Right to Education for Persons with Disabilities: Towards Inclusion (The)

This 42-page action paper is a product of the Education for All (EFA) disability 'Flagship’ initiative that recognises persons with disabilities as having fundamental human rights and therefore requiring an action plan to help address their needs. Achieving the right to education for persons with disabilities in basic education is the main goal and necessary if the Millennium Development Goal of "education for all" is to be achieved by the target date of 2015. This paper seeks to spearhead this worldwide initiative.

This paper presents "a rights-based case for inclusiveness for all persons with disabilities not only in access to basic educational opportunity and accomplishing the comprehensive EFA mission, but most importantly also in their engagement at all levels in the policy and processes necessary for such inclusiveness to actually work." According to Lawrence, much of the conceptual work has already been carried out in recent studies. Further, this paper includes the collaborative work of many organisations and agencies that together are seeking to map out a pragmatic Flagship agenda.

The paper is broken down into three sections. The first section focuses on some of the complexities presented in respect to the concept of disability and of its relationships with inclusiveness in education policy and practice. The major issues are addressed in section two in the context of challenges for the work of the Flagship. They are: "definition, scope and statistics for the Flagship effort; associated demands on the capacity of educational systems, with particular emphasis on several aspects of national planning, such as balancing equity with quality, early childhood education, life skills, inclusiveness vs. special classes/schools, and the role of non-formal education; the financial and pedagogical resources required; intersectoral and cross-professional cooperation necessary to achieve results; the special considerations due to education of girls and women, and the unique problem of HIV/AIDS; and ultimately how to measure success through monitoring of the EFA process, with reference to some examples of good practice." The final section of the book offers a practical action framework broken into four global and seven regional/national activities.

As one practical example, Lawrence describes two key characteristics of a UNESCO regional Toolkit and their relevance to the future focus of the Flagship. First, "the signal effort to center the process of learning on the learner him/herself, and bring a supportive cluster of community, family, and approbative social support in innovative ways to the arena of educational enterprise. The second is in the careful and practical way that disability is placed into a positive atmosphere of mutual inclusiveness, ideally to the advantage of all concerned."

According to Lawrence, achieving these goals by their time-lines requires "unprecedented intersectoral and interagency collaboration among partners that are used to working together, and in some cases, that are not." Lawrence describes the need for everyone working on these goals to remove every kind of barrier, and that resources must be equal to political will. Lawrence believes that "it is a case best made by persons with disabilities themselves, who are emerging globally as a diverse and increasingly effective constituency for change."