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Schooling of a multiple with disability

The thing all families want in this situation is some idea of what their child who has been labeled as having a "disability" will be like as they develop.

• can they remain in the same school as the other multiple(s) in the family and if so for how long?
• what are they likely to be like in adulthood and what are then the implications for whether they can care for themselves?

It may sound extreme to be discussing this when the multiples are still just at the stage of starting school, but every family is already thinking about this. A frequent issue in the disability literature is WIAG ("When I am Gone") with parents wondering who will care for their disabled child after they are too old.

So assessment of disabled children has many connotations and especially so in multiples. Taking the multiple with a disability out of the mainstream education system or even keeping them back a year at school is a formal message to the family that this child is "different" from the other multiple(s).

This decision is basically irrevocable and a child in such a situation can never again catch-up with their multiple siblings. So it needs to be made with the maximum amount of information from formal assessment. This may not be so easy. In younger children, the fact that multiples take time to catch-up with others needs to be considered, as do some of the specific problems in areas such as language development. So the older the child(ren) at the time of assessment the better, as this leads to more accurate prediction of what life will be like in adulthood. Against this must be weighed the needs of the family and the school to know as soon as soon as possible. This leads onto how the family adjusts to life with one or more multiples who have disabilities.