Education and disability: Analysis of data from 49 countries

• In Event: The Equity Initiative: Gathering and Utilizing Data on Children with Disabilities in Education

Proposal

More than two years after the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, many of the most marginalized groups remain invisible in education data at the national and global levels, including children and adults with disabilities. This scarcity of data is partly linked to the challenge of identifying disabled persons in household surveys because of the lack of a uniform definition of “disability.” To address the need for globally comparable measures of disability, the Washington Group on Disability Statistics has developed questions for use in household surveys and censuses to identify persons with a disability based on the presence of difficulties in six core functional domains: seeing, hearing, walking, cognition, self-care, and communication.

This session will present recently published results of an analysis of survey and census data on education from 49 countries. Data sources include Demographic and Health Surveys supported by the US Agency for International Development, School-to-Work Transition Surveys carried out by the International Labour Organization, and population census data compiled by IPUMS-International. The data reveal persistent disparities between persons with and without disabilities with regard to school attendance, completion of education, and literacy.

The presentation will also highlight some of the challenges encountered during analysis of data on education and disability due to the questions used to identify persons with disabilities, the small sample size of many surveys, and the relatively small proportion of persons with disabilities in each country’s population. The session will conclude with recommendations for future collection and analysis of data on persons with disabilities.

Author

• Friedrich Huebler, UNESCO Institute for Statistics