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Individualized Education Plan: the concerning lack of family involvement

© Portfolio UNIPD

The Puzzle Group, a Competence Group for People with Disabilities in the Province of Pesaro-Urbino, expresses its concern to the Minister of Education and MeritValditara regarding the use of the SIDI platform for compiling the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) and the lack of family involvement in drafting the document.

The Puzzle Group, which involves familiesassociationslegal professionalsteachers, and educators, expresses their concern about the limited active participation of families and the consequent marginalization of their role during the compilation of the IEP through the SIDI platform.

In particular, the SIDI platform, writes the Puzzle Group, "does not facilitate a necessary dialogue for the agreed elaboration of the document and marginalizes the familybetraying the substance and foundations of the inclusion legislation and the valuable Joint Drafting that inspired the Legislator since 1994", consequently, it underlines that "It would be very fruitful if the Ministry of Education and Merit, so sensitive to the inescapable contribution of the family, could support those necessary correctives to ensure that we do not embark on a point of no return that would seriously harm inclusion and close the school in a “practical and institutional monadism”."

The Group therefore suggests "that the Ministry communicate to all Schools, all Provincial and Regional School Offices, that with the use of the SIDI platform, GLO meetings are not abolished, and that, at the same time, the necessary meetings during all phases of the IEP construction are maintaineddue and increased, as fruitful discussion determines the effective expression of the educational-didactic project." Furthermore, it states that "it would also be fruitful if such communication were scrupulously implemented by all School Institutes, with renewed attention to the active participation of the family, we repeat, not only in the approval phase of the document, but also in the preparatory phase and, aiming high – but the School is here also for a vision – to a concordant and engaging training phase for the entire GLO. So that the IEP is a model to be co-drafted and not a bureaucratic or modular fulfillment that would render it and evolve it into a real barrier."

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school people with disability education family