Who is responsible for the integration of children with disabilities in Spanish schools?

At the age of nine, Helena has a disability rating of 87 per cent. Her parents spent her early childhood seeking out every resource available to help her, something they still recall as an "unfairly" difficult task. It was then that her deafblindness led them to Once, where they discovered the possibility of having communication mediators.

"It must be very hard to have something on your mind and not be able to get it out. For others not to understand you and for you not to understand them. That's where the communication mediators helped us," Helena's mother says.

From day one, they noticed the change. Today, Helena spends six hours a week with a communication facilitator at school, CEIP Revello de Toro, and another three at home with a mediator Once provides. Every day she learns a new way to express herself, to understand and to see the world as her siblings do.

Helena is not alone. Thousands of children in Malaga province have special educational needs. At nurseries and primary schools, these conditions affect the day-to-day lives of all children. At the secondary school level, as Patricia Carratalá, head of the department of communication mediation at Universidad Laboral, points out, these difficulties become even more pronounced.

"The communication delays they experience are staggering. To prevent and address all these cases, we have the MECOs, the communication mediators," Carratalá says.

The term 'communicative mediation' first appeared in the official state gazette (BOE) in 2015, when the national confederation of the deaf called for the sign language interpreting vocational training course to be converted into a university degree.

The communicative mediation course filled the gap left by this disappearing vocational training programme.

Initially, they focused on the deafblind community but, as Carratalá points out, the low number, while a relief, was a problem for the profession.

"Today, across the whole of Malaga province, there are 13 people with deafblindness. That's already too many, but of course you can't be training 30 mediators a year just for that community."

From then on, communication mediation expanded to cover anyone with "communication, language and speech difficulties".

"Virtually all disabilities involve a communication element. We can cater for any of these conditions," Carratalá says.

Since 2015, she has been striving towards a simple yet long-overdue goal: achieve employment opportunities for communication mediators.

In schools such as Revello de Toro, other staff members responsible for pupils with special needs echo these concerns.

Ana Pinilla, a hearing and speech therapist, says that every pupil with specific needs should have one communication therapy session a day. The situation makes this impossible: "There are just two speech and language therapists here. We simply cannot give them the attention they need."

Each year, Pinilla's school has up to 60 pupils with hearing and speech difficulties.

The communication mediators who work in their classrooms come through work experience programmes. Each academic year they take on more: two three years ago, four last academic year and five at present. The school states that, at the very least, the school needs three mediators.

Carmen Porras, a communication mediator, has completed her work placement at Revello de Toro. "There isn't a wide range of career opportunities available to me with this qualification. Schools don't have the opportunity or the option to hire us. I know FOAPS exists, but it doesn't receive much financial support either and doesn't have a large team of communication mediators," she explains.

Carratalá also highlights the important role that parents' groups play in this. "After all these years, I've built up quite a network of contacts and we're doing a lot, but if they don't organise themselves, this won't go anywhere," she says.

"There are children who make more progress in three months with us than they do throughout their entire education," Patricia Carratalá states.

She does not blame the teachers. "If you're a teacher with 30 pupils in your class and one of them has ASD, you can't give them the attention they need. It's already difficult enough to manage a whole class as it is," she explains.

Whereas there used to be one pupil with a specific language impairment, today it is common to find as many as three or four per classroom.

The regional ministry of education says that communication mediation "is not a professional role that falls within the education system", unlike sign language interpreting or therapeutic pedagogy.

"Schools cannot request just any resource. It is the government that makes resources available to them, but of course, only those stipulated within the education system, not just any resource," regional sources say.

"I don't know whether they will be part of the system in the future. It's not just communication mediators: many other professional roles could be, or already are, operating through agreements or memoranda of understanding," officials from the regional ministry of education say.

At present, they have agreements with organisations such as Once to meet the need for support staff for children with special needs. They do not currently plan to incorporate this role into the Andalusian education system, although they point out that if they were to do so, it would be through competitive examinations.

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