Making the IDELA toolkit inclusive of children with disabilities: challenges and promising practices

• In Event: Promising approaches to generating inclusive data for children with disabilities: the role of learning assessment tools

Proposal

Ensuring early learning and development opportunities for all children requires equity and inclusion around the access, participation, progress and achievement of key early childhood development (ECD) skills and milestones. Early learning and development assessments and measurement tools play a fundamental role to achieve this. ECD assessment data provide stakeholders with information on how well children are developing and on whether teaching practices, programs and policies are beneficial for all children, including children with disabilities. Despite this, the inclusion of children with disabilities in ECD assessments and in education monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts in general is still challenging for most programs in low- and middle-income countries.
Acknowledging that children experience a variety of learning needs and trajectories, which are shaped by individual characteristics, environmental barriers and contextual circumstances, and recognizing the right that every child has to achieve an optimal development, this presentation addresses recent methodological work on the IDELA toolkit to foster the collection of accurate and inclusive data on children with disabilities. Drawing on recent data collected from a global online survey with current IDELA users across more than 30 countries, and on results from recent methodological work to make IDELA data more inclusive, we will:
•Document current practices around the use of the IDELA child assessment with children with disabilities, highlighting reported challenges and promising practices to make the tool inclusive of children with difficulties in different functional domains.
•Describe the results from piloting a new module of the IDELA Classroom Environment tool to measure school and classroom inclusiveness. The new module intends to measure the availability of inclusive and responsive materials and activities, classroom arrangement and equipment (seating arrangement), and use of teaching strategies that can promote equal participation for all children irrespective of disability status.
•Describe the challenges and lessons learned from efforts to mainstream the collection of data on children with disabilities for disaggregation purposes, in the context of program’s M&E
•Importance of examining how sex, disability, and other vulnerabilities intersect to shape increased vulnerabilities and disparities in the access to quality ECE and school readiness.
•Reflect on the importance of partnerships with organizations of persons with disabilities as part of methodological work and from the earliest stages of any program, to promote adequacy, relevancy, and ultimate usefulness of the evidence generated.

Authors

• Filipa de Castro, Save the Children

• Seble Mezmur, Save the Children

• Clara Pava, Save the Children