Breaking promises: South Africa’s struggle to implement inclusive education for children with disabilities – Three major areas of concern

• In Event: Challenges to inclusion - a global survey

Proposal

Context and Argument
South Africa is a country rhetorically committed to engaging in education reform and advancing school inclusion for all children, including those with disabilities; though, the country seems to struggle significantly in doing so. In response to signing multiple international, human rights treaties spearheaded by United Nations agencies, SA devised various policy documents such as Education White Paper 6: Special Needs Education (EWP6) (Department of Education, 2001), aimed at promoting the inclusion goals generated by the UN. In 2015, South Africa’s government declared it had reached the United Nations Millennium Developmental Goal: “Achieve Universal Primary Education” (United Nations, 2015, p. 24); yet Human Rights Watch (HRW) (2015) conducted a report suggesting the South African government is, in fact, far from achieving this goal. Since 2015, although South Africa reified its commitment to upholding EWP6 policy mandates and became a signatory of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 (United Nations, 2019; Wernecke et al., 2021), over half a million South African children labeled with disabilities are still out of school completely, and most who are in school are educated in separate and generally inadequate “special schools” (Human Rights Watch, 2019; Statistics South Africa, 2019). Most of the barriers to ability-based inclusive education, that are supposed to have been brought to the center of the agenda, as promised, are related to the South African government’s struggle to successfully address three major areas of concern, including: 1.) ambiguous inclusion policy and insufficient funding for policy implementation, 2.) rampant lack of access to appropriate schools for impoverished children with disabilities, and 3.) inadequate teacher training and support for inclusive classrooms. The South African government is essentially breaching various international human rights treaties (i.e. SGDs) and defying its own policy mandates (i.e. EWP6) to include children with disabilities into schools (Donohue & Bornman, 2014; Engelbrecht, 2020; Wernecke et al., 2021) by failing to effectively address these aforementioned barriers and accept accountability for inclusive education implementation.
Inquiry
This will be an exploratory conceptual paper that draws from relevant policy documents, international and national (South African) statistics, and scholarly sources. I will offer critical insights into why South Africa is struggling to adhere to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, its own National Development Plan (NDP) (that closely aligns with the education goals of the SDGs) (National Planning Commission, 2012; Statistics South Africa, 2019), and its EWP6 policy mandate, in the matter of educating children with disabilities. I will explore the ambiguity within these international and national documents that attributes to confusion and lack of government accountability. I will then utilize an intersectional framework to investigate how the government is failing to provide education access to impoverished children with disabilities, again contradicting the SDGs and the NDP. I will also explore how the government is failing to meet policy mandates by not providing teachers adequate training and support to accommodate students with disabilities into the classroom and combat medical model views of disability.
Contributions and Relevance
Regarding recent reporting on South Africa’s progress towards the SDGs and Agenda 2030, including SA’s Voluntary National Review (United Nations, 2019), there is a lack of specificity and only surface level data regarding children with disabilities. There is sparse research addressing obstacles which contribute to disabled South African children being excluded from schools and how this relates to the SDGs, the NDP, and EWP6. This paper aims to expand upon current analysis and open a dialogue on the structural and exclusionary issues within the South African education system (a legacy of the apartheid), as well as the vagueness and medical model discourse of inclusive education policy affecting South Africa.

Author

• Treasa Praino, Syracuse University