Ms Amy O'Keefe:

I will give another personal anecdote. The Senator spoke about exclusion and expulsion. Recently, I worked with a young girl who is the oldest pupil I have worked with. Usually, I am in with the little ones. I met her family. She had been expelled for what was termed "challenging behaviour" but what I like to term "distress response behaviours", which is responding in a distressed manner to something. This girl communicated primarily through Lámh and uses an AAC device now. She is such a chatterbox. She loves to tell people about her weekend and she talks to her teacher and peers.

I met the family and we chatted a little about whether they noticed a pattern in her responding this way. It usually occurred on Monday mornings. I gathered some further information on her circumstances and it turned out that her attempts at communicating about her weekend were not being acknowledged by her teacher. In a process of elimination, I discovered that she needed just a simple acknowledgement, for example, saying, "I know you have lots to tell me but I am really busy this morning, so we will do this first and then you can tell me about your weekend". I worked with her for a year. I also worked with her on July provision and I never had an experience where she had a distressed response to interactions with me. This is because I would tell her we were busy because we first had to practice our community skills before going out with Nana and we had to be ready on time but when we were in the car with Nana she could tell me all about her weekend. She was not being acknowledged at all in the school. Her attempts at communication were not being acknowledged. Simply by acknowledging her and helping her to understand that we were going to talk about it later, she had no distress response behaviours at all.

She is now in a school and it is amazing that she is so happy. This was all she wanted. We had a great time together but she would always say that her friend would go on the school bus. I would tell her that I understood and that we would be on the school bus soon but we were just waiting for the new school to open. She is fully included and is the only girl in her class. She is the queen bee.