I think it is such a poor decision for Spesh kids to do Further. I think VCAA shouldn't even need to make it that Spesh kids are restricted from Further, but rather that students would just never pick both those subjects. However, students do do all 3, and hence this needs to be stopped via VCAA intervention.
With methods as a prerequisite for Spesh, already these people do 2 maths subjects - for them to also take on a third (further), and hence have potentially half their ATAR (6 subjects, 4 full, 2 at 10%, giving 4.2 subjects - with 3 maths, you have 2.1 subjects contributing) based purely off maths seems too much.
Contrastingly, for LOTEs (see
http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/french-italian-its-all-double-dutch-to-many-20121006-276gz.html - almost nobody does 2 languages, let alone 3), there are almost no students who so limit themselves to one field of study. I don't have any statistics or resources or anything, but I don't think that there would be many people who study 3 history subjects - either Revs, Renaissance, Australian (or Classics as well).
Already I think that genuine Further students are at a big disadvantage in doing well in that subject when there are Methods kids also doing Further. Additionally, there are Spesh kids who also do Further. For me, this hardly seems reasonable whatsoever to those who truly belong in Further.
For instance, just how many of the 40+ scores published for Further do you think would belong to real Further students, those who did not also do Methods or Spesh? Or how would you feel as a pure Methods student (who doesn't do Spesh) if suddenly University maths students were now also dropping in to do Methods and were taking basically all of the Study Scores of 40 and above?
Finally, and correct me if I am wrong, but I feel like essentially the only reason that Spesh kids would ever do Further is in the hope of getting a better ATAR. Unless these students with all 3 maths (most likely combined with physics, ie 4 maths) are each planning on doing Pure Maths degrees at Uni (this being the only other reason I can think of to support choosing all 3), I think these students are then at a disadvantage when they get into Uni on the back of a devious ATAR, half comprised of scores from Maths subjects which may be of little or no relevance to the Uni courses that they will study.
(For a similar reason, I seriously dislike that there are some who choose LOTEs purely for ATAR purposes - most particularly, the boys who pick up Latin in something like Year 10, for the sole reason (surely) of boosting their ATAR. Believe me in saying that I scarcely considered the mark-ups for Latin or French when choosing my subjects. They had been my two favourite subjects since I started them in Year 7.)
I feel like people and students especially should be looking more toward the future and long term goals (i.e. how the work you did at school will aid you in your knowledge required for later life) and not so much looking towards an ATAR and other very short term goals.
I find it hard to believe that any Spesh student who then chooses Further is doing anything but thinking about the latter.