Isolation rooms for WA kids
Nearly 30 public schools have set up isolation rooms to use as a last resort when children become so uncontrollable they are a threat to the safety of themselves and other students.
The Education Department said 28 schools had registered specially designed rooms, painted in calming colours and free of any harmful objects, to use for “protective isolation”.
In some, the walls are padded with “a thin layer of foam insulation with a vinyl covering”.
Reasons leading to isolation include students becoming uncontrollably aggressive towards themselves or others, such as banging their heads, cutting themselves, hitting, kicking or biting other students, throwing objects, smashing glass or pulling down bookshelves.
Disability advocates this week criticised using isolation rooms in Perth schools after receiving reports of autistic students being held in them.
The department has confirmed their use is not limited to students with disabilities.
But it said yesterday only five of the 28 registered rooms were in use — two in mainstream schools and three in education support facilities.
So far this year five students have approval to use isolation as a behaviour management strategy, compared with five last year and two in 2013.
Edith Cowan University behaviour management lecturer Mandie Shean, a former school psychologist, said isolation rooms could be good or bad, depending on whether they were used appropriately.
They were useful to calm children and keep them from harm and embarrassment. But they could be detrimental if used in anger as a punishment or to deal with an immediate problem.
Dr Shean said the number of children in schools with “really severe behaviour problems” had increased in the past five years.
“You’ve got students in schools that people just don’t know what to do with and they don’t have the training for it,” she said.
Education Department statewide services executive director Lindsay Hale said using protective isolation with any student had to be agreed to by the child’s parents, the school principal and the regional executive director.
He said the student was under observation in the room and was only isolated for as long as it took for them to settle down.
