Transcript IASSID Sudamerica Conference

Inclusive Education - a Global Perspective:
Insights from Canada and South Africa
IASSID World Congress
Cape Town, South Africa
Dr. Vianne Timmons
President, University of Regina Canada
Professor Nithi Muthukrishna
Faculty of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Overview of Presentation
• Global views on inclusion in education
• Principles underlying policy and legislation
• Implementation struggles over past decade? What do we
know?
• The Canadian picture
• Inclusive education policy implementation: The case of
South Africa
• What are the lessons?
Inclusion and Education for All
• Inclusive education - main principle - education is a basic human
right and the foundation for a more just society.
• Inclusive education - key strategy in a rights based approach to
achieve Education for All.
• “Right to education rooted in international human rights treaties”
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.
Education for All, Jomtein, Thailand, 1990
World Education Forum held in Dakar, Senegal in 2000
Millennium Development Goals
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
• Need for political will for educational reform
• Commitment by governments to invest in education
UN Convention on Disability
• There are eight guiding principles that underlie the Convention and each
one of its specific articles:
a) Respect for inherent dignity, individual autonomy including the freedom to
make one’s own choices, and independence of persons
b) Non-discrimination
c) Full and effective participation and inclusion in society
d) Respect for difference and acceptance of persons with disabilities as part of
human diversity and humanity
e) Equality of opportunity
f) Accessibility
g) Equality between men and women
h) Respect for the evolving capacities of children with disabilities and respect for
the right of children with disabilities to preserve
their identities
Rights Based Education
• Key principles:
 access
 participation
 inclusion
 accountability
 equality and non-discrimination
 empowerment
 accountability
 transparency.
Rights Based Education
• Removal of physical and social barriers
• Attitude change for policy makers, employers, teachers,
community members, health care professionals and even
family members
• Equal right to freedom, dignity, non-discrimination
• Protection from the state against abuse of these rights
• Access to economic, cultural and social rights.
A Rights Based Approach
• All role-players - individuals, schools, departments of education,
governments, local organizations, NGOs, CBOs, the private sector,
tertiary institutions, and donor organizations – meet obligations.
• Structures and mechanisms of accountability and transparency to
monitor violations of the right to education
• Inclusive education (IE) – principles education is a basic human
right, foundation for a more just society.
• Aim of IE - eliminate social exclusion and exclusionary pressures
• Rights framework - focus on challenging issues of exclusion,
inequality, disparities, power imbalances and social injustice.
Policy and Legislation
• Addressing policy fragmentation
 Bring together policies - such as “equality in education,”
“anti-discrimination,” “inclusive education,” “education for
all,” “community based rehabilitation,” “social inclusion
and exclusion,” “health promoting schools,” “child-friendly
schools,” “schools as centres of care and support,” “antiracism”- within framework for general education
 Fragmentation between general and special education –
dual system
Policy Implementation Struggles
• Finance/Resource Allocation
 Cost effectiveness
 Optimum and creative use of resources
 Minimize duplication, wastage and
mismanagement of resources.
 Allocations – to ensure unified system of service
delivery across country - and adjustments for
contextual factors.
Policy Implementation Struggles
• Resource Based Funding
 Shift
 from funding policies operating from dual system of education and
segregation of learners - not cost effective, exclusionary for poor countries.
 from focus on categorizing learners - to allocate funds - proved a poor use of
human and material resources.
 Focus on levels of support needed for schools to ensure access to quality
education.
 Funding must guarantee minimum level of support adjustments when
taking into account issues such as poverty, under development,
geographical location etc.
 Resource-based formulas - funding based on established program needs
– rather than labeling and categorizing.
 Assumption - every school, and every district need a certain level of
support provision - for learner population with diverse needs.
Policy Implementation Struggles
• Resource-based formulas - need to be tied to specific policies at
local levels that specify levels of support
• Funding must be enabling – children access a range of support
options, and should not limit placement options.
• Funding goes with the child – and not with a particular category of
school
• Support and funds for support should be accessed at a range of
settings
Policy Implementation Struggles
• Focus - community based support – children can access support in
schools and facilities in their local communities.
• How to reframe special schools that operate on a highly specialized,
costly model of support based on a medical model.
• A rights approach - operates from a community based model of
support may save costs vs. medical model of support.
• Strategies to ring fence funding – e.g. for high need learners,
redress, access, strengthen families, teacher development, assistive
devices, human and material resources.
Global trends towards inclusive schooling: What
have been the imperatives in past decade?
• Creating inclusive access to schools – assure inclusion, equality,
participation.
• Early identification and intervention
• Centres – to minimize barriers to learning, and increase access and
participation school based policies - collaborative and enquiry based
approach – involving all role players including parents/caregivers,
Disabled people’s Organizations (DPOs), and community members.
• Exploring new mechanisms to measure success
• Developing inclusive curricula
• Awareness and advocacy: Changing attitudes
Global trends towards inclusive schooling: What
have been the imperatives in past decade?
• Indicators of outcomes (outcome measures) – at level of individual,
family, community, organization, district.
• Indicators - of contextually relevant inclusive cultures in centres of
learning.
• Accountability and monitoring
• Developing contextually relevant training models and approaches
• Developing inclusive curricula
• Access to education for out of school children with disabilities
• Need for rigorous research agenda
Canada
• Education is provincial responsibility, difficult to have
national trends identified.
• The trend is to have inclusive education in policy.
• Teachers, principals and parents support inclusive
practice: Challenge is teachers feeling competent
• Challenges with consistent, sustained practice.
• There are examples of excellent inclusive practice.
• Inclusion at the post secondary level is developing.
Recent Research - Inclusion
• There is an association between inclusion and
health
• PALS data was pooled from a sample of close to
8000 parents of children (birth to age 14) with
disabilities
General Health
St u d e n t He a lt h b y In c lu s io n Sc a le
Ve ry we ll / we ll
100%
Ave ra g e
Po o rly / ve ry p o o rly
90%
80%
Re s p o n s e
70%
55.7%
65.4%
76.3%
60%
50%
40%
30%
32.2%
26.8%
20%
10%
19.9%
12.0%
0%
Lo w In clu s io n
7.8%
3.8%
Mid In clu s io n
Hig h In clu s io n
Academic Progress at School
Pro g re s s a t Sc h o o l b y In c lu s io n Sc a le
Ve ry we ll / we ll
100%
Ave rag e
Po o rly / ve ry po o rly
90%
31.7%
80%
40.3%
Stude nt Re s po ns e
52.0%
70%
60%
27.8%
50%
30.5%
40%
32.2%
30%
20%
40.5%
29.2%
10%
15.8%
0%
Lo w Inc lus io n
Mid Inc lus io n
Hig h Inc lus io n
Importance of Research
• Link inclusive practice with academic
achievement (Willms, 2002).
• Need to focus on teachers’ knowledge and
innovation in local context.
• Research and training needs to link health,
education and social welfare.
Inclusive Education: The case of South
Africa
Education White Paper 6 (July, 2001)
Located in rights and equity discourse
Paradigm shift “from special needs” to “barriers to learning and
participation”
• Systemic change - system needs to be responsive to diversity of
learner needs and system needs
Acknowledgement that social, political and economic factors
prevent access
• Exclusion - denial of social rights
• Move away from “deficits” to “socially constructed disadvantage”
• Key focus addressing barriers to learning and participation
Defining inclusion
processes of increasing participation of students
and reducing exclusionary practices
developing enabling education structures, systems
and learning methodologies
acknowledging and respecting difference in
children, whether due to age, gender, ethnicity,
language, class, disability, HIV status,
never ending process rather than simple change of
state
broader than formal schooling
contexts vary regarding extent and nature of
barriers to learning and participation
Key barriers
 inaccessible and unsafe built environment
 inadequate provision of support services to
schools, parents, care-givers, families and
communities
 disability
 lack of enabling and protective legislation
 lack of human resource development
 lack of parental recognition and
involvement
Key barriers
 Socio-economic barriers that place learners at
risk: child abuse; HIV/Aids epidemic; violence,
crime; substance abuse; child abuse.
 Problems with language and communication
 Attitudes
 inflexible curriculum
Policy implementation in SA: Education
White Paper 6
Key Strategy Areas:
 The qualitative improvement of special schools and their
conversion into resource centres to support mainstream
schools
 The need to overhaul the process of identifying, assessing and
enrolling learners in schools
 The expansion of access and provision –mobilisation of out of
school children and youth of school going age
 The establishment of full service schools – that would have
resources to accommodate a diverse range of needs
 Strengthening education support services
 Establishment of District support services
 Establishment of Institutional Level Support Teams in schools
(ILST)
Focus of training and nature of training
since 2001
• Pilot/development projects
• Expanded cascade model – train the trainer, cluster
based training, and site based support post training
• Content of training: ranged from wide range of barriers
to learning; Screening, identification, assessment and
support (SIAS); Inclusive learning programmes
• Constructivist approach
• National DoE – conceptual and operational guidelines –
unique initiative
Contested Spaces
Research based analysis
• Silences around exclusionary pressures in schools and
communities – yet South Africa has a broad
conceptualization of inclusion that includes multiple
vulnerabilities.
• Funding pressures
• Decentralization of education governance - lack of
capacity at the district level
• Struggles around the meta-discourse of inclusion
Silences around exclusionary
pressures
Poverty, deprivation and inequality
• Poverty - all-pervasive, over-riding barrier to basic education extreme poverty and social marginalization.
• Poverty - part of a web of human rights violation that children and
their families experience in this context.
• Stories reflect intricate web of exclusions and oppressions children
and their families experience in this context and sustained process
of being relegated to the margins of society (Muthukrishna &
Ramsuran, 2007; Harley, 2006; Pendlebury, 2005).
• Sea of poverty threatens goals of equity and redress.
Silences around exclusionary pressures
Funding pressures and the macro economic
policy
• Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP) and Growth,
Employment and redistribution Strategy (GEAR) (Fiske & Ladd,
2004) – fiscal austerity - impact achieving equity in education
• 2002-2008: fiscal space that has opened up - taken by ECD and FET
– leaving special needs with no real benefits from increased
provincial education budgets (Wildeman & Nomdo, 2007)
• Provincial departments – not able to fund and deliver sustainable,
quality IE programmes – cf. out of school learners.
• Recent development: approx. R2.5 million from National Treasury
for IE implementation – 2008-2011.
Contested spaces
Sustainability of IE training (2001-1008)
• Pilot/development projects not sustained (Pather, 2003;
Ntombela, 2007)
• Case: out of school learners – since pilot project
initiatives – no evidence of strategic plans and
implementation; district level governance weak.
• Dependence on donor funding
• Conditional grants to provinces did not materialize
Contested spaces
IE as a meta-discourse
• IE – a meta discourse/cross cutting – intended to be
infused into entire national and provincial directorate –
in reality located special needs structures at national,
provincial levels, district levels – lack political power
• Weak linkages between special needs directorates and
public schools directorates (Wildeman & Nondo, 2007)
• Intra-department collaboration – not a reality - limited
shared understandings of priorities, strategies,
implementation of parameters (Perumal, 2005)
What are the Lessons?
• Need ethical leadership at all levels - a moral
endeavour - an ethics of critique, agency,
community, justice, care, professionalism (cf.
Furman, 2004).
• Schools are moral communities
What are the Lessons?
• Policy implementation is not a linear process – has to
engage with particular contextual pressures
• Concept of a conditional matrix (Perumal, 2005) – to
understand multiple, interlocking, intersecting
influences – micro- and macro-political
• Need to understand multiple exclusions
• Transformation/development agendas – must be driven
by local people at district level and schools and their
communities
What are the lessons?
• Need a dialogic approach – to engage with narrative of
classrooms and schools, their curriculum and school
community (Pather, 2004; Muthukrishna, 2006).
• Developing inclusive schools is ‘cultural story’ with a
history, an archaeology: there are diverse voices, many
layers, multiple meanings and subjectivities (Moss,
2003; Vayrynen, 2006)
What are the Lessons?
• Identify performative spaces for further inquiry
 In South Africa support structures such as Institutional Based
Support Teams (ILST), District Based support Teams (DSLT),
special schools as resource centres; community based support.
 Need greater focus on post secondary education
 Teacher education programs need rethinking – must be loacted at
central levels – not margins of the curriculum
 Teacher identities and policy implementation education
 Relationship between insiders and outsiders in development
initiatives.
What are the Lessons?
• Attitude is critical
• Children learn and support each other
• People with disabilities live in our societies,
schools prepare children for society
• Children can do well socially and academically in
inclusive settings
What are the lessons?
• Ensure there are enabling policies that are
implemented and sustained
• Educate families and communities to advocate
• Educate teachers on what is possible
• Document success stories – rigorous research
• Investing in inclusive education is investing in
quality education
What are the lessons?
• Research shows children taught in classes with
children of different abilities have increased
learning (Willms, 2002).
• Inclusive practice can be positive for ALL
children (Timmons, 2008).
• Even with few resources inclusive practices can
happen (Alur, 2002)
“The quality of our education
should be measured by the
quality of education that we
provide for our vulnerable
children.”
Thank you