Transition Programs Available For Students with Intellectual Disability towards Community Integration in Ghana

Students with intellectual disabilities have very low IQ and low reasoning abilities which makes them unable to live independent lives. This makes it very necessary for special schools across the country to offer transitional programs to enable these individuals acquire the requisite skills that would empower them to integrate into their various communities. It is in the light of this that this research was conducted to examine the transitional programs available for students with intellectual disability and to establish how the transition programs prepared them for community integration in Ghana Piaget’s theory was adopted by the researcher. This theory deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how people acquire, construct, and use it. The design for this study was descriptive and the approach adopted was qualitative which involved the use of semi-structured interviews in the collection of data. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the teachers, and house mothers, while a simple random sampling technique was used to select the parents/guardians. The findings of the study indicated generally that transition programs available in the special schools are not given much attention and such programs are not well structured to meet the needs of the students due to lack of inadequate teaching and learning resources. Besides this major finding, the study also revealed setbacks such as lack of governmental support in the area of policy and grants that have affected the progression of the program since the needs of individuals with intellectual disability are not adequately met. In conclusion, it is recommended that the government through the Ministry of Education and teachers should pay more attention to the available programs for these students with intellectual disabilities to enable them transit from school to work with ease.