Inclusive Education in Trinidad and Tobago: "Inclusion? Yes, But ..."

• In Event: Challenging the Universality of Inclusion: Context and Culture in the Transfer of a Western Principle

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the current state of services for children with disabilities in Trinidad/Tobago (TT), within the context of the nation’s recent status as a developed nation and the widely accepted principles of inclusion and public funding set forth in the United Nations’ Education for All (EFA). Globally, despite widespread efforts, the majority of programs have continued to be privately provided (Mittler, 2005) and operate “outside the mainstream of school life” (UNESCO, 1999, p. 10). At the Caribbean Symposium for Inclusive Education (UNESCO, 2007), while all 16 participating countries endorsed the principle of inclusion, most indicated that full inclusion into regular schools was not financially feasible.
The study used a conceptual framework proposed by Peters (1993), who posits that a full accounting of the provision of services for people with disabilities requires an understanding of the relations among three dimensions -ideology, societal structures, and practice. Based on Peters’ model, 50 qualitative, open-ended interviews were conducted, guided by key questions focusing on each area of the model. Following qualitative tradition (Patton, 2015), the sample was purposively selected to include a range of parents, teachers, government officials, and leading community advocates and service providers. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed following grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006), by which data are coded and categorized, and ultimately analyzed into thematic strands that address the main research questions but may also reveal related important questions that had not been specified in the methodology.
Results revealed that while the nation publicly aspires to provide public education for all within an inclusive framework, the reality falls far short of these goals. In TT, schooling is provided free from primary through University levels, yet public schooling meets only a small proportion of special needs children, the majority of such services being in segregated settings. Reasons proposed for the difficulty of inclusion emphasized the society’s entrenched conceptualization of schooling as academic pursuit and the high cost of providing adequate resources for a more differentiated educational system. While pressure from international funding agencies pushed the government to provide assistance to private special schools, systems for implementing this are unreliable, leaving many such schools in jeopardy of closing for lack of funding. The vast majority of interviewees supported the principle of inclusion but expressed serious doubts that it was feasible for TT in the near future. Participants also expressed reservations about the goal of public provision of all schooling, suggesting that privately provided special services should be an acceptable goal but with full government support.
The findings are significant in that they give further evidence to the pattern of lip-service to the EFA, which results in unsystematic efforts at inclusion and publicly funded special needs education. The findings also support a growing body of literature arguing that the transfer of societal concepts such as inclusion and public schooling to developing nations fails to take into account the realities of social, cultural, and economic structures (Emerson, McConkey, Walsh, & Felce, 2008; Tooley 2009).

Author

• Beth Harry, University of Miami