Julia, 14, finally attending school after being kept at home for more than 12 years
Disabled Children and Education
Disabled Children and Education
World Vision is particularly concerned at the global failure to address the issue of education for disabled children. Despite rising enrolments, disabled children still miss out disproportionately on receiving any kind of education. According to UNESCO, one third of the 75 million children still out of school are disabled children and fewer than 10% of disabled children in Africa attend school. Other surveys suggest that only 2% of disabled children in developing countries receive an education and that disability has a greater impact on access to education than gender, household economic status or rural/urban divide.
If we are to make any significant progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and the Education For All (EFA) goal of universal primary education by 2015 then concerted efforts must be made to ensure this group of children has access to a quality, relevant, and effective education.Political leaders must now prioritise getting this group of children into school.
This is a fundamental human rights issue. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly expresses the right of each child to education and is reinforced by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which stresses the right to be educated within inclusive systems.
By acknowledging and promoting the equal rights of disabled children to education we can change this and get closer to achieving the MDG and EFA goals. World Vision is therefore calling on the UK Government to promote the education of disabled children through all financial and technical assistance to education. In doing so they must recognise that it is not enough to just place disabled children within current education systems. New inclusive systems must be developed if the goal of free, quality education for all is to be achieved through the inclusion of disabled children.
Past briefing papers on education and disability
Past briefing papers and reports on education and disability
Education's Missing Millions 2007
Getting disabiled children into school in developing countries May 2007
Teachers and Inclusion - a disability perspective February 2006
Julia alongside her friends at Gyumir inclusive school
Julia
Julia's story
14 year-old Julia is from Armenia and has two semi-paralysed fingers. As a result she was kept at home for more than 12 years – she was not taken to nursery, never went to meet her relatives, had few friends, and wasn’t taken to school, for the simple reason that her parents feared their daughter would be laughed at and discriminated against. So instead she stayed at home, running the house alongside her mother.
In 2005 Julia came into contact with World Vision Armenia. “When I first met Julia, I couldn’t understand, why her parents had feared to take her to school; her impairment was unnoticeable, so no one could ever guess she had one,” says Ervandanush Sahakyan, a social worker with World Vision’s Gyumri project. Through work with local teachers on how to make the changes necessary to include Julia in learning within a regular classroom and work with her parents to overcome their fear of discrimination, Julia eventually attended school for the first time in November 2006.
Julia’s is not an isolated case. In Cambodia 16-year-old Jeng has been blind since the age of two as a result of measles. She has never been to school due to the negative attitudes of her community. Jeng’s neighbours often tell her, ‘There is no need for you to study: you are blind. Don’t you feel shy going to school with no eyes like this?” Others have asked her aunt “why do you bother to feed a useless person like her?” even though Jeng cooks, cleans the house, washes the dishes, chops firewood, and helps with the rice harvest.