Special Education Teacher
What the work is
Teaches academic and living skills to early childhood, primary and secondary school students with particular learning difficulties using various techniques, and promotes students' social, emotional, intellectual and physical development.
Would you enjoy the work?
These are the main tasks in the official description. Mark how each one sounds to you.
- Assesses students' abilities and limitations with regard to intellectual, sensory, physical, social and emotional disabilities, or specific problems of language and culture
- Develops and implements individualised learning, behaviour and wellbeing plans to maximise students' growth
- Teaches students with physical, social, intellectual, emotional and linguistic needs
- Enhances student engagement through enriched differentiated and individualised learning programs
- Administers various forms of assessment and interprets the results
- Prepares and maintains students' data, and records and submits reports as required
- Advises, instructs and counsels parents and teachers on the availability and use of special techniques and therapies that benefit students' growth
Try it
A simulation and a case study from this kind of work, set in a support class inside a primary school, working with students who learn in different ways. They are fictional.
The kind of days you could have
Good days
- A student who has struggled to read for years reads a sentence aloud and looks up at you
- A strategy you built for one child gets picked up by the whole class
- A parent who has been worried for years sees their child join in at school
Hard days
- A day where every plan you made meets a child who needs something quite different
- Writing plans and reports that take hours away from the children
- A meeting where adults disagree about what is best for a student, and you are in the middle
Written by Career Calling as a general guide. Real roles vary by employer and place.
Description and tasks: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Occupation Standard Classification for Australia, 2024, Version 1.0 (opens another site), occupation 251431, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The skill guide above is our plain English summary.