Presented at ISEC 2000

Inclusive education - a challenge, a process

Sai Vayrynen - United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, France

Salamanca 6 years on
UNESCO's involvement in the promotion of inclusive education

More than 300 participants representing 92 governments and 25 international organisations met in the World Conference on Special Needs Education: Access and Quality, in Salamanca, Spain, in 1994, to further the objective of Education for All by considering the fundamental policy shifts required to promote the approach of inclusive education. The Salamanca Statement, adopted at the Conference, urged all governments, among others

• to give the highest policy and budgetary priority to improve education systems to enable them to include all children regardless of individual differences or difficulties, and
• to adopt as a matter of policy the principle of inclusive education.

Inclusive education - a challenge, a process

Inclusive education has evolved as a movement to challenge exclusionary policies and practices and has gained ground over the past decade. International initiatives from the United Nations, UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank and elsewhere jointly add up to a growing consensus that all children have the right to be educated together, regardless of their physical, intellectual, emotional, social, linguistic or other condition, and that inclusion makes good educational and social sense.

A decade of international instruments and documents have promoted the principle of inclusive education - 1989 UN Convention on the Right of the Child, 1990 the World Conference on Education for All: Meeting Basic Learning Needs, and the United Nations Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities, 1993. The Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development also emphasized the importance of providing education for persons with disabilities in integrated settings. Today, the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education provides the clearest and most unequivocal call for inclusive education and has reinforced the ideas expressed in the other international instruments.

Inclusion is to be seen as part of the wider struggle to overcome exclusive discourse and practices, and against the ideology that that each individual is completely separate and independent. Inclusion is about the improving of schooling. Rather than being a marginal theme concerned how a relatively small group of pupils might be attached to mainstream schools, it lays the foundations for an approach that could lead to the transformation of the system itself.

A UNESCO survey of 63 countries, carried out in 1995, concerning developments in special needs education revealed that integration is a key policy idea in many of the countries in the sample, although only a small number spelled out their guiding principles explicitly.

Today "special educational needs" is not just referring to physical, sensory or intellectual disability, but to a broad spectrum of educational needs gone unnoticed in regular schools among children. They are often at risk of dropping out because of poverty, hunger, malnutrition, environmental or cultural reasons, or impairments that impede their progress. While significant expansion of primary education is laudable, these children will not survive the system unless the broad continuum of their needs is addressed. These children include those who drop out of schools and /or repeat classes, learners who develop slower than their age-peers, children with disabilities, street and working children, children with HIV/AIDS, juvenile offenders and children of incarcerated parents, and children from disadvantaged homes, refugee populations, ethnic/linguistic minority groups, remote areas, etc.

Thus, attaining the universally accepted goal of Education for All remains one of the most daunting challenges facing the global community today. Reaching the unreached, all those children and youth excluded and/or marginalised, has now been accepted as a priority in virtually all countries. Developing countries, for which this endeavour is especially challenging, are being strongly supported by the international development community in the effort to provide Education for All - the key to sustainable social and economic growth.

Within this paradigm, it is recognized that current Education for All strategies and programmes are largely insufficient or inappropriate with regard to needs of children and youth with special needs. Where programmes targeting various marginalized/excluded groups do exist, they have functioned outside the mainstream - special programmes, specialized institutions, specialist educators. Notwithstanding the best intentions, it is conceded that too often the result has been exclusion: differentiation becoming a form of discrimination, leaving children with special needs outside the mainstream of school life and later, as adults, outside community social and cultural life in general.

UNESCO's involvement and contribution

UNESCO's driving force since Salamanca has been in disseminating the messages which emanated from the World Conference, leading discussions and debates, initiating and supporting innovation and assuming a catalytic role in sharing and disseminating new thinking and new practice with respect to addressing special educational needs within the regular education system.

The main thrust of UNESCO's efforts has focussed on:

1) developing national capacities for policy making and system management in support of inclusive education, and
2) bringing forward the concerns of people with disabilities, as well as other marginalized groups on the wider educational agenda and on the agendas of international development organizations.

UNESCO's catalytic role in national education policy development has been particularly successful in the following examples:

• In South Africa, the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action informed so far the most advanced policy statement on addressing barriers to learning and participation.
• In Mozambique and Palestine, inclusive education has adopted as the principle in addressing the diversity of special needs of the learners. Inclusive education is a part of the Education Sector Programme, funded jointly by various bilateral donors.
• In Guinea, the national teacher training curriculum has been revised to include a study module on inclusive education.

National capacity building in support of inclusive education is one of the most crucial elements in developing more inclusive education systems, and it is the area where UNESCO has invested considerably and where it made a major impact. Capacity building is implemented mainly through training activities and promoted through networking nationally and internationally. These training activities have been carried out in all world regions, although the priority has been given to Africa. Training is targeted to regular teachers and teacher trainers, but all educational staff, including managers and administrators, as well as decision-makers, are also participating.

As regards UNESCO's involvement in bringing forward the concerns of excluded/marginalised children, a few examples highlight the work carried out:

• Development of indicators and collections of statistical data in Chile, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Uganda and Zambia in the field of special needs education. In many countries, children with disabilities and learning difficulties are invisible in the sense that they do not appear in statistics. This development work highlights the importance of developing statistics and also, the problems of "finding" those who are out of the education system.
• As a part of the EFA Year 2000 Assessment, UNESCO has carried out a Thematic Study "Participation in Education: Inclusion of Disabled Learners" documenting the progress made as relates to education of learners with disabilities in the regular education provision.
• UNESCO, ILO, UNICEF and WHO continue to collaborate in promoting the UN "Standard Rules on Equalisation of Opportunities of Persons with Disabilities".

Challenges and the Way Forward

The major challenges facing the development of more inclusive education systems at all levels are related to the following:

• Despite the adopted policies on inclusive education, all countries struggle with the management and implementation of an education system that truly caters for diversity. Experience from many countries show that the development of inclusion policies should be based on a consensus of a philosophy of inclusion. It should be linked to broader developments, such as a reform of education system, a reform of the status of disabled persons, or more general democratic changes.
• Funding mechanisms seem to be the key predictor to the set-up for the provision targeted to address the diversity of learning needs. The mechanisms of financing can explain discrepancies between general policies on inclusive education and the practical organisation of inclusion.
• Curricula should be relevant to the needs of the context and the community and foster the development of the "whole learner". Curricula should be flexible enough to accommodate the diversity of learning styles and pace, as well as to provide possibilities for social and emotional development.
• Support services are necessary to ensure that ALL learners can learn according to their potential. Instead of only focusing on individuals, support should be given teachers, learners and their families. As support services are generally costly, many countries have opted to work in collaboration with other sectors, such as health and social.
• As inclusive education systems require new skills and knowledge from the teachers, teacher education should be revisited and designed to support inclusion. This might involve improving the teaching practices, developing collaborative working and teaching methods, redefining special teachers' roles, etc.
• The importance of community and parental involvement in education is recognised although a lot needs to be done in order to make their participation real. A particular issue in promoting parental involvement is that the parents of marginalized learners themselves often experience marginalisation. Like their children, they may live in poverty, or in isolated communities, or be members of ethnic and linguistic minorities. In such situations, the encouragement of parental groups seems to be doubly important, since the group offers individual parents the support, confidence and personal development they may need.
• If the countries are to develop the education systems to be more inclusive, multi-sectoral collaboration becomes crucial. As many reasons for school failure, drop-out, developmental delays, etc. are else than educational, co-operation and collaboration between and across sectors is needed. Structures or procedures to facilitate multi-sectoral collaboration need to be developed.
• Attitudes are the greatest barrier, or the greatest asset, to the development of inclusion in education. They influence to our perceptions of challenges, strategies to be chosen and goals to the achieved. If Education for All is to be achieved, it has to start with the change in attitudes to make Education for All mean ALL, not just "all, BUT".

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