Assist students with special educational needs
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The documentation around care is highly automatable and that is where the time goes back. The care itself needs physical presence and someone accountable for the outcome, so this work stays where it is.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Direct care and assistance |
| Jobs that do it | 18 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents |
| O*NET activity | Assisting and Caring for Others (4.A.4.a.5) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 18 occupations that perform it.
- Provide students with disabilities with assistive devices, supportive technology, and assistance accessing facilities, such as restrooms.
- Provide assistive devices, supportive technology, or assistance accessing facilities, such as restrooms.
- Collaborate with other teachers that provide instruction to special education students to ensure that the students receive appropriate support.
- Provide assistive devices, supportive technology, and assistance accessing facilities, such as restrooms.
- Provide adapted physical education services to students with intellectual disabilities, autism, traumatic brain injury, orthopedic impairments, or other disabling condition.
- Provide students with disabilities with assistive devices, supportive technology, or assistance accessing facilities, such as restrooms.
- Provide assistance to students with special needs.
- Use computer applications to identify or assist with communication disabilities.
- Assist children with disabilities or children with psychological, emotional, or behavioral issues with boarding and exiting the school bus.
- Communicate with students who use an alternative method of communications, using sign language or computer technology.
What we would actually use
Nothing in our landscape addresses this work. That is the honest answer rather than a padded list: this activity needs a person present, or a machine rather than a software agent.
Buy nothing for the care itself. The time comes back from the documentation around it, so the stack worth building is the recording one, on the pages for that work.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
Who does this work
18 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Adapted Physical Education Specialists
- Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English as a Second Language Instructors
- Career/Technical Education Teachers, Middle School
- Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School
- Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education
- Kindergarten Teachers, Except Special Education
- Middle School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education
- Preschool Teachers, Except Special Education
- School Bus Monitors
- Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education
- Special Education Teachers, Elementary School
- Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten
- Special Education Teachers, Middle School
- Special Education Teachers, Preschool
- Special Education Teachers, Secondary School
- Speech-Language Pathologists
- Substitute Teachers, Short-Term
- Teaching Assistants, Special Education
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Assist individuals with special needs”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.