Intersectional Understandings of Disability and Implications for Educational Policy and Practice in India and Pakistan

Group Submission Type: Panel Session

Proposal

The Sustainable Development Goals emphasise the importance of ‘inclusive and equitable quality education’. Yet children from poor households, and among these, girls and children with disabilities in particular, are at a greater risk of being excluded and least likely to achieve basic learning outcomes. Focusing on research conducted in India and Pakistan, this panel will aim to:

1) Provide new insights into the complex and rich lives of children with disabilities- at both the household and school level in India and Pakistan.
2) Share evidence on how disability intersects with other variables, such as household income, gender and nature of disability, to shape spaces of inclusion/exclusion in schooling.
3) Explore existing opportunities in the education systems, particularly at the classroom level, to inform the development of equitable inclusive teaching strategies.
India and Pakistan are particularly unique, as both countries have attempted to address the Right to Education for all children, including for those with disabilities. These policy rich settings have seen rapid expansion of the primary education sector and a noteworthy focus on disability in the official discourse. However both countries continue to be faced with significant challenges in their education system, notably low levels of learning especially among children from disadvantaged groups, inadequate resourcing, and also issues of access particularly in Pakistan.
This panel brings together three presentations from an on-going research project, “Teaching Effectively All Children” (TEACh) funded by ESRC-DFID. This mixed methods project involves data collection at both the household and the school level to examine inequality in access and quality of schooling, with a specific focus on children with disabilities. The household data collected information on over 2,000 children (ages 8-12 years) and incorporated questions from the Washington Group Module on Child Functioning. We therefore have a unique data set which captures disability prevalence rates and a range of other variables such as household wealth, parental education, school enrolment patterns, attendance and participation, school choice, parental perceptions around schooling of their child with disabilities in comparison to their non-disabled child and so on. The school level data, which involved both qualitative and quantitative methods, provides important insights into how school and classroom practices are experienced by different children, including those with disabilities and how these experiences impact on children’s learning outcomes.

The three presentations will engage in depth with different aspects of the project and draw out important policy implications for the development of effective inclusive education in both contexts.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Inclusive Education

Chair

• Pauline Rose, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• Supporting educational access and participation of children with disabilities: Evidence from a household survey in rural India - Anuradha De, CORD; Pauline Rose, University of Cambridge; Nidhi Singal, University of Cambridge

• Teacher preparedness, beliefs, and practices in inclusive classrooms: Evidence from a school survey in Punjab, Pakistan - Rabea Malik, IDEAS, Pakistan; Monazza Aslam, Institute of Education, University College London; Sahar Kamran, IDEAS, Pakistan

• Educating children with disabilities in mainstream government schools in India and Pakistan: Perceptions, practices, and priorities - Nidhi Singal, University of Cambridge; Meera Samson, CORD, India; Rabea Malik, IDEAS, Pakistan; Kirthi Rao, CORD, India; Matthew Somerville, UCL