A vacant therapist post, a missing student, and a summative assessment in three weeks
You are the class teacher of Grade 5B in a mainstream school in Taraz: 27 students. Timur, 11, transferred in September. His PMPK conclusion recommends an adapted programme, 30 minutes of extra time on written work, first-row seating, and twice-weekly sessions with a speech therapist. In practice the speech therapist post has been vacant since August; the school has one teaching assistant for the whole primary wing; subject teachers report that Timur refuses to read aloud; in five weeks he has missed seven days. His mother says a group of boys imitate his speech in the corridor and that he cries at night. The deputy head says 'there is no assistant, the teacher should cope'. The term summative assessment in Kazakh language is in three weeks. Timur's reading is at Grade 2 level; his comprehension of oral instructions is good, and he answers confidently when he is not asked to read in front of the class.
1. What do you do in the next two weeks, and where are the boundaries of your role?
Read the worked answer
Act where the classroom can act; escalate what the classroom cannot fix.
Within your role (this week):
- Confirm first-row seating in every subject, not just yours, and set up a named peer buddy for written instructions.
- Stop public reading aloud. Replace it with prepared reading - Timur hears the passage the day before, or answers orally while a partner reads. His comprehension is good; the current arrangement assesses decoding in public, which is not the objective of most lessons.
- Pre-teach five or six key words before each Kazakh language lesson so he meets them before the class does.
- Agree a private signal he can use when he is lost, so he does not have to announce it.
Outside your role (in writing, this week):
- Send a short memo to the deputy responsible for inclusion and to the school's psychological-pedagogical service: the PMPK recommendation, the vacant post since August, the seven absences, and the classroom adjustments already made and their effect. Do not attempt to deliver speech therapy; implement the recommended classroom accommodations and say plainly what is not being delivered and why.
- Record dates, adjustments, and outcomes from now on. Resource decisions follow documentation; undocumented need looks like a teacher's complaint.
Boundary to state clearly. You adapt teaching; you do not diagnose, treat, or decide whether the recommendation is valid. The deputy's 'cope' is a resourcing statement, and the answer to it is a written record, not extra unpaid improvisation.
2. How do you adapt the Kazakh language summative assessment, and where is the line between adaptation and changing the standard?
Read the worked answer
Legitimate accommodation - remove barriers unrelated to the objective.
- 30 minutes of extra time, as recommended.
- Instructions read aloud, and items checked for reading load independent of the skill being tested.
- Oral response instead of written where the objective is comprehension or content, with the same criteria applied.
- A separate room or a low-distraction seat.
- Larger font, wider spacing, fewer items per page.
- Reduce the number of items while sampling the same objectives - fewer questions of each type, not easier questions.
Not legitimate - these change what is being measured.
- Dropping the writing criterion when writing is the objective being assessed.
- Pre-teaching the actual items or showing the paper in advance.
- Marking on effort, or awarding a pass to avoid conflict.
- Excluding him from the assessment altogether; that removes the evidence of what he can do and hides the school's failure to provide support.
Test the decision with one question. Would the adaptation still be defensible if it were applied to every student in the class? Extra time and read-aloud instructions pass that test; a personalised easier paper does not.
Document. Record every adaptation on the assessment record, aligned to the PMPK wording, and add a brief note on how he responded. That record is what shows the school assessed him fairly, and it is also the evidence needed if the results are later challenged.