-About Jože Krajc Primary School Rakek
-About Miroslav Vilhar Primary School Postojna
-About Norrtälje Grundsärskola
-About Norrtälje Grindskolan

Special education needs guidance commission - How to recognize children with special needs and choose the correct program/school in Slovenia?

Placement is aimed at children with special needs who need appropriate adaptation and assistance to achieve knowledge goals and standards and to develop their potentials.

The proposal for the placement of children with special needs is prepared by the special education needs guidance commission of first instance, which operates within the framework of the National Education Institute of Slovenia, and by the special education needs guidance commission of second instance, which operates within the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport.

Children with intellectual disability, blind and visually impaired children or children with visual impairment, deaf and hard of hearing children, children with speech-language disorders, children with disabilities, long-term sick children, children with deficits in specific areas of learning, children with autistic disabilities and children with emotional and behavioural disorders are included in the most appropriate programme by the placement decision, and in doing so receive other appropriate assistance.

The commission works very professionally, facing a number of challenges.

Special needs children in Slovenia
In the presentation we’ll present options of Slovenian education systems for special needs children. Some of them are included into regular school and others attend special institutions. We’ll present also the organisation of work and the way of work with special needs children at our school. This year 25 students from grade 1 to 9 are included – integrated to our school, some of them have smaller and some bigger deficits. Most of our special needs children are those with disabilities in specific areas of learning. We motivate and guide them on their way and help them to become successful, independent and responsible for their further lives.

Anja Šircelj Istenič works at Jože Krajc Primary School in Rakek as a teacher for special needs children, a German teacher and, for the last two years, she has also worked as an assistant principal. She holds an M.A. in Inclusive Pedagogy. In her work with children with special needs she helps these children to overcome their deficits and learning difficulties, and as a German teacher she teaches German as an optional subject to students aged 12 to 15.

Tjaša Prudič works at Jože Krajc Primary School in Rakek as a counsellor, and in recent years also as a teacher of ethics and history. She holds an M.A. in Inclusive Pedagogy. She has been constantly involved in professional development, personally and on the school level, as she takes part in and manages various developmental projects that contribute to the quality of the pedagogical process at the school. As a counsellor, she spends most of her time helping students resolve conflicts, learning to resolve conflicts, helping students with learning difficulties, and helping students with special needs. In recent years, she has been paying more attention to preventive work in the field of a positive school climate. She teaches students to tolerate conflict resolution and strategies for establishing and maintaining pleasant interpersonal relationships. Her challenge is how to have more time for quality pedagogical reflection and finding common solutions for issues that occur among co-workers.

School is meant to meet the needs of all students, but not all students are best served by the traditional forms of school. The Student Health Team co-operates with teachers, students and guardians to find ways to support students towards the best possible education based on each person’s individual needs. We will describe how the team works to meet that goal in the first part of this presentation.

Agneta Eriksson and Kristina Andersson work as administrators and investigators. They have both a long background as Special teachers. They work with assessing children who might be in need of a school for children with learning disabilities. Over the last year they have seen an increase in children admitted to the special needs school

In the second part of the presentation, Resource classes will be shown – what we do, how we approach our students and the routines for placement in our units.

Cecilia Evans is the Head of the Resource Classes in Norrtälje municipality. Her qualifications are Education for children with special needs, Bachelor of Education for Compulsory School in languages, Advance training in schools with learning disabilities, Vocational training in multiple courses in autism disorders, Headmasters training. She has been an educator for 25 years; she started out as a regular teacher in secondary education, teaching youngsters with all types of educational challenges. For the past 12 years she came to realize that her real passion is working with children within the autism spectrum disorder. She has worked in both the public and private sector. During that time, she studied farther to become a principal and be able to help more children.

There are five students, 8–12 years of age in this group. Three pupils have severe learning disabilities.
Now in the spring term, the group has been taught geography, their local area. That have also included the subjects; Swedish, mathematics, art and Social study.
Teachers use adapted material, adapted to the students’ level and level of learning.

At the beginning of the school year, 6th grade students go to a two-day camp with a team of teachers. They spend two days there together and do all the activities together - from cooking lunch and solving games to spending the night. They walk to a nearby hunting lodge, which offers a lot of indoor and outdoor space so that students can practise mutual relationships, get to know themselves and others and spend time patiently with each other. With the help of different games: getting to know each other games, team games, trust games and relaxation games, with the goal of solving them as a group, students experience each other differently and practise better cooperation.

The presentation will offer an insight into how the camp is prepared and carried out and what its contribution to interpersonal relationships and conflict resolution is. Some of the games will be described, too.

Tjaša Prudič works at Jože Krajc Primary School, Rakek as a counsellor, and in recent years also as a teacher of ethics and history. She holds an M.A. in Inclusive Pedagogy. She has been constantly involved in professional development, personally and on the school level, as she takes part in and manages various developmental projects that contribute to the quality of the pedagogical process at the school. As a counsellor, she spends most of her time helping students resolve conflicts, learning to resolve conflicts, helping students with learning difficulties, and helping students with special needs. In recent years, she has been paying more attention to preventive work in the field of a positive school climate. She teaches students to tolerate conflict resolution and strategies for establishing and maintaining pleasant interpersonal relationships. Her challenge is how to have more time for quality pedagogical reflection and finding common solutions for issues that occur among co-workers.

Bal-A-Vis-X  is a series of Balance / Auditory / Vision eXercises of varied complexity. Exercise are related to rhythm and require full-body coordination and focused attention. The program utilizes sand-filled bags, racquetballs, balance boards, and multiple principles and activities from Kinesiology. There are more than 200 exercises that you can practice with students who need support in developing their cognitive and motoric skills. Exercises improve eye hand coordination, attention, memory and word recall, understanding, perseverance, motivation for work and self-esteem. I will present some exercises that I find most useful and that seem playful but at the same time the students are gaining particular skills.

Edina Samida finished her psychology studies in 2003 in Sarajevo. She worked mostly with children with autism spectrum disorders and their parents. In 2010 she moved to Slovenia. She further took studies in the field of cognitive behavioral therapy, DIR Floortime therapy, Brain Gym methods for children with special needs and other modern approaches to working with children with special needs. She worked as a volunteer in the intergenerational centre, where she conducted various workshops for children and lectures for parents. Since 2018, she has worked as a teacher of children with special needs and partly as a counsellor for the first triad at the "Jožeta Krajca" Primary School in Rakek.

Working with students from their early years of primary school to the last year has its benefits as their relationship changes through the years, depending on the subject and the level of formality of the task. Students’ eagerness and relaxed approach in the early years develops into a more serious one as their work gets graded in 8 and 9 grade. The presentation will focus on ways of carrying out chemical experiments in the early years of primary school, the benefits and the outcomes, and the further impact of the experience which is evident at Chemistry class, elective subjects and competitions in this area later on. Practical methods of working with students in 8 and 9 grade will be described and demonstrated.

Anita Šen is a Chemistry teacher in year 8 and 9, a teacher of elective subjects Chemistry in life and Chemical experiments, a mentor of cycling test for students in grade 5, and a teacher in the early years of primary school ‘extended stay groups’. She is a mentor of competitions in the students’ knowledge on Chemistry and Diabetes that students take part in at the school level and national level. She also organises occasional workshops for the talented students and workshops for visiting international exchange students and topic-oriented field trips.

School is meant to meet the needs of all students, but not all students are best served by the traditional forms of school. The Student Health Team co-operates with teachers, students and guardians to find ways to support students towards the best possible education based on each person’s individual needs. We will describe how the team works to meet that goal.

Linda Karlsson is a teacher at Primary School Grindskolan. Susanne Hendel and Carina Larsson are special educators at Primary School Grindskolan. They teach all classes, but mostly they give the team of teachers support about their work. They work hard to handle all the challenges with students with special needs. They work with students in regular classes and in Studion.

We know that the reading quality of pupils and students are crucial for their success in school. In order to see that all pupils or students are able to follow the text in the teaching materials we have started to use Reading Develop Schedule (LUS in Swedish). In grade 1 to 3, four times a year we check the pupils reading skills. According to the result teachers and the local organisations discussing what to do in order to help the pupils develop their reading skills.

Johan Kant is the Operations manager for the compulsory school at Children and education administration in Norrtälje municipality. He is a teacher in social science and worked for nine years in a school with many students with another ethic background than Swedish. After that he worked for ten years as a principle and today he is the manager of 17 principles in Norrtälje. In his private life he has a blog where he discusses the Swedish school system.

We are in the same building and good conditions for cooperation are possible. In the kitchen and library students are some of the staff. Students can receive lessons at both primary and special school. Together we clean nature every spring. The collaboration can also consist of finding the right school form and support for a certain student. In a special case, the trip to Slovenia was the one that made us give the best help. Life changing story will be presented.

Stellan Armandsson is a Teacher in Mathematics, Technology, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Social Sciences and Geography. He is Chief safety representative for the Swedish Teachers' Association in Norrtälje and First teacher, tutor, outdoor teacher and has an active YouTube channel. He has received an award for environmental work in Roslagen.

Once a month the staff at NGS get counseling by psychologist Niklas Wilén. He’s specialized in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and helps them in their work with their pupils. ABA focuses on improving specific behaviors, such as communication and language, social skills, play and leisure, as well as adaptive learning skills, such as fine motor dexterity, self-care and eating. Teaching based on ABA has a strong emphasis on making it easy for the child to do whatever behavior the situation focuses on and using positive reinforcement to make that behavior more likely to be used the next time in a similar situation. It should be easy and fun to learn important adaptive skills, even or especially for children with developmental disorders!
ABA is also an effective tool to gather information and analyze dysfunctional behaviors and learning more about why a child does what he or she does in a certain situation. This often gives the staff better understanding and makes it easier to implement well thought strategies such as using visual aids, prompting alternative behaviors, and reinforcing adaptive behaviors and not the dysfunctional ones. The ultimate goal of teaching based on ABA is to establish and enhance socially important behaviors.
In the film, an English lesson can be seen. Students practice storytelling from the film and they practice words that color numbers and season-related words.

Cathrine Winström is a special educator and works with students who have severe learning disabilities and autism. She has a professional experience of this for more than 30 years. She is trained in special education for students with neuropsychiatric disabilities. At NGS their way of working is clarifying with image support, clear beginning and end. They work with communication with images and with sign support. Some students use communication aids. ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) is also a way of working they have. They are supervised in ABA once a month.

The topic of this lesson is revising and practising the Past Simple and Past Continuous tenses. The students understand the difference between the Past Simple tense and the Past Continuous tense and use these tenses appropriately when they explain the story behind the story (King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and his other wives; the Tower of London) and demonstrate what they have learnt in a role play during the second part of the lesson (Was he dreaming?). They describe things and events that happened in the past and talk about actions in progress in the past. Vocabulary related to the texts is revised and consolidated. The students write a short composition using the Past Simple and Past Continuous tenses as well as some new expressions from the texts at the end of the lesson or for their homework.

Karmen Vidmar has acquired rich and varied work experience in different fields – from teaching English and German in language schools in Postojna and Ljubljana and in the Adult Education Centre Postojna to working as a tourist guide, a translator and a primary school teacher. She has been working as an English and German teacher at Miroslav Vilhar Primary School Postojna since 2006 teaching students aged 9-14 years.

Online teaching and learning was a big challenge for all concerned. On the one hand, the teachers struggled to develop new ICT skills, new approaches and methods for teaching and reach each and every child during the epidemic. On the other hand, many pupils initially had no computers at home or the necessary computer skills.

But over time, all the students developed skills so that they could follow the classes by using a computer. Higher-class pupils became much more independent, while lower-class children often remained dependent on their parents' ability and help.

In our work we will present some examples of good practice that we used during distance lessons in different classes – in lower educational standard for pupils with mild intellectual disability and in special classes for pupils with moderate and severe intellectual disability.

Saša Pivka is a special education teacher and the project coordinator at Miroslav Vilhar Primary School Postojna. She is currently teaching 2nd Grade students of adapted programme with lower educational standard (children aged 7–9 years). She has 20 years of experience in working with children with special needs in different settings.

During my science lessons, in addition to the basic learning goals, I usually follow others that are long-term oriented and are not stated in the regular learning curriculum:


1. Simplifying and adapting content to the developmental level of students.

2. Long-term exposure to more demanding content.

3. The teacher's attitude towards the subject matter is one that the students will imitate, so it is important that the teacher also shows curiosity and desire to learn something new. Co-creating the learning process is important for developing a positive attitude towards learning subjects.

4. Working with tools from a “father’s” workshop can help the child and adolescent find their identity.

5. In STEM classes, it is important that students get rid of the fear of making mistakes.


The role of the teacher is to value error as part of learning and to assist students in learning from their mistakes. There must be enough room for mistakes and learning from them. The aim of the presented science lesson was to learn about heating and stretching of materials in different states of matter, to set up one's own hypotheses, and to test one's predictions with the help of experiments. In the introduction of the lesson, we revised the knowledge of the past lessons and recalled some experience from everyday life. This was followed by presentations of experiments, hypotheses, experimentation, hypothesis testing and extraction of the findings from the experiments. The class of nine students is very heterogeneous in terms of learning abilities, but at the same time very calm. In some students, we can sense the fear of making mistakes and exposure fear. Such a class often requires a shift in attention to concrete ideas and activities. The lesson was eventually also evaluated by the students, who particularly emphasized experimentation as one of the major motivators.

Andrej Mihelčič is a teacher in the last - 9th grade of primary school with lower educational standard for children with special needs and developmental disorders. He has been teaching children in age group 10-15 for 13 years. He has experience working with students with special needs in kindergarten, regular primary school and primary school with a lower educational standard for children with behavioral and emotional problems. After the university degree in defectology he studied integrative relational psychotherapy. During his work in Residential and Counselling Center Planina he co-authored the “Guidelines for working with children with behavioral and emotional disorders'', participated in several conferences and workshops on children and youth with behavioral and emotional disorders. He occasionally volunteers in a local intergenerational center where he provides psychosocial support to adults with mental disabilities.

Our school has been cooperating very successfully with the Slovenian Society for Dog-Assisted Therapy “Tačke pomagačke” (Helping Paws) for eleven years and is considered one of the first schools to have introduced the dog into the classroom. Dogs are not only an exceptional learning experience for our pupils, but the encounters with dogs also have enormous positive effects on their development and learning. The dog is a motivator for the pupils, a partner, even an accuser. For the teachers, however, a motivator and collaborator who leads the pupils to the desired goals in a playful and relaxed way. It enriches our work and our personalities.

Dog-assisted therapy is performed most often in the classroom with all students and individually as reading with dogs or R.E.A.D. program. The dog can be a demonstrator, a motivator, it can be used as a reward for a successful activity, or it can only be a non-working observer of what is happening in the classroom. His presence alone encourages the pupils to take more action.
For successful therapies, it is important that they are carefully planned in advance. A professional (teacher) at the school plans them together with a guide dog.

Mateja Kocjančič is a special education teacher at Miroslav Vilhar Primary School Postojna, currently teaching 5th and 6th Grade students of special programme, adolescents aged 18–22 years. She has 20 years of experience in working with children with special needs in different settings. She was the first teacher to start dog-assisted therapy at Miroslav Vilhar Primary School Postojna.

Saša Pivka is a special education teacher and the project coordinator at Miroslav Vilhar Primary School Postojna. She is currently teaching 2nd Grade students of adapted programme with lower educational standard (children aged 7–9 years). She has 20 years of experience in working with children with special needs in different settings. She has been coordinating dog-assisted therapy for ten years at Miroslav Vilhar Primary School Postojna.

Brain Gym is an educational, movement-based programme which uses simple movements to integrate the whole brain, senses and body, preparing the person with the physical skills they need to learn effectively. It is a result of many years of research into learning and brain function by the educationalists, Dr. Paul and Gail Dennison, from the United States. It is now used in over 100 countries and recognised as a safe, effective and innovative educational and self-development tool.

Brain Gym can be used to improve a wide range of learning, attention and behaviour skills. It was originally created to help children and adults with learning challenges, such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD. But now it is used to improve functioning and quality of life of people from all walks of life from education to the arts, business, healthcare, sport and personal development. The movements can be used by people of almost any age and mobility, from babies upwards.

The Brain Gym movements are easily incorporated into classroom activities. They are lead by the teacher and they do not require any special equipment or material. It is a set of 26 exercises or activities. At our school we do these exercises every day at the beginning of our lessons.

Janja Vilar is a special needs education teacher. She works at Miroslav Vilhar Primary School Postojna, currently teaching 1st Grade students of adapted programme with lower educational standard. She is also a member of the Special education needs guidance commission in Cerknica. She is also a lecturer in child’s early development and works with children with special needs.

The presentation will show the approach to students with special needs during individual lessons with them and what is important for and to the teacher. Moreover, some speech pathologist exercises will be presented which can be done by special-educational teachers or class teachers.

A special-educational teacher essentially needs to train a student’s executive functions which are working memory, inhibitory control, mental flexibility, attention, organisation and planning, concept formation, set shifting, word and idea generation. A very significant part of studying process is also the relationship between the teacher and the student. This is strongly connected with speech language pathology therapy. Student’s interests can be used as communication and motivational tool. It is also important that parents know what can they do, which exercises they can do with their children at home. Finally, we must not only see the students’ special needs and obstacles but what they can do – their strong areas, plan our individual work with them on those and build on that.

Urška Lužar graduated in special and rehabilitation pedagogy and later did her master’s degree with a title "Performing musical activities and the competence of teachers in an adapted program of a nine-year primary school with a lower educational standard". For two years she worked in special primary school Roje in Domžale. Now she has been working as special and rehabilitation teacher at Primary school Rakek since 2018. Beside individual special sessions with children with special needs she has been teaching in after school programmes, cooking class, hiking class and in the previous jobs also folk dances and singing. Through years of teaching not only as a special-educational teacher but also as a singing teacher she has realised the importance of knowing the student’s interests, strong points and skills and that is what she builds her work on. Due to her interests in music, etymology of languages and lack of speech pathologist profile at her school, she begins to be more interested in speech-language pathology therapy and exercises as a special-educational teacher is allowed to perform with the students.