UN Photo/Loey Felipe.

By Manos Antoninis
PARIS, Jun 23 2020 (IPS)

Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa get bad press for their progress in providing inclusive education. Just two in three children complete primary school on time, while the number of out-of-school children and youth is 97 million and growing. Less is said, however, about the range of tools many countries in the region are deploying to include some of those furthest behind in mainstream schools: students with disabilities.

These efforts should be celebrated and there seems no better time to think about inclusion than now. Inequalities in education are always blatant, but the new 2020 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report by UNESCO shows that the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated exclusion. About 40% of countries in sub-Saharan Africa have not been able to support disadvantaged learners during school closures, notably students with disabilities.

Many of the countries looking to move from segregated towards inclusive systems need to overcome management challenges. They need to think how to better share specialist resources between schools so that all children can benefit

Prior to the pandemic, countries in the region were taking different approaches to inclusion. Data from the continent shows that 23% of countries have laws calling for children with disabilities to be educated in separate settings. Most countries, however, combine mainstreaming with separate arrangements, usually for learners with severe disabilities.

Many of the countries looking to move from segregated towards inclusive systems need to overcome management challenges. They need to think how to better share specialist resources between schools so that all children can benefit. Examples of this can be found across the continent.

Angola and Nigeria, for instance, are looking at transforming special schools into support bases for children with disabilities in mainstream schools, as well as providing training for teachers. Angola set a target in 2017 of including 30,000 children with special education needs in mainstream schools by 2022.

Kenya also recognizes special schools’ pivotal role in the transition towards inclusive education. At present, almost 2,000 primary and secondary mainstream schools provide education for students with special needs.

Malawi tries a twin-track approach. Those with severe disabilities are educated in special schools or special needs centres, while those with mild disabilities are mainstreamed. Special schools at each education level are being transformed into resource centres.

Instead of resource centres, Tanzania is mobilising itinerant teachers offering specialist services. These teachers are trained and managed by Tanzania Society for the Blind and provided with a motorbike. They also perform vision screening, refer children to medical facilities and organize community sensitization and counselling
While the political will for change seems clear, there is often a gap between theory and practice. This is where the emphasis between now and 2030 must lie. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, teachers mention that implementing inclusive education is hard because they lack resources.

Take Malawi for instance. While it is increasingly encouraging learners with special needs to enrol in mainstream schools, a lack of facilities forces many to transfer to special schools. In Namibia, the shortage of resource schools in rural areas, a lack of accessible infrastructure and unfavourable attitudes towards disability are just some of the barriers to successfully implementing its inclusive education policy. Similarly, in the United Republic of Tanzania, only half of children with albinism complete primary school. Because they lack support, they often end up being transferred to special schools.

The same story can be found in South Africa. It has a law from 1996 stating that the right to education of children with special needs is to be fulfilled in mainstream public schools. But recently it reported back to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that it had new segregated schools in basic education and a lack of provisions for children with severe intellectual disabilities.

Ghana is another case. It is the only country in the region to make provisions for all learners in its education law. Its 2015 inclusive education policy framework envisages transforming special schools into resource centres, while maintaining special units, schools and other institutions for students with severe and profound disabilities. But children with intellectual and developmental disabilities must perform the same tasks within the same time frame as their peers without disabilities, occupy desks placed far from teachers and are often physically punished by teachers for behavioural challenges, even in inclusive schools in Accra.

While all these efforts are commendable, simply laying the groundwork for inclusion in education will not suffice. Implementing the ambitions spelled out in education policies will take a new wave of efforts. The 2020 GEM Report looks at the different steps needed to provide disability-inclusive education, providing ten recommendations for policy makers, teachers and civil society over the next ten years. We hope it will prove a useful resource for countries in the region to move to the next stage.

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Primary School in Labag, Dhaka. Credit: Shafiqul Alam Kiron/IPS

By Manos Antoninis
PARIS, Oct 24 2017 (IPS)

Two years have already passed since the global education goal, SDG 4, was set by governments. But the vision of that goal has not yet fully trickled down to the country level. We need to know who is responsible for achieving this goal.

Effective accountability can help with this, holding people to their obligations. These need to be set down in laws and regulations, giving us all clear sign posts against which we can fall back if standards fail. Without these clear sign posts, negative practices are  left unchecked.

Accreditation processes, for instance, make sure that schools and institutions meet certain standards before they can start accepting students. If these aren’t met, the schools or institutions can face probation, restrictions or closure.

But handling these processes requires resources and skills that many countries don’t have enough of – or aren’t prioritizing enough. For example, in Indonesia, 97% of children attend private pre-schools, only 8% of which are accredited. The country’s 200 accreditation staff simply can’t get through the over 140,000 early childhood institutions that need to be checked.

If schools or institutions aren’t regulated that means there is absolutely no guarantee that the students sitting in their classrooms are being taught correctly. This has serious consequences. India has about 1 million rural medical practitioners who are not graduates of accredited schools, for instance, which is a fairly worrying thought.

If schools or institutions aren’t regulated that means there is absolutely no guarantee that the students sitting in their classrooms are being taught correctly.
Government and court records showed that, between 2010 and 2015, at least 69 of the 398 medical colleges and teaching hospitals in India had been accused of rigging entrance examinations or accepting bribes to admit students. Twenty-four of those colleges ended up being closed down by regulators.

The newest Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, Accountability in education: meeting our commitments, is adamant that accreditation processes should be applied equally for public and private institutions, but this is often not the case.

In countries that have seen a recent proliferation in private institutions, regulations are still playing catch-up to developments. In January last year, about 80% or 3,422 of 4,274 higher education institutions in Indonesia were not accredited, implying that three-quarters of graduates earned illegitimate diplomas.

Setting standards through regulations would also do a lot to stem the tide of private tutors settling into the education system. The industry, which is likely to be worth US$227 billion by 2022, is becoming a sort of parallel education system in many countries.

In Cambodia, households accounted for 69% of national education spending in 2011, a fact linked to high rates of private supplementary tuition and indicating that education is far from free. But, without regulations, it is driving an even larger wedge between the poor and rich in education.

In Bangladesh, for instance, where at least half of high school students use private tutoring, only about 43% of children from the poorest fifth of households going to primary school in Bangladesh received supplementary tuition compared to 67% from the richest.

In India, about 40% of urban secondary students received private tutoring compared with about 26% of rural students.

To truly illustrate the magnitude of the inequality divide, it is important to look at expenditure on private tuition. Richer households and urban households are not only more likely to receive supplementary tuition, but also to spend more on more experienced tutors, purchase individual rather than group tutoring, and purchase more hours.

In Bangladesh, the richest households spend four times more than poorest households on supplementary tuition in primary education, and a staggering 15 times as much on private tuition as poorer households in secondary education.

Despite these inequalities, most countries typically have no regulations on private tutoring or lack the will or capacity to monitor or penalize tutorial centres. Lack of capacity to monitor such centres in Bangladesh, for example, has undermined government attempts to cap tutoring fees.

With barely any regulations on the practice at all, there is nothing to stop teachers from also being private tutors, which can create conflicts of interest, and damage learning in school.

In Nepal, for instance, teachers covered less material in school to increase demand for tutoring. Poorer students who did not enrol in private tutoring did worse on exit exams.

To remedy these issues in education systems, a number of actors need to take action: teachers, schools, and the private sector all have important roles to play and respect codes of conduct.

However, governments in particular need to generate momentum by putting in place accountability structures and regulations. As the GEM Report underlines, such accountability systems are necessary if we are to make progress towards the global education goal. They are the difference between an education system that is effective and one that is not.

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