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Disability-sensitive inclusive education policy and systems mapping

Mon, March 26, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hilton Reforma, Floor: 1st Floor, Business Center Room 3

Proposal

The objective of the Education Equity Research Initiative’s Disability Task Team is to improve the availability and quality of data on the prevalence, access, and achievement of children with disabilities. To better understand how education systems are serving students with disabilities and what the impacts of those efforts are, the Task Team identified inclusive education approaches and outcomes as an important research priority, and established a dedicated working group pursuing research in this area. This paper presents the results of activities undertaken by this working group.

To investigate how education systems are including—and could better include—students with disabilities, the working group has undertaken a review of the disability-sensitive inclusive education policies and support systems available in a set of countries across both the global North and global South. The aims of these explorations are to better understand (a) what types of policies or systems features are common across selected countries and (b) how comprehensive policies (or a set of policies and systems) are in supporting inclusive education for children with disabilities within countries.

For each targeted country, members of the working group have conducted a review of available policy and systems information and, when possible, conducted interviews with country experts about existing policies. Using this information, members of the working group have mapped relevant policies and system structures, such as resource availability and inclusion of disability in data collection for school-age children, against a framework of policy and system characteristics, ultimately producing (a) a policy and systems mapping in Excel for focus countries and (b) a policy brief synthesizing findings from the mapping.

Country selection was prioritized by identifying countries that (a) are pursuing disability-sensitive inclusive education and (b) have policy documents, policy reviews, or education sector plans readily accessible.

Methods: Desk review of country documents, education sector plans and targets, and existing policy reviews; key informant interviews with topic or country experts.

Mapping Framework: For each country, the mapping exercise presents information on the following areas:
(a) Definitions of disability and inclusive education, including whether policies consider a nuanced understanding of the diversity of disabilities
(b) Disability-sensitive inclusive education policies and whether they consider:
i. School infrastructure
ii. Curriculum
iii. Teacher training
iv. Assessment
v. Accommodations/supports
vi. Parent engagement/parent rights
(c) Resource availability and financing for disability-sensitive inclusive education
(d) Monitoring systems in place that consider the inclusion of children with disabilities in schools, including what types of disability data on school-age children the government collects
(e) Available evidence on impacts on children with disabilities from research studies or evaluations related to covered policies.

The paper concludes with recommendations for policy, practice and further research.

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