PeakDash

Having a special needs child was long an obstacle to foreign families coming to live on the mainland. Chinese special needs schools - there are only 400 in a country of 1.3 billion - are by and large little different from ordinary schools in stressing rote learning, discipline, and order. None of these qualities suit special needs children, but their needs traditionally have not been at the centre of the schools' thinking.

Van Dongen recounts a trip to one school where she saw lovely paintings on the wall. Startled, she asked if the children had done them. No, the teachers, replied. 'I said to them, take them down! Put up the children's paintings!'

At Sunshine, things are different. Van Dongen, former chief representative of KLM, the Dutch airline, is a sinologist by training, and not an educator. She began the school project through pure need. 'Basically, I was stuck with my own Down's syndrome child and she was having so many tantrums at home,' says van Dongen, who has lived in Beijing for 16 years. 'I needed a proper school.'

So van Dongen began looking around. She approached the international schools that cater to foreigners, but none would take her - even those that had newly opened up and had the space.

'The next option was Chinese schools. I wasn't happy with what I saw. They were just like normal schools, but taught slower. The teacher to pupil ratio was about 20 to one, and the kids sat in class like this', she says snapping to attention in her chair. 'There was no creativity in teaching and they weren't really making any concessions to the fact that the kids were special needs kids.'

Van Dongen decided to go it alone. She began asking among friends and acquaintances, and quickly discovered there were no fewer than 60 foreigners with special education training living in the city, mostly women who had accompanied their spouses and families to China. And 27 children - that she has heard about so far. How many are there in total? 'Who knows!' she says.

Van Dongen's basement was the school's first home. New paint and extra heaters, and the Sunshine Learning Centre - technically, a non-governmental organisation, and not a school - opened in February. 'In the beginning it was all one on one and the kids improved so much.' Tin-kai learned to feed himself. There were other successes.

By May, the basement was too small and van Dongen rented the villa where Sunshine is now.

Headed by Australian-educated Singaporean principal Angie Chen, van Dongen oversees a teaching staff of six. The school is in Gahood, one of the suburban villa complexes in Shunyi, near the city's international airport, where many foreigners live.

Spread over two floors, it now has nine students - two with autism, four with Down's syndrome, one with Landau-Kleffner syndrome, another with an unspecified learning disability and Tin-kai, who was born with hydrocephalus head.

Painted a sunny yellow, the facilities are clean and bright, and prettily appointed. Multi-coloured toys, well thought-out play areas and child-safe furniture impart a caring, creative and happy atmosphere. With six teachers for nine pupils, the teacher-student ratio is good.

Principal Chen is clear about their goals. 'Our vision, or our goal, is independence. We are trying to teach basic needs, such as eating, dressing yourself, how to cross the street, and because our community is international, things such as how to take a plane.'

Some aspects of life in Beijing are unique and teaching has to be tailored to reflect that. Beijingers' poor driving skills are an example. 'In other countries you can teach the children to wait at a zebra crossing for a car to stop,' Chen says. 'Here, because cars don't stop, you have to teach them to wait until there aren't any cars at all.' This independence-oriented approach, common in the west, is still new to China, where traditional academic pursuits are more valued - and demanded even of children who cannot hope to comply. 'But our kids don't need more math or English. They need functional skills.'

None of this is cheap, and having a student at Sunshine costs US$20,000 a year, the same price as an education at one of the city's international schools.

Yet van Dongen is not aiming at foreigner-only exclusivity.

A key element of her vision is to open the school to Chinese students in four years, by which time she hopes to have halved the fees. Van Dongen, who collaborates closely with the nearby Shunyi Special Needs School, a government-run institution, is training two teachers from there at any one time. They return to their school and bring back new ideas. The changes at the government school, says van Dongen, are dramatic. She is full of praise for the school's principal, Hou Yajun, whose co-operation has been key to getting van Dongen the permission needed to set up the school from the local branch of the municipal Civil Affairs Bureau. She says watching that transformation is what drives her.

Married to a mainland man, her three children are Eurasian, and, she believes, privileged. The family could afford the medical care for her Down's syndrome daughter, Laura. But in the Beijing hospital where Laura got some of that care, she was the only mother in a ward of 20 disabled children. The other children had all been abandoned, van Dongen believes. 'The next stop was the orphanage.'

Faced with a one-child policy that increases dramatically the pressure to have a perfect child who will contribute to the family income and carry on the ancestral line, abandonment of disabled children is common on the mainland, and many people regard special needs children as a waste of money.

Given that grim reality, van Dongen wants to change what she can. 'When I do something like this I want to do something for other Chinese kids. At the moment it's still a school for foreigners. But we aim in four years to have 100 pupils and be a bilingual school.'

Expansion means bigger facilities, and van Dongen is looking for those. 'I wish I had an investor. At the moment I don't have any surplus money, and we can't charge a capital levy as we've just started.' Moving premises will also mean a bigger investment. Chinese special needs schools do not have wheelchair access. As a result, they only take in children with mental handicaps. But van Dongen needs a wheelchair-friendly building, which means paying for an elevator.

Van Dongen has just taken a part-time consulting job to pay her own bills, as all the income from the school goes to paying teacher salaries. Eventually, she says, she is hoping to persuade companies to sponsor a child.

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