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World
Education Forum
Dakar, Senegal 26-28 April 2000 |
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| Including
the excluded: enhancing educational access and quality |
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Issues
Paper
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| Strategy
Session III.6 |
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Original
: English
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 Each
One Counts. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)
affirms the right of all children to relevant and good quality
education. The CRC reconfirms the EFA imperative of an "expanded
vision" of education: that all children have the right to learn
at all stages of their development, and to do so in ways which
are appropriate and easily accessible. It reconfirms that this
learning must contribute to children's physical, psychosocial,
emotional and intellectual development. It should enhance their
capacity to earn a living, participate in the decisions of their
society and live in peace and dignity. Increases in the percentage
of children reached are important, but are no longer sufficient.
Quality counts. All children have the right of access to effective
opportunities for learning. Exceptions cannot simply be argued
away on the basis of "especially difficult circumstances". |
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The exclusion of children constitutes a broadly based and intricate
web of human rights violations. Millions of children are made
vulnerable by living in circumstances of poverty, socio-cultural
marginalization, geographic isolation, racial and/or gender
bias. They are further encumbered with related burdens of disease
and disability, sexual exploitation, indentured and injurious
labour, or forced involvement in civil and military conflict.
The exclusion of these children from education is simply one
more manifestation of this web of rights violations. But it
is a particularly tragic one. Without access to good quality
education, children are denied the opportunity to acquire the
knowledge, capacities and self-confidence necessary, as children
and later as adults, to act on their own behalf in changing
the circumstances are excluding them.. |
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Exclusion is interactive and comprehensive. It touches all aspects
of the lives of affected children, resulting either in their
having no access to education or in their being poorly served
when they are enroled. In consequence, they repeat, drop out
or graduate without actually learning. Being excluded from education
is not a single event in a child's life; nor is it a single
process. Rather, exclusion from education involves a pattern
of personal, socio-cultural, economic and institutional factors
which together act to keep a child from participating in effective
and organized learning experiences. |
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Three broad types of causes are involved in this syndrome of
exclusion; it is in the specific characteristics and interactions
of each of these where the specific causes, scope, consequences,
severity and dynamics of exclusion in any one setting will be
found. These include: i) contextual causes, such as environmental
and demographic pressures and political and economic systems;
ii) socio-cultural causes, such as belief and value systems,
indigenous knowledge, and family structures; and iii) relational
causes, such as resource allocation patterns, and gender and
age relations. |
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Furthermore, exclusion can happen at every level of society:
(1) children are excluded within the family and the community;
(2) the school is excluded within the education system; and
(3) the national education policy is excluded within the society
and international community. |
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| Exclusion
at the micro level: the school |
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Schools
exclude at the micro level when they are not learner-friendly,
do not support their teachers as professionals and do not
welcome families as partners.
Schools
exclude when they fail to create a culture of peace or to
take affirmative and uncompromising action to end all forms
of harassment, abuse and violence.
Schools
exclude when they do not reach out to the families of children
most vulnerable and do not link them into the education
of their children.
Schools
exclude when they fail to concern themselves with those
children who do not attend school and do not put systems
in place for formally noticing and tracking those not in
school.
Schools
exclude by costing too much, directly and indirectly.
Schools
exclude by not being sufficiently accountable -- to teachers,
students or parents. Exclusion at the meso level: the education
bureaucracy
The
education bureaucracy excludes by failing to recognize the
diversity of learners within its purview.
The
education bureaucracy excludes children when it fails to
provide their teachers with the learning and professional
status they need to be competent, responsible and motivated.
Education
systems exclude when they fail to provide teachers regular
in-service professional development and moral support from
qualified and learning-oriented supervisors.
Education
systems exclude through a message that says "conscientious
teaching is the least prominent and most thankless of the
activities teachers are expected to perform."
Education
bureaucracies exclude by focusing on achievement of the
'successful', rather than on an inclusive education which
aims to improve the learning skills of all pupils.
Children
already at risk are made more vulnerable to exclusion when
the system's testing procedures fail to reflect their individual
learning characteristics and home backgrounds and to accommodate
teaching to these.
The
education bureaucracy excludes children when it persists
in creating inappropriate and irrelevant curriculum and
materials of poor quality.
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| Exclusion
at the macro level: national education policy |
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Government
and education policies exclude at the macro level in two
broad ways. By commission, they actively deny children's
right to education through the regulations they apply --
restrictive enrolment criteria, for example, or policies
which segregate children with disabilities into institutional
arrangements without professionally competent staff, effective
co-ordination with the mainstream education system or support
to parents.
They
also exclude by omission, failing to make "education for
all" a broad societal philosophy and articulated priority.
National
governments and education policy-making bodies exclude by
not seriously or comprehensively identifying barriers to
education for families and children at risk, or creating
opportunities to enable their participation.
National
systems exclude when they segregate children with special
learning needs.
·Education
policy-making excludes when it segregates the formal "legitimate"
school system from the "less-worthy" educational activities
out of school.
Education
policies exclude by insisting on centralized and inflexible
control over standards, approaches and methods that are
not relevant to vulnerable communities.
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| Who
are excluded? |
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How education systems exclude children potentially concerns
all children to some degree. The concern of this strategy session,
and a critical focus of global action in support of education
during the next 15 years, however, are those children who are
affected in a major way by these exclusionary forces. They are
the children, chiefly (but not solely) in developing countries,
living in conditions of extreme poverty and social marginalization.
They are children who, whether on their own or through their
families, are unlikely to be able to break the exclusionary
downward cycle. They are, therefore, the children for whom national
systems and the international community must take significant
affirmative and persistent action both to change the causal
conditions of poverty and exclusion and to design and implement
inclusive, effective education. |
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More
specifically, they are children who:
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are
considered not to "fit" into majority-based classrooms:
ethnic minority and scheduled caste children; children of
different cultures, speaking other than a national language;
or whose dysfunctional family or life on the street leads
them to be stereotyped as children incapable or unworthy
of learning and therefore kept out of school;
contradict
accepted norms of who can or should learn: girls in general,
and pregnant girls in particular; children with disabilities
or affected by HIV/AIDS
cannot
afford the cost or the time of schooling: children from
poor families and working and street children;
are
not free or available to participate: geographically isolated
children; child soldiers; unregistered migrants; children
of transients, seasonal workers and nomadic communities;
are
living in the context of disaster: children in war zones;
refugee children; and children displaced by destruction
of the physical environment.
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| What
does exclusion look like? |
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Somewhat arbitrarily, the face of exclusion depends on who the
children are, where they are, and what they are doing. The excluded
child is, for example, a girl working as a flower seller on
the street in an impoverished slum; or he is an adolescent boy
from a hilltribe community forced to serve in one of the drug
militias of the Golden Triangle. This differentiation into the
who, where and what of exclusion is intended to provide perspective,
to make the concept more accessible and operational in terms
of defining a specific focus, constraints and entry points.
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Who these children are, then, concerns those characteristics
that are effectively "given", the essence of the child: gender,
ethnicity, race, age, basic intellectual and physical capacities,
background and personal history. These are the bases on which
the child must be accepted as a learner and around which society,
the education system and the school must organize education
to ensure a relevant and effective learning experience. These
personal characteristics cannot be used to justify exclusion. |
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Where they are concerns the context in which children live.
It concerns the surrounding conditions that exclude children
by failing to allow for their basic rights and needs, including
access to good education. It shifts the focus from the child
to those responsible for ensuring the protection and development
of all children, pursuant to the CRC. It obliges us to change
our thinking from how the child must fit into school, to consider
instead how the barriers presented by the school and the wider
environment can be removed to ensure that the school fits the
child. |
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What they are doing concerns both the who and where of exclusion.
It concerns how children, using their interests and meagre resources,
are coping with the conditions of their lives. This affects
how ready children are to engage in learning and to participate
in education, given their other activities and concerns. This
affects how those responsible for children's well-being can
effectively know and co-operate with children to ensure their
education, as well as health care, social services, protection,
etc. A perspective on what excluded children are doing forces
analyses and interventions to be more tailored. For example,
that which working children are actually doing, and where, and
with what risks, largely determines how much "space" they have
for learning. Such perspective helps us to see more clearly
how education can be made to suit children as and where they
are now and to help them move forward. |
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Globally, whatever the perspective, girls constitute the majority
of excluded children. Gender discrimination continues to be
the major causal factor of children being left out, and pushed
out, of school. The denial of girls' right to education remains
a pernicious and persistent characteristic of many societies
by reason of culture and family choice. |
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The basic question of exclusion is simple enough: "Why is it
that so many schools throughout the world fail to teach effectively
so many children?" But the answer is not so simple. Exclusion
is a layered phenomenon. Underlying conditions keep children
out: poverty, discrimination, communal violence. Systemic factors
push them out: unsafe and insecure schools, unqualified or unmotivated
teachers, inflexible schedules and irrelevant curriculum. Individual
and family situations hold them back: values or immediate priorities
that push formal education aside. |
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While there has been progress since Jomtien in extending the
quality and scope of education to many children, progress for
excluded children seems only marginal. At least the questions
are clearer, and by extending the EFA effort, the world is giving
itself more time to try to answer them. This extension, however,
acknowledges the world's failure to respect the right of all
children to an education and legitimises the loss of another
generation. Some of the more persistent threads of debate focus
on a number of dilemmas. |
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Should
we:
focus
efforts directly on reaching excluded children and/or, more
broadly, on disabling the causes of exclusion? ·
create high quality, accessible school systems and/or broaden
the framework to recognize early childhood and nonformal
programmes as integral parts of an expanded vision?
intervene through national-level advocacy and/or through
direct context-specific action with families and communities?
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work within closely-controlled, well-resourced pilot programmes
and/or seek to go directly to scale, involving changes in
the entire education system ?
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| In addition
to resolving these dilemmas, the world faces several challenges:
how to deal seriously with poverty, make affected children visible,
generate better and more participatory analyses of what is happening
in the field, make the framework of inclusion wide enough to
cover all children, ensure that focused action is necessarily
co-ordinated action, and engage in serious and sustained introspection
about what more needs to be done. |
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