RURAL and remote children are having disabilities and learning difficulties undiagnosed due to a lack of face-to-face interaction with teachers and early childhood educators.
That was one of the messages from the national Isolated Childrens' Parents' Association conference in Perth last week.
This creates a multitude of challenges later in a child's school career, with them falling behind or even failing later units.
ICPA Alice Springs, Northern Territory vice-president Danyelle Haigh's son is in year three at the Alice Springs School of the Air, and was struggling at school before the family realised something might be fundamentally wrong.
"It had to do with not being picked up sooner because he is remote and not with his teacher all the time," Ms Haigh said.
Due to the lack of face-to-face interaction, school teachers weren't able to pick up any problem with his learning.
"He's behind in reading, writing, just communications, the whole literacy side of things, he really struggles, he's really behind for his age," she said.
"I think it's harder to catch up because it's gone so long without being detected, and he hasn't had the help prior.
"We've been trying to access it but there has been nothing available for us, we've been waiting a year.
"I could put it on my private health and fly to South Australia or to Queensland, but we also don't have time to do that either."
It wasn't until Ms Haigh's new governess, who is a trained speech pathologist, came to work for Ms Haigh that the family realised that Mr Haigh had underlying disabilities that had gone undiagnosed.
"She had my son for a week and she said something's wrong," she said.
"If it wasn't for the luck I had this year having her, I wouldn't know where we would be.
"My governess has been assessing lots of the other families at my expense, because she works for me."
Ms Haigh believes there needs to be a system in place for early detection for remote children, with more facilities available with access to psychologists and speech therapists.
"If we had access to that prior as well, that early intervention and that early education, we could have seen signs of it earlier," she said.
ICPA Cunnamulla, Queensland, branch member Amy Palmer has been a prep and year one teacher for 10 years, and said she had seen a lot of undiagnosed issues that should have been addressed earlier in the child's life.
"Especially starting with prep and year one, we get a lot of issues where they haven't been screened before they've come to us, and then they get screened, and they really need to be picked up before that because it's an ongoing process," Ms Palmer said.
"Language starts when they are born, so by the time they are five they've already got a set of language skills that could have been better or could have been improved by the time they are five.
"So I think with early intervention, it makes it a lot less of a big deal when they are five."
ICPA special education needs report writer Sally Sullivan believes early intervention is the answer to stop children like Mr Haigh slipping through the system undiagnosed.
"Early intervention needs to have started before these children attend primary school, to make sure they have the best start to their education, however many preschool aged children in regional and remote Australia continue to have no access to vital early intervention assessments or programs," Ms Sullivan said.
"While there are some existing early intervention service providers in rural and remote Australia, without consistent and guaranteed funding, it is challenging, if not impossible for them to expand to service areas without any access to services."
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