Many disabled children and young people are denied sustained access to basic education. Some of these disabled children never enter school, others start but make poor progress, and a relatively small proportion are educated in a parallel system of special schools, running alongside mainstream schools. The rise of the disabled people’s rights movement saw an increasing understanding of disability as a social construction, leading to the conclusion that society, including schooling, therefore has to adapt to successfully include disabled people. The alternative to this ‘social model of disability’ is the ‘individual model of disability’. Here, problems of access, etc are located within a disabled person, who is often medically defined by their impairment. Disabled children are the ones who must adapt in order to be integrated into mainstream schooling. The growth of inclusive education has added to the wide variety of forms of educational provision for disabled children. It is therefore timely to assess the impact of new forms of provision that are evolving, and to see if there are lessons to be learned from these recent developments.
The review will look at studies of the current scale of the access issue for disabled children, and at a range of examples of current educational provision. These examples are likely to be drawn from a) countries where access to basic education is generally high, but limited for disabled children, b) countries where disability interacts with other forms of disadvantage, and c) countries affected by conflict with increased rates of certain impairments. As background to this, it will look at the historical and intercultural development of concepts of disability and of the education of disabled children in developing countries. This will culminate in a discussion of current international policy on disabled people’s rights, inclusive and special education, and the Education for All agenda.
How many disabled children?
The review will look at the size of the population of disabled children and the nature of the effects of disability on their education. While figures such as 10% of the world’s population being disabled are a useful rallying cry to a cause, they do not tell us much about the number of school-aged disabled children in different places and their effective access to education. As well as using surveys that suggest the number of school-age disabled children, the review will seek to answer the question of the number of disabled children indirectly by addressing the following questions?
- What information is available from screening for impairment carried out by health services, what are the links between health and education services, and how useful is teacher-led first stage screening?
- What do local provision, such as pilot schemes tell us about numbers of disabled children in a particular place? To what extent does the provision of an educational service reveal ‘demand’ as parents and carers are encouraged to seek education for their disabled children, defined in the terms of the service providers?
- What are the high-incidence and low-incidence impairments in particular places? For example, rates of hearing impairment among children in many developing countries are often higher than rates of visual impairment.
- To what extent is it useful to plan provision by impairment compared to planning organised by level and type of educational need?
- Can we work backwards from possible access-enhancing improvements to basic education for disabled children, and see what statistics these measures would need in order to be adequately planned?
Educational provision for disabled children
This section will look at the policy and practice of selected government, NGO, INGO and multilateral governmental organisations. It will describe various forms of educational provision for disabled children and ask how successfully these provide access to basic education. It will look at processes of inclusion and exclusion operating both inside and outside schools. For example, it will consider how school curricula and teacher education facilitate or impede access, and how education links with health services, such as community-based rehabilitation.
Key issues are likely to include:
- The interrelationship between disability and poverty, and their mutually reinforcing effect on access to education
- Debates on the right to inclusion versus the right to special education
- The ethics of surveying numbers of disabled children without a service
- Whether it is useful to explicitly recognise and plan for the educational needs of disabled children, or whether disability should be treated as one aspect of pupil diversity needing to be addressed in inclusive education
- The effect of local and national factors, such as population density, on the organisation of education for disabled children.
- The critical points during an educational career for increasing access, eg the role of early years provision and transition to vocational education
- The impact of the HIV/AIDs pandemic on family support for disabled children and young people
It is anticipated that this review will link to CREATE reviews on non-state provision of basic education, and on health and nutrition. It aims to identify gaps in the literature and to suggest areas for future research.
