I Have No More Humans, I am sorry

By Rebecca Thomas

I don't know if this is happening everywhere.

Maybe it is a Te Tai Tokerau thing.

Maybe other SENCOs, LSCs, principals and teachers around Aotearoa are sitting with the same uncomfortable feeling.

But something is happening in our kura.

And I am worried.

While the educational landscape has been consumed by curriculum changes, assessment changes, media swipes, political ugliness and educators pushing back against yet another thing being done to education, something much quieter seems to have been happening underneath it all.

The children arriving through our gates are changing.

Or perhaps the children haven't changed at all. Perhaps we are simply seeing needs that were once missed. I don't know yet. But I know what I am seeing. Our need for wraparound support for neurodivergent ākonga, and for children with significant health, communication, behavioural or cognitive needs, has tripled. Tripled.

And at exactly the moment we seem to need specialist expertise more than ever, that expertise is becoming harder to find. There isn't currently a single educational psychologist available through the Ministry in Te Tai Tokerau. The last one has left. There is no replacement. An entire region. No educational psychologist.

But strangely, that isn't the thing keeping me awake.

It is the little ones.

The Year 2s.

The Year 1s.

The new entrants.

Increasing numbers of very young children arriving at school with significant speech and language needs, developmental differences, cognitive delays, neurodivergence, difficulty regulating themselves, difficulty communicating, difficulty navigating a classroom filled with twenty-something other small humans. Some need almost constant adult support; the adults simply aren't there.

Last week, a teacher came to find me.

Six days earlier, a new child had enrolled in her class.

Six days.

She was frantic. "I can't have another child with this much need." Not I don't want them, or that they shouldn't be here. 'I can't'. There is an enormous difference. She was at breaking point.

So I did what SENCOs do. I opened the class lists. Maybe I could move somebody. Maybe another class had a little more capacity. Maybe there was somewhere else where this child could land and the load might be shared differently. I went through every class. And then I had to go back to her. "I'm sorry." There was nowhere. Every class already had three, four, sometimes more children requiring significant additional support. There simply wasn't another classroom with capacity; we all have the same need. There wasn't another teacher aide. There was nobody left for me to shake from the tree. All I could offer in the call to her desperation was myself.

I could come and observe and watch. Maybe I could suggest some strategies she hadn't tried. We could move the furniture and perhaps change the timetable with visuals. Build routines or find sensory tools. Break learning into smaller pieces. We could use every bit of professional knowledge we collectively possessed. But none of those things can become a human being. And sometimes what a child needs is a human being. Someone beside them.

That person is increasingly difficult to find.

Teacher aides are some of the most important people in our schools, yet we ask them to do extraordinarily complex work for remarkably little security. We ask them to support children with significant communication needs. Trauma. Neurodivergence. Medical needs. Aggression. Sensory needs. Developmental delay. Sometimes very real physical risk. Sometimes we even ask them to step up as LATs at short notice when our teachers are sick. Then we offer them modest wages, uncertain hours, term-time employment and, too often, funding tied to a child, an application or a temporary pot of money. And then we wonder why there aren't queues of people outside the school gate wanting the job. I can't blame them; the level of need I am seeing is severe.

And this evening I found myself sitting with a specialist talking about what happens next.

These five-year-olds will become six. Then seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eventually they will reach our senior classes. "What happens when this cohort reaches Year 6?" I asked.

Then, half joking and half not: "Will there be any staff left by then?"

The specialist laughed. "They'll probably all have AI teachers by then," they said, "sitting there staring like zombies at screens."

We laughed.

For a few seconds.

Sometimes laughter is what humans do when the alternative is acknowledging the enormity of what has just been said.

Then the conversation ended.

I got into my car. And somewhere on the drive home, the joke stopped being funny. I couldn't literally drive the despair from my soul. Because I kept thinking about those five-year-olds. They need teachers who have enough space left inside themselves to notice them. They need teacher aides who are valued as skilled professionals rather than an optional extra we scramble to fund.

They need speech-language therapists.

Educational psychologists.

Occupational therapists.

Learning support specialists.

People who know their whānau.

People who understand that behaviour is communication.

They need relationships.

They need time.

They need humans.

The longer I drove the more need sprang to my mind.

Inclusion without adequate support isn't inclusion. Sometimes it is simply placement. We can write beautiful policies about inclusive education, or send an NZCER survey and tick a relevant box for ERO. We can say every child belongs. I believe every child does belong. But belonging cannot mean placing increasingly complex need into classrooms while quietly removing the infrastructure that makes belonging possible. That isn't inclusion. That is asking classroom teachers to absorb the difference. And they are absorbing it. Every day. Until eventually somebody appears at the SENCO's door and says: "I can't take another one."

And then somebody like me opens a spreadsheet, searches through every classroom, every funding stream, every teacher aide hour, every possible intervention and every human being we have left… and has to say: "I know." "I'm sorry." "There is nobody."

That should worry all of us.

I don't yet know whether what I am seeing in Te Tai Tokerau is being seen across Aotearoa. I would genuinely like to know. Are other schools seeing increasing complexity and need among our youngest ākonga? Are other SENCOs and LSCs looking at their junior classrooms and wondering what happens when these children move through the school? Are principals struggling to recruit teacher aides? Are teachers quietly reaching capacity? Because if this is bigger than us, then perhaps we need to start talking about it.

Loudly.

Before another five years pass. Before today's new entrants become tomorrow's Year 6s. Before another exhausted teacher stands in a doorway asking where the help is. And before the answer becomes something none of us should ever have to say in a school:

There are no more humans, I am sorry.