What South Africa needs to do to improve education for children with disabilities

In many countries, including South Africa, there are strong economic inequalities between adults with disabilities and those without. A key to reducing these disparities is to improve access to education for children with disabilities or in difficulty.

South Africa developed a white paper on inclusive education in 2001, recognizing disability as a factor that hinders learning and participation in school. This policy emphasizes that learners with disabilities or difficulties should receive the support they need, in their local school, whenever possible.

This is in stark contrast to the situation before 2001, where additional support was only available in a grossly insufficient number of special schools. Inclusive education focuses on removing barriers to children’s participation. It does this by addressing physical environments, teaching practices, and attitudes of teachers or peers, among other strategies.

Despite the publication of the 2001 White Paper and other inclusive education policies, implementation has been slow. In 2017, disability was still the main reason children aged 7 to 15 did not go to school.

Until recently, the willingness of local schools to provide additional support to learners with disabilities or with learning difficulties was rarely assessed in large-scale school surveys. It hampered accountability.

The Ministry of Basic Education has started to remedy this situation by expanding the 2017 School Monitoring Survey, a nationally representative survey of 2,000 schools. He oversees many aspects of the functioning of the school. The expansion has allowed it to take a closer look at the implementation of inclusive education.

I used the data from this survey to assess the availability of support structures for people with disabilities, the physical accessibility of schools and the adequacy of teacher training for the inclusion of people with disabilities in mainstream schools in South Africa. South. I assessed the variation of these factors between schools in the richest and poorest areas and in different provinces.

My study found that teachers are insufficiently trained to adapt curricula and teaching methods to include learners with learning difficulties and disabilities. Mainstream schools receive little external support from districts and specialists such as psychologists, social workers and therapists. There is still a long way to go to achieve the political ideals set out in the 2001 White Paper. The policy is currently undergoing a long overdue review.

Can mainstream schools provide additional support?

From 2001, school and district support teams, resource centers and outreach teams were to be introduced to support inclusive education in practice. Districts are expected to provide training and curriculum support to school teams. They are also supposed to help schools identify, assess and overcome barriers to learning. My study found that two-thirds of schools had school support teams in place in 2017 (up from 54% in 2011) and 65% of these school support teams were supported by the district in 2017.

The number of South African schools with wheelchair accessible toilets almost doubled between 2011 and 2017. But more than 50% of schools say they are unable to screen for learners’ visual, hearing or learning difficulties. This implies that many students who may encounter these difficulties are unlikely to be identified and do not receive the support they need to fully participate in schooling.

Inadequate teacher training

I found that while 74% of the teachers in the sample had received training to identify barriers to learning or help learners with learning difficulties, only 57% had covered the critical topic of program differentiation. . Only 43% had been trained in implementing assessments that took into account barriers to learning.

Teachers generally showed a poor understanding of the selection process. These results show that additional teacher training is needed to effectively deliver inclusive education.

My study also revealed vast inter-provincial inequalities in support for people with disabilities and teacher training. Schools in the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Limpopo were the least likely to have at least one suitably trained teacher. Gauteng, the Free State, and the Western Cape had high levels of training coverage. On a positive note, teachers in schools in poorer areas were just as likely as those in richer areas to have received training.

Importantly, I found that teachers who were trained in inclusive education were much more likely to be confident in resolving barriers to learning. More in-depth teacher training, the creation of school-based support teams in each school, and higher levels of support from districts in lagging provinces will help increase teacher confidence in those provinces.

It is particularly important that specialized support for schools is available in each district. Effective and realistic strategies for providing such support should be included in the updated white paper. Otherwise, a child’s access to an effective education will continue to be a lottery determined by the province in which they live.

Nicola Deghaye received doctoral funding from the National Research Foundation. The study reported here is part of his doctoral research.

By Nicola Deghaye, PhD student in economics, University of Stellenbosch