By Catia Malaquias
On 5 July 2017 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) released “A Guide for Ensuring Inclusion and Equity in Education”. The drafting of the Guide was coordinated by Professor Mel Ainscow, Emeritus Professor of Education at University of Manchester and Adjunct Professor at the Queensland University of Technology.
UNESCO, as the United Nation’s specialised agency for education is leading the Education 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims “to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” by 2030. The Guide is intended as a resource for countries to help embed inclusion and equity in their education policies and systems.
“The ultimate objective is to create system-wide change for overcoming barriers to quality educational access, participation, learning processes and outcomes, and to ensure that all learners are valued and engaged equally.” [p.10]
This objective is consistent with the obligation of countries (including Australia) as signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Article 24 (Inclusive Education) of the CRPD was recently clarified in General Comment No. 4 by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN Committee):
“The right to inclusive education encompasses a transformation in culture, policy and practice in all formal and informal educational environments to accommodate the differing requirements and identities of individual students, together with a commitment to remove the barriers that impede that possibility. It involves strengthening the capacity of the education system to reach out to all learners. … It requires an in-depth transformation of education systems in legislation, policy, and the mechanisms for financing, administration, design, delivery and monitoring of education.” [para 9]
General Comment No. 4 makes clear that the education of students with disability in settings separate from their same-age non-disabled peers is not “inclusion” but rather “segregation”:
“Segregation occurs when the education of students with disabilities is provided in separate environments designed or used to respond to a particular or various impairments, in isolation from students without disabilities.” [para 11]
In fact, the General Comment calls on Governments to transfer scarce human and financial resources tied up in segregated special schools and units to support the inclusion of students with disability in general education classrooms:
“The Committee urges State parties to achieve a transfer of resources from segregated to inclusive environments. State parties should develop a funding model that allocates resources and incentives for inclusive educational environments to provide the necessary support to persons with disabilities.” [para 68]
The UNESCO Guide also envisages the practical and progressive transfer of resources from special schools to inclusive educational settings:
“Where countries have separate special provisions, it is likely that these will continue contributing, at least for the time being. Special schools and units can play a vital role by acting as resource centres for supporting regular schools as they seek to become more inclusive. For this reason, encouraging cooperation between the two sectors is very important, not least so as to minimise social isolation. Such cooperation opens up new and promising opportunities for special school staff to continue their historical task of providing support for the most vulnerable learners in the education system (Ainscow, 2006).” [p31]
In saying this the UNESCO Guide also notes that approaches, practices and thinking developed in special education settings may not be appropriate in general education school settings:
“Too often, the kinds of individualised responses that have been the hallmark of special education divert attention from the forms of teaching and school conditions that can actually involve all the learners in the class. This helps to explain why efforts at inclusion that depend on practices imported from special education tend to foster new and more subtle forms of segregation, albeit in mainstream settings.
…
The recognition that inclusive schools will not be achieved by transplanting special education thinking and practice into mainstream contexts opens up new possibilities. Many of these relate to the need to move from the individualised planning frame … to a perspective that seeks to personalise learning through an engagement with the whole class (Hart et al., 2004).”
It is this mismatch between special education thinking and practices and general education contexts that makes the “experience-based” inclination of Governments and school administrators and teachers in general education to treat special schools and their staff as “experts” or “leaders” on the inclusion of students with disabilities in regular classrooms so problematic.
Leadership in inclusion must come from Government and primarily from the general education system itself – it should not be outsourced to a subsidiary and largely external component experienced in practicing segregation rather than inclusion. Re-badging special schools as “resource centres” is one thing – giving them the label of “centres of excellence” on the education of students with disability is factually questionable and counter-productive more broadly:
- in disempowering general education teachers from feeling competent to teach students with disability; and
- removing the sense of responsibility of general education teachers towards the education of students with disability.
In essence it confirms the myth upon which the special segregated education system has traded and continues to trade:
“Students with disability have ‘special needs’ that are best addressed by ‘special teachers’ in ‘special schools'”.
The limited “transformational” concession being that the myth can now be practiced in a general education school provided there is oversight and hands-on support from the special school system.
In effect, the resources of the special education system should be “included” within the general education system, rather than preserved in a “segregated” parallel system, a separateness that dates back to the institutionalization of people with disability.
The progressive and concerted inclusion of the resources of the special education system depends upon Governments making the community and particularly parents of children with disability aware of the research evidence in support of inclusive education.
UNESCO and the International Bureau of Education recognised this in their “Training tools for Curriculum Development: Reaching Out to All Learners” (2016), upon which the UNESCO Guide is based:
“… it is desirable that governments make clear their commitment to inclusion, emphasizing the positive benefits for parents and children. Specifically, it is useful to emphasize the distinction between needs, rights and opportunities. All children have needs (e.g. for appropriate teaching), but they also have the right to participate fully in a common social institution (a local general education school) that offers a range of opportunities for them. Too often parents are forced to choose between ensuring that their child’s needs are met (which sometimes implies special school placement) and ensuring that they have the same rights and opportunities as other children (which, according to the Salamanca Statement, implies general education school placement). The aim therefore should be to create a system where these choices become unnecessary.
This is why it is important to stress that inclusion is about the development of regular schools, rather than the reorganisation of special schooling. The aim has to be to increase the capacity of all schools in the general education system, so that, like the most effective schools that exist, they can meet the demands of all children while offering them similar rights and opportunities. This has implications for a changed role for special schools in the medium term and the disappearance of special schools entirely in the longer term. However, it is vital to note that the disappearance of the buildings that house special schools does not imply the disappearance of the skills, attitudes, values and resources which those buildings currently contain.”
In that regard, it is worth remembering that Italy closed down its special schools in the 1970s and accordingly students with disability have since been educated in regular classrooms. The medium to long-term goal for most countries is in the distant past for Italy.
In the meantime, the reality in Australia is far more troubling, with data showing that there has been a significant increase over the last decade in the proportion of students with disability in segregated education settings, evidencing a clear departure from the path of realising the right of every Australian student to an inclusive education and a failure of efforts in policy and practice across the Australian educational landscape towards the goal of an inclusive education system.
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