What is Inclusive Education? Concept Sheet

Inclusive Education (IE) is a strategy contributing towards the ultimate goal of promoting an inclusive society, one which enables all children/adults, whatever their gender, age, ability, ethnicity, impairment or HIV status, to participate in and contribute to that society. Difference is respected and valued. Discrimination and prejudice will be actively combated in policies, institutions and behaviour.

Education is the right of all children, and IE aims to ensure that all children have access to an appropriate, relevant, affordable and effective education within their community. This education starts in the home with the family, and includes formal, non-formal and all types of community-based education initiatives.

Within schools IE is an approach which aims to develop a child-focus by acknowledging that all children are individuals with different learning needs and speeds. Teaching and learning can become more effective, relevant and fun for all. Therefore IE will always be good for all schools, although all schools may not be good for all children.

IE is part of development, and development should be inclusive, i.e. responding to the needs of real people who are all different. As with all children, disabled children have a range of basic needs which need to be met in order for them to benefit from education. These include nutrition, acceptance, love and basic health care. Poverty and lack of basic infrastructure (roads, transport) affects children’s access to education, including disabled children. Whatever the level of socio/economic development, the education of disabled children should be seen as integral to the development of education for all children. Many of the ‘problems’ which exclude disabled children from education are a result of exclusive planning: planning should be inclusive.

IE is the responsibility of both government and community, requiring collaboration between sectors and extensive participation. Supporting and involving families is central to IE, as the family has prime responsibility for the care and education of their children (whether disabled or not). Community Based Rehabilitieation (CBR) as a component of community development can help meet basic and specific needs of disabled children, such as access to braille and sign and mobility aids. CBR may also have a direct role in supporting the education of children with severe and multiple disabilities, both in the context of their own homes and in day care facilities.

Issues of disabled identity and discrimination need to be addressed as part of an IE strategy. In order to combat discrimination and to promote positive identity in disabled children, disabled role models should be accessible to all children, schools should employ disabled teachers, and curriculum materials should reflect the existence of disabled people in society in positive ways.

As a catalyst for change IE provides not only school improvement but an increased awareness of human rights which leads to a reduction of discrimination. By finding local answers to complex problems it empowers communities and can lead to wider community development. IE addresses a real need, is a readily understandable concept and requires no new major resources. It primarily involves changes of attitudes and behaviour. It has the potential to be a very effective starting point for addressing the Rights of the Child in a range of cultures and contexts.

Note on use of terms
The term Integrated Education generally refers to an approach which has focused on helping disabled children and children with learning difficulties benefit from mainstream schooling. As a result of initial efforts to respond to the needs of children with disability/learning difficulties, schools become more flexible and child-centred and therefore enable other marginalised groups to benefit. The term Inclusive Education is a more accurate term which reflects our common goal. However, many programmes will continue to use the term Integrated Education where this is more meaningful and familiar in that context and culture.

Specific Terms used in Relation to Children and Learning

Guiding Principles
Every child is different, and there is no fixed dividing line between disabled children and non-disabled children, or between children with learning difficulties, and those without. Whatever language is used, it is important that it is clearly understood, promotes positive attitudes and practice, and does not stigmatise. Therefore different terms will be appropriate in different contexts and cultures. Language should not be used for labelling children, but rather for highlighting problems and improving practice. Whatever term is used, the words ‘child’ or ‘children’ should be added, e.g. ‘children with learning difficulties’.

Impairment
This commonly refers to ‘the lack of part or all of a limb, a defective limb, organism or mechanism of the body’. Children with different impairments (e.g. ranging from missing finger, club foot, epilepsy, facial scar to severe brain damage) can be excluded from education for different reasons. These include negative attitudes, lack of physical access/transport, and rigid teaching methods in schools. Having an impairment (e.g. short sight, missing finger) does not automatically mean that the person is disabled.

Disability
Save the Children Fund (SCF) views disability as a social and development issue, not a medical one. In this context, a child with an impairment is ‘disabled’ when, in their particular context and culture, they are excluded from society/education or discriminated against. The term does not just refer to physically disabled children but includes any impairments (such as the less visible hearing impairment). The term ‘handicapped’ is generally felt to be not appropriate in most English-speaking societies (coming from ‘cap-in-hand’ and evoking a passive charity model). Where it is still used, it often refers to people with severe impairment who are ‘handicapped’ by society, and may be used interchangeably with the term ‘disability’.

Special Educational Needs
This term arose out of the realisation by educationalists that not all disabled children (e.g. those who used wheelchairs) had problems learning, and that many children without obvious impairments were failing in schools. It represented a move away from focusing on a medical condition to acknowledging different ‘learning needs and speeds’. However, it is unfortunately still used to label individual children, rather than highlight problems in the system. It is positive concept when it helps schools to become more child-focused and flexible but it does have its limits and is not possible to define precisely. United Nations Educational Scientific & Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) uses the term ‘children with special needs’ to refer to street children and other marginalised groups.

Learning Difficulty
Children do not have a ‘fixed’ ability to learn. All children can learn, and any child may experience difficulty. Their learning is affected by a wide range of factors including the home and school environment, skills/methods of teachers and cultural perceptions of what types of learning are valued and given status. ‘Children with learning difficulty’ is used to refer to children who are not succeeding in mainstream schools. But often their lack of success is to do with poor teaching methods and lack of appropriate support for their learning. So it is a term which should not be used to label children. However some children (e.g. those with conditions such as Down's Syndrome or iodine deficiency, or brain injury) may learn at very different rates and with certain overall (but broad) limits.

Mental Handicap
In some societies, ‘children with severe learning difficulties’ has replaced the terms ‘mental handicap/retardation’ which encourage stigma and focus on a perceived defect. In other societies, ‘mental handicap’ may be a big improvement on ‘mad’ or ‘idiot’ and so is appropriate for the time being (see ‘Guiding Principles’).

1980 - 1995: SCF’s Main IE Programme Overseas

Thailand
1983: Various disability projects started, including units for hearing impaired children and day care for mentally disabled children.
1989: Special classes within mainstream schools started as a response to waiting lists for residential institutions.
1991: IE programme for visually impaired children began.

China
1988: Work with the Anhui Provincial Education Committee began. Two kindergartens started to integrate.
1993: SCF advisor appointed for two years to help scale up.

Laos
1991: Primary Education Programme staff exposed to UNESCO pack and study tour.
1993: Pilot IE school began.
1995: SCF advisor appointed to take work forward and link with Kindergarten programme.

Vietnam
1989: Initial collaboration with Centre for Research and Education of Disabled Children.
1990: Support for special school teacher training, resource centre development and scholarships.
1994: SCF advisor appointed for two years to develop IE.

Lesotho
Pre-1988: SCF ran hostels for boys with polio while they attended mainstream schools and for visually impaired boys while they attended a resource centre for blind people. SCF was considered the lead agency on disability in Lesotho.
1988: Regional disability advisor visited Lesotho and started policy negotiations on IE. Collaboration with the Ministry of Education began.
1991: SCF advisor appointed to coordinate national IE programme.

Morocco
1993: CBR programme began in Khemisset, including small classes for hearing impaired and mentally disabled children. Lobbying and advocacy at national level to promote IE.

Some Examples of Programmes with an IE Component
Swaziland: Pre-school IE is a component of CBR programme.
Zanzibar: IE in mainstream primary is a component of CBR programme.
South Africa: Pre-school IE component in several CBR programmes and in work with NGOs.
Zimbabwe: IE in pre-schools is part of commercial farm workers programme.
Mozambique: As part of CBR. Small signing groups for deaf children.
West Bank: Outreach programme and sponsorship.

Summary of IE Literature Search
Sparse, dominated by a small elite.
Misleading and unreliable use of hard data in relation to formal provision of education to disabled children.
Reinforces negative deficit model of developing country.
Concepts confused and unexamined, e.g. what is meant by the term ‘special needs’?
Cross-cultural issues not addressed. (www.eenet.org)

Avoiding Issue-overload: Core Principles and Diverse Discrimination

In these times of issue-overload (gender, disability, HIV, poverty, ethnicity, age), experts in each ‘issue’ abound, each with their extensive reading material and advice on how to raise awareness on that particular issue. This can be both conceptually and practically overwhelming; despite the best intentions, it becomes a practical impossibility to attend 6 different awareness-raising courses, and plough through 6 different sets of reading material and guidelines, let alone to accommodate 6 different specialist advisor visits from Save the Children Fund (SCF) HQ…… Yet it is immediately obvious to anyone who becomes ‘aware’ on two or more issues, that there are a significant number of common key principles which once understood and internalised, make becoming ‘aware’ on other issues a much easier task. It would seem that at the current time, whilst these common elements are increasingly acknowledged, very little work has actually been done on producing materials and training packages which define these common principles and issues, and clarify the specific differences.

In the disability field, this is probably due in part to the fact that the disability movement is relatively young, and disabled people have needed to spend time defining themselves and their issues before being ready and able to ‘merge’ with other marginalised groups to fight common oppression; a strong identity is needed before integration, rather than assimilation can occur. However, the increasing categorisation of yet more and more types of ‘difference and oppression’ has resulted in an increasing realisation of potentially ludicrous consequences; competition between oppressed groups, labels taking precedence over acknowledging individual difference and common humanity, fear of speaking/acting due to pressure to be ‘politically correct’.

In theory, guiding principles which refer to all children should be relevant to all these diverse groups. In reality, division, discrimination, ‘blind spots’, ‘mental blocks’, fear and ignorance exist, and although there are an infinite number of types of vulnerability and marginalisation, it is still useful to highlight a finite number of key issues which if people are made aware of, then this can help to improve practice.

Experience shows that a person who is gender-aware, child-aware and race-aware, can still be completely disability-unaware, and ignore or discriminate against disabled children and families with disabled members. The process of awareness-raising on these diverse issues is not one of adding layer after layer of information, it is more like training the muscles of perception (seeing, hearing) to be able to focus on marginalised groups and individual difference, and to recognise how one’s own limitations influences perception. Once our ‘muscles’ become used to perceiving flexibly, it hopefully becomes easier with time to acknowledge and respond to a range of differences.

Principles/issues common to all types of discrimination and difference:

• The need to be aware of and acknowledge our own bias, attitudes and emotions in relation to the issue (e.g. what words/images/feelings spring to mind on hearing the word ‘disability’.
• Awareness of the impact of our behaviour/attitudes/style of communication on different groups (e.g. issues around communicating with children, interviewing women, cultural body language - realising that we can be part of the oppression).
• Importance of identifying both common and specific needs and access.
• Finding out about actual lifestyles/perceptions/priorities rather than transferring knowledge about one person or group to another.
• Importance of promoting positive identity (self-help groups, role models).
• Consulting with and involving different groups separately (e.g. meeting with women alone, or disabled women alone, or children alone).
• Focus on removing barriers (attitudinal, physical, institutional) to participation, rather than trying to change the individual.
• Importance of valuing mistakes and imperfection as a contribution to learning.
• The value of identifying with a marginalised group/person (women talking to women, disabled people working with disabled people), but also acknowledgement that anyone can increase understanding by listening and learning (e.g. it is not necessary to be disabled in order to understand anything about disability, but it is necessary to listen to and learn from disabled people).
• Need to challenge discrimination through policy and practice.

Specific issues - some examples relating to disability:

• Disabled people are very different from each other (whether they have the same or very different impairments).
• Disabled people are dispersed throughout all societies (often very isolated from each other).
• There is no clear, objective dividing line between disabled people and non-disabled people - disability relates to perception.
• Anyone can become disabled at any time.

SCF’s experience of integrated education work has highlighted how a focus on a ‘single issue’ such as disability can become a gateway to promoting an inclusive anti-bias approach. In Lesotho, teachers in primary schools received a three week training on ‘special needs’ in order to help them implement the government programme of integrating disabled children. Initially many felt resistant and also afraid of disabled children. However, because the training was about developing good teaching methods to enable teachers to respond to pupil diversity, many teachers found that they gained more than they thought they would;

‘there are many very useful techniques from special education. We are catering for individual difference… the programme has improved the school drop-out rate and repeaters… it helps non-disabled children because they develop a sense of social responsibility, they learn to feel more responsible for their own learning when the teacher is busy with a disabled child… we now work harder and longer hours, but teaching is more interesting and rewarding! There is no going back - it would be like asking a repentant sinner to return to their sins!’ (interviews with teachers).

Although many more girls than boys attend school in Lesotho for a variety of reasons, the awareness-raising and training for the teachers is perceived as a sort of conversion process, whereby they come to ‘see the light’, they are now really convinced that all children can learn, that they as teachers are responsible for children’s learning, and that children are individuals. They respond more appropriately to children who are quiet or a bit slow, and are more aware of the influence of family background and problems on learning.

I would like to suggest that SCF does not begin to produce a parallel literature/process in relation to gender, but rather pioneers a collaborative approach which will define and refine common principles/issues, and then spell out specific issues according to key areas of discrimination, resulting in a single package of guiding principles. What do you think? (Sue Stubbs).www.eenet.org