for your time and thanks for speaking to us today.

Rachel Scheuboeck: Thank you so much for taking the time to get in contact with us. We really hope that we can support and connect with some of the teachers out there.

Dale Atkinson: Thanks, everyone out there for listening and speak to you next time on Teach.