ABSTRACT
All children are entitled to an education, as stated in Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948). However, despite international commitments to the principles of Education for All (EFA) and Universal Primary Education (UPE), many disabled children are still not able to access this basic human right. Evidence of lower participation rates in education emerged from the World Health Survey (WHO, 2002–04), which showed that disabled children, on average, spend significantly less time in school than non-disabled children, across all age groups and in both low-income and high-income countries, with disabled girls at a particular disadvantage. A statistical analysis of data from this survey, relating to 15 low-income countries, identified a significant association between disability and lower educational attainment in 14 of them, more than for any other indicator of multi-dimensional poverty (Mitra et al., 2012). In terms of the wider picture, it has been estimated that a staggering ‘90 per cent of children with disabilities in the developing world do not go to school’ (UNICEF, 2014, p. 6). While such estimates should be treated with caution, given the widely reported lack of reliable data on disability in general, and on the educational status of disabled children in particular (UNESCO, 2014), the available evidence clearly suggests that far too many disabled children remain excluded from education. Furthermore, those who do attend school are often excluded from classrooms and are far less likely to complete primary education than their non-disabled peers (UNESCO, 2015b).
