Tuesday 7th November Part 2

After this we moved on to visit the Minister for Education. The main topic discussed was the Education policy, as we are keen to ensure that children with special needs are not forgotten. The Minister assured us that this was not the case, but we are still worried as we have not seen the redrafted version of the new policy. We took the Minister through our IEP, stressing that the initial work with Milton Margai was a pilot, and that we intended to roll this out to the other schools for blind children.

We then visited Milton Margai – you may have seen this school featured on breakfast television as it is twinned with a school in Kent which had some media coverage last year. A great deal of work had been done over the last year or two to spruce up the buildings. The children all seemed very cheerful and lively (a real contrast to those we met later at the school for blind children in Liberia), and in general it was a place of optimism. I asked the headmaster whether there were many children with multiple disabilities – apparently not. His view of why not was pretty stark – they will probably have been abandoned and left to die….