Globally, over 240 million children are living with disabilities. Children with disabilities have a higher chance of dropping out of school. According to UNICEF, 49 percent of children with disabilities have never attended school, with 42 percent of them not having any form of foundational reading and numeracy abilities. Also, students with disabilities are at a higher risk of emotional neglect, stigma, and abuse at the hands of their educational instructors.
These figures show that there is an urgent need for educational districts across the globe to adopt deliberate educational policy measures that will include children with disabilities. So, disability-inclusive educational policy is an educational policy that ensures that the learning needs of every child are adequately catered for regardless of their disabilities or other forms of learning impairments.
Ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and life-long learning opportunities for all is the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). This goal, among other objectives, seeks to ensure that people with disabilities have equal access to all tiers of education and vocational training. It also requires that governments provide disability and gender-sensitive education facilities. Similarly, the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) guarantees that the rights of people with disabilities are a fundamental human rights issue as opposed to clinical and social welfare-oriented. The convention further notes that actualizing the development goals of people with disabilities is a core part of achieving broader global development goals. CPRD unequivocally provides that children with disabilities have the right to receive education in an inclusive environment that provides them with a necessary support system. The convention also lays out policy requirements for providing disability-inclusive education.
Disability-inclusive education also involves identifying children with disabilities early enough and providing them with the necessary forms of rehabilitation and treatment that they need to improve the quality of their lives and their educational outcomes. This would involve taking actions to help them develop their emotional, social, and physical development. Additionally, government action might require educational boards to help them develop their pre-literacy skills or provide parents and guardians with free or affordable sign-language instruction. It might also require government funding for surgical procedures like cataract removal, physiotherapy, or prosthesis administration.
Further, to create a disability-inclusive educational system, educational boards must develop structured and accredited professional development courses that train teachers and other relevant stakeholders in the educational system to teach children with disabilities. This means that inclusion must be a core part of the programs of major educational stakeholders. Also, these stakeholders should have access to improved work conditions, and there must be measures in place to ensure that they are not overwhelmed by the number of children with disabilities.
It is estimated that 10 percent of learners in any country are people with disabilities, so it is important that school districts peg the budgetary allocation for meeting the needs of students with disabilities to be at least five percent of the overall educational budget. Also, there should be an implementation of immediate and long-term targets geared at reaching people with disabilities across all educational programs. Similarly, school districts can adopt a policy framework that pushes educational programs and grants that include and center people with disabilities and adopts disability inclusion targets and criteria.
