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| III.
STATE OF PRACTICE AND PROGRESS SINCE JOMTIEN |
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| Introduction
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(i) On the plus side, the decade has laid a solid groundwork
for action against the exclusion of children, in terms both
of education as a defined sector, and of learning as a cross-cutting
process necessary to all aspects of survival and development.
The World Conference on Education For All (EFA) was a watershed,
a critical juncture in global thinking about the legitimate
place of learning and education as core to all human and social
development. Jomtien established an unarguable link between
poverty and exclusion, for the individual and the society; exposed
the failure of most nations to provide adequate basic education
for all their citizens; and confirmed the inevitability of future
exclusion for those children and their families who are denied
access to such education. Critically, it set a new "expanded
vision" for education and declared national and global responsibilities
for taking action. |
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The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) provided the
critical overarching framework for EFA in making the education
of all children their right. It committed a global imperative
of action to ensure all children an effective education, not
simply to a seat in school and not simply for those who turn
up. Governments, civil societies and donors are now compelled
to give highest priority to an explicit and intensive focus
on the chronically excluded: under the CRC umbrella, all children
are owed an education which "meets their basic learning needs
and enables them to live an individual life in society ... in
the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and
solidarity". Responsibility for providing this quality of education-for-all
rests with everyone in the world society, at global, national
and - by extension - local levels. Ultimately, of course, much
of the onus for children's learning and education falls to families
and to schools. |
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The Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special
Needs Education further refined and focused the message of EFA,
committing the international community to addressing the still
large-scale and typically systemic exclusion of those children
with special learning needs. This continues to be a problem
in all countries to some degree, both by education systems omitting
to identify, count or support children's special learning needs,
and by their committing actively against them, declaring children
who are "different" as incapable of learning or participating.
For children in either context, Salamanca was important in putting
more explicitly onto the global EFA agenda the imperative of
recognizing, valuing and managing their learning; and doing
so in ways which ensure their full participation in education,
the successful realization of their learning goals and, ultimately,
their independence as adults able to sustain themselves as parents,
workers and citizens. |
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Salamanca was also key in reinforcing and extending the EFA
principle of an expanded vision of education, one in which "ordinary
schools should accommodate all children, regardless of their
physical, intellectual, emotional, social, linguistic or other
conditions" (UNESCO/d/:1). "Inclusive" schools give particular
attention to enabling the learning of each child, serving to
integrate all and not to segregate any. They serve to bring
all children into the education mainstream. Salamanca recognized
that "regular schools, with this inclusive orientation, are
the most effective means of combating discriminatory attitudes,
creating welcoming communities, building an inclusive society
and achieving education for all" (Article 2) |
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Less a formal international commitment than a global re-declaration
of the central place of learning and education for all, the
Delors Commission served further to underscore the role of education
as a basic element of individual and societal development and
peaceful co-existence. In confirming the capacity to learn as
the "treasure" everyone has within them, the task of education
is to ensure all children (and adults) the right to life-long
learning along four core dimensions or pillars: learning to
know, learning to do, learning to be and learning to live together.
There is now a fifth: learning to transform oneself and the
world around one. |
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In both general and specific terms, all of these initiatives
put education in the centre of action in support of the children
who are most excluded, as both a tool for their development
and a place for their protection. Stockholm, Oslo, Cairo, Amsterdam,
Beijing and other international actions have, through the remainder
of the decade, made substantive contributions to the EFA framework.
Their discussions and commitments have taken a harder look at
the realities of the especially vulnerable and forgotten child
and, within this framework, the special protection and development
rights of girls and women. |
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The World Summit for Social Development (WSSD) was especially
important in looking specifically across all groups and sectors
to consider the interactive nature of socio-economic exclusion
and development. In consequence, it stressed the need for integrative
strategies and collaborative actions by domestic institutions,
NGOs and international agencies to deal with them. Suffering
to some degree in not having a clear constituency to keep its
Action Framework on the table, the WSSD nevertheless presented
a significant opportunity to push the critical role of learning
as the enabling dimension of all organizational and social change
aimed at social integration "....the capacity of people to live
together with full respect for the dignity of each individual,
the common good, pluralism and diversity, non-violence and solidarity
as well as their ability to participate in social, cultural,
economic and political life .... It requires the protection
of the weak, as well as the right to differ, to create and to
innovate" (Part II, para2). |
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WSSD thus made critical distinctions between inclusion and conformity
and between diversity and exclusion, distinctions and implied
directives central to realizing effective and equitable education.
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It went further, urging specific actions to mobilize funding
of the "Agenda for Development" to which Summit members had
committed: reduced military spending; enhanced transparency
and accountability at all levels; better focusing on basic human
needs; recognition and support to alternate financing mechanisms;
open exchange of technology, knowledge and skills; application
of the "7%" ODA commitment, debt relief, and action on the 20/20
initiative. All of these, if coupled with concerted action to
address the professional quality of teachers and curriculum,
would clearly have gone far to ending education exclusion. The
UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF), though not yet
as far as along as it needs to be in mobilizing and ensuring
effective collaborative and consistent action on children's
exclusion, is clearly the way to go. Multilateral agencies,
NGOs and bilaterals each have their own areas of comparative
advantage, mandates and partners. Each, however, shares a common
constituency of people who are excluded, marginalized and living
in poverty, and to whom it owes action that is relevant, sustainable
and of high quality. |
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(ii) On the other side, progress in following up all of these
global agreements is far from wholly positive. While enrolments
and school spaces have increased, these "have not been matched
by gains in ensuring that pupils persist in their schooling
and emerge from primary school with the knowledge and skills
they need .... (The) expected benefits ... are being undermined
by significant levels of drop-out" in both developing and developed
countries (EFA - Status and Trends 1998: 9). The Jomtien target
of 80% completion for primary school is still a very distant
goal in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and much of Latin America.
The 80% figure is no longer, of course, tenable under the CRC.
In presenting this number as sufficient, Jomtien may have suggested
that "the rest" could legitimately be left to fail or not to
come at all -- in effect, serving to legitimize exclusion. |
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In focusing on UPE as an expressed goal, and defining that within
the specific context of schooling, Jomtien may also have served
ironically to undermine the probability of its own key concept
of the "expanded vision" taking root. Education for all has
become minimized in too many countries and too many agencies
as school for all. The expanded vision of basic education is
inclusive of, but clearly greater than, formal schools and traditional
classroom methods. Though the WCEFA strongly endorsed the place
of alternative education arrangements within the vision (various
forms of NFE, ECCD, on-the-job learning etc.), the UPE-cum-schooling
emphasis appears to have left them relegated to a second-class,
choice-limiting status. The CRC is significant in changing the
paradigm. 8/10 children completing primary school is no longer
the issue; 2/10 not completing is. |
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The EFA Declaration was important in establishing the core of
what effective education and learning systems should be, the
"that" of basic education. Jomtien and the succeeding decade
have been less clearly successful, however, in making explicit,
and putting into effect, the "how" of mobilizing subsequent
action; of stimulating demand and improving supply. The Amman
Mid-Decade Meeting provided a useful, albeit justifiably modest,
stock-taking of the progress made in the first five years. It,
too, was unfortunately vague in analysing the "how" of why the
Framework was not being fully implemented. Where and what the
implementation gaps were, and how to fill them -- especially
with respect to such fundamental issues as the training of teachers
and mobilizing of sustained political action -- remained largely
unknown. |
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Nor has the decade finished with strength in terms of tracking
the progress of EFA targets. While anecdotal evidence suggests
that many innovations are showing good effects, there is little
systematic assessment of them. Many of the advances reported
are based either on broad averages, or narrowly-focused pilot
efforts, both of which have drawbacks in terms of informing
wider practice. Monitoring and tracking systems remain universally
weak, not well able to determine the real quality and impact
of many of the interventions on, or the deeper reasons for,
continuing exclusion. Rare also are the comprehensive case studies
and implementation analyses which might present the kind of
integrated social development picture urged by the WSSD. Instances
of serious and interactive exclusion remain without good explanations
as to how to disentangle them. |
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Highlighted throughout the Johannesburg EFA 2000 Conference,
for example, were the multiple needs of creating stronger capacities
for analysis, of undertaking research, and of using results
to inform policy and practice. Data throughout the continent
are considered to be weak in quality, narrow in scope and limited
in quantity. In particular, too little is known of patterns
and trends on such key issues as participation and achievement
especially as these concern the children who are at-risk and
excluded -- girls, children with disabilities, minority groups.
Analysis is often poorly done; not considered sufficiently reliable,
and not presented with sufficient assurance, to mobilize, guide
or evaluate change. . |
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School and community-based action research is rare. Teachers,
parents and students have little input to assessments which
are done within the education sector as it affects them. What
is happening in the classroom, what teachers and students are
actually doing, is rarely observed let alone analysed. While
a wide range of innovations and pilot programmes are being tried
through the region and may well be relevant to excluded -- on
community and outreach schools, multi-grade classrooms, double-shifting,
use of quasi-professional resource teachers -- few are being
systematically assessed to determine whether or how they are
making a difference, to which children, and under what conditions.
Lack of analysis makes it difficult to take corrective action
on the unsuccessful ideas; to strengthen and extend those which
are effective; or to share lessons. |
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The types of studies currently being promoted by the UNESCO/UNICEF
"monitoring learning achievement" project and by regionally-based
ones such as the Southern African Consortium for Monitoring
Educational Quality, are steps in the right direction. An important
focus for them will be on the more qualitative factors impeding
access and successful participation of especially vulnerable
children, and on the relevance of what they are learning. These
assessments need also to be persistent (to identify patterns)
and participatory (to ensure shared ownership of conclusions
and follow-up action). |
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Also meriting closer attention is the use of "pilot" projects
as the mechanism for focusing and managing action for the excluded.
Pilots are often undertaken because "(it is) difficult for people
to agree on the pace of change"; they let small groups of mobilized
people do it on their own (Leiberman&Miller:26). Unfortunately,
the logic of pilots often fails in application, leaving them
"outside the mainstream, threatening people in the rest of the
[system] and causing resentment. Eventually, most of these programmes
collapse, not from lack of value, but from lack of support"
(Ibid:26). |
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Where they involve marginal communities, those with few resources
and little room for experimenting, they are often too demanding
to be sustained. Real control over planning, design and implementation
of most pilots rests with interveners rather than the schools
and communities involved; and efforts to develop local capacity
are often too limited to shift the ownership. Sustaining the
results of innovation requires serious, long-term attention
to the change process, to organizational learning and to participation.
These are the necessary conditions of "full scale" implementation
which many EFA pilots have tended not to give. |
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It is an area where Ministries of Education need to assert their
strong commitment to the excluded. "Although the educational
innovations targeted to various excluded groups are often managed
and executed by NGOs, it is essential that the Ministries are
involved from the initial (stage) by, for example, assigning
... officials to work with the innovations or by directing some
resources; and later adopting the innovation for dissemination.
Separate projects which are not well incorporated in the framework
of the national education system tend to (be) short-lived."
(UNESCO/ Special Needs Education, memo:Nov99). |
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| Summary
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The first part of this section has touched very generally on
where EFA seems to have come in terms of commitments made and
directions expected. The rest of the section looks in more detail
at some of the advances, lessons learned and dilemmas recognized
with respect specifically to those conditions excluding children.
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These are not presented as water-tight compartments. Rather,
there are recurrent themes and common threads, principles of
action which appear to characterize moves toward more effective
and sustainable action, not simply against exclusion, but in
support of inclusion (as Salamanca used it). These themes are
not new: broad participation and synergy, within a holistic
framework and using enabling processes to ensure local relevance.
These are the concepts and principles underlying all of the
international commitments noted above. What must be new for
the next decade is that action is taken actually to implement
them -- by states, civil societies and the international community.
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| III-1
Expanded Participation in a Holistic Framework |
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Perhaps the two most significant advances of the Jomtien decade
in reaching excluded children, indeed all children, have been
(i) the increasing realization that education, like learning,
is a necessarily holistic and integrated system, and (ii) the
persistent movement toward greater participation of communities,
families and children in matters concerning learning, education
and schools. Coincident with both of these has been a more sensitive
appreciation of teachers and school as critical actors; a "distinct
trend toward focusing the reform efforts at a level nearer to
the 'action': the school itself" (Shaeffer/Govinda:1). |
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None of these developments is revolutionary. All, however, are
fundamental and mutually reinforcing in reaching the excluded.
They recognize that no education policy will be sustainable
by attempting to mandate attitudinal or behavioural change from
the centre, or in one narrow aspect of the system. They acknowledge
that genuine implementation of change in classrooms, families
and communities which are socio-culturally and economically
marginalized and at risk requires equity, transparent accountability
and joint responsibility. |
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| 1-a
Expanded Participation |
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| The
Family |
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Participation in the context of excluded children most particularly
concerns their families. The concept of the family as a place
of security and support for children and as a partner of the
school has been slowly emerging over the decade as efforts are
made to find better ways to address the rights and needs of
all children to education. Facilitating that emergence should
be happening more quickly. The CRC in particular recognizes
families and parents as the first line of intervention in, and
support for, children's emotional, psycho-social and intellectual
learning. The capacity, or incapacity, of families to act on
behalf of the survival, protection and development of their
children is especially critical in the early years, and not
much less so as children become adolescents and begin to confront
the confusion of uncertain and conflicting choices and demands.
Families are key in keeping children out of exploitative working
conditions and in school; the opposite is equally true. |
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Again recognizing exclusion as a cycle, the education level
of the family is the "single best predictor of how long children
will stay in school and how well they will perform" (EFA Statistics
and Trends 1998:36). It is much more difficult for illiterate
parents and those who have been harmed by schools to see the
value of education for their children, or to help them participate
even when they do. Programmes which promote parent literacy,
therefore, are also likely to have positive effects on the children's
learning. Mobilization campaigns to get girls into school are
most successful when they are done in collaboration with the
family -- and with community leaders, civic groups and NGOs,
the bodies often in closest touch with the values and needs
of families and so most able to influence their decisions. The
particular importance of the family during times of stress is
clear. Conflict, forced migration and economic crisis are periods
when family stability and consistency are the child's best link
to learning, adaptation and sense of identity, and when the
loss of family can be especially devastating. The effectiveness
of action such as that by the World and Asian Development Banks
in working with Indonesian families to put in place scholarships
for the most at-risk children will be critical in this regard.
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One area where gains have been made in this respect is in the
greater attention being given to early childhood care and development
(ECCD) interventions. Most successful where set within the context
of their families, ECCD programmes recognize that "only with
whole-hearted parental participation can such programmes succeed"(Young:7).
They are critical in countries like Lao PDR where, especially
among indigenous families, primary school attendance is very
low. The village-based early childhood education project (with
the Ministry of Education, Lao Women’s Union and UNICEF) is
concerned with children's early learning within the framework
of support both for their own developing capacities, as well
as the capacities of their care-givers, especially mothers.
It strengthens the family's knowledge and practice in basic
nutrition, hygiene and health and child development, including
infant stimulation and ways to increase language ability. It
links with WID and basic education interventions "so that there
is support for increased income generation, village planning
and schooling"; and with the media and early childhood education
sub-project to produce educational radio broadcasts, videos
and print material on good parenting, nutrition and child development
practices. |
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For seriously at-risk children, and those unlikely to have access
to reasonably effective schools, ECCD interventions may be the
only quality learning support that they will have. It is, therefore,
especially critical that the interventions be of high quality:
learning and learner-oriented, interactive and participatory,
culturally sensitive and responsive, holistic and engaged with
all family members and the community agencies with which they
also interact. |
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Programmes which are able to engage with marginalized families,
to work with them in the context of the constraints and strengths
of their own setting, and which bring them together to support
one another, are the most effective. They impose less risk to
vulnerable families, allowing them to find their own "best way"
in developing strategies of childcare and learning they are
able to sustain in collaboration with neighbouring families
and local support agencies. A main difficulty with efforts to
engage such families in changing their relationship with the
school is, of course, their own negative history with education
-- if they have had one at all. Parents who have themselves
been excluded from school are less likely to have the knowledge,
skills or psychological "margin" for risk-taking which would
make them feel naturally comfortable in their children's school.
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One example of an attempt to overcome this distance is the school-based
education project in Peru. Working through activities aimed
at developing a shared vision, breaking down dysfunctional perceptions
and creating a partnership among parents, students and teachers,
the underlying strategy of the programme has been "... to start
a dialogue on the child as a priority for parents and for teachers"
in terms of their shared responsibility in the child's education.
Parents and teachers work together "... to formulate solutions
and alternatives which could help create the 'ideal' school"
(Hidalgo:4). At the same time, teachers develop "conversations"
with students, on the assumption that they, too, are in a position
to have opinions about the quality and content of their learning
and have the capacity to contribute (Ibid:5). The task is an
evolutionary and open-ended one, attempting to create a culture
of inclusion where both community and school are able to bring
together their expectations and priorities, evaluate options
for "translating them into reality" and developing frameworks
of action they can then work to apply (Ibid:6). |
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Interventions such as this are critical to building on and strengthening
the learning which goes on in families in ways which will help
them engage with the school. Especially for vulnerable families,
it is important that schools themselves reach out to support
families in doing better, to encourage them to "... be involved
throughout their children's schooling..." (Bamber:1-26). The
results of a large-scale study of poor inner city schools in
the United States, for example, showed clearly that effective
schools were those which were able to help parents change the
ways in which they connected to the school and promoted their
children's learning as they moved through the system. Beginning
when children were very young, these schools helped parents
help their children in "building the skills" they needed to
do well in school. They "coached" parents in how to talk to
teachers, helped them "... to monitor their children's progress"
and support them with their school work. Effective schools helped
parents learn "how the system works" so they could be better
advocates for their children, to "make decisions about how to
make the school better", and make sure their children were "learning
what they needed to know" (Bamber:1-l1). |
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| The
Community |
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It is important to recognize families per se, their unique role
in creating and raising children and the need to take them into
one-one partnership. But most excluded families and their children
live in the context of a community. Less a geographical construct
than a sociological one, communities are important here as the
primary reference group for families and their children (especially
older ones). Particularly in traditional societies and cultures,
communities can play a major role in defining a family's available
resources and support structures, its social obligations, and
its core values, attitudes and expectations. The community in
this sense is especially critical in addressing exclusion. No
attempt to create equitable and inclusive education programmes
for children and families will succeed independently of their
surrounding community. |
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Using this broad definition of community, the learning and education
of excluded children can be enhanced where families and local
groups come together to support them in formal and nonformal
programmes, with and without government support. Excluded children
can also be supported through "communities of interest", networks
formed among them as individuals who share a common bond of
vulnerability. These are child labourers or street children
who form family-type bonds; or support groups formed by adolescents
affected by HIV/AIDS. Mutual support and exchange associations
of these kinds can constitute significant forms of psycho-social
"margin". They provide a sense of belonging, a nurturing role
and guidance; often they also provide very pertinent and effective
venues for learning information and skills. They can provide
critical focal or entry points for education interveners, as
interlocutors able to interpret between an NGO or school outreach
initiative and children unable to communicate effectively or
from a position of equal participation what they want and need
to learn. |
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Communities, whether geographic or interest-based, can also
play a critical role in finding and engaging "missing" children.
Informal associations of child carpet workers in India, for
example, have proven to be much better able to locate other
children and convince them that it is safe to get involved in
learning programmes than IPEC or government officers. |
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Somewhat more systematically, lok jumbish in Rajasthan is another
example of community-based mapping of the excluded, where and
as they are. Working with community members interested in educational
improvement, it creates an "inspirational group" which then
undertakes to "depict every household in the village visually
on a simple map ... indicating the schooling status of every
household member 5-14" (PROBE:107) Serving as a an "occasion
for interacting with the community", block-based interviews
help to show where special help is needed and what priorities
families see as barriers to their children attending school.
"Leaders of the village and the local community draw up a set
of proposals based on the mapping data, where new schools and
NFE centres are needed and where present ones need fixing".
The methodology is intended to be empowering as well as informative,
allowing even non-literate families to be involved in the analysis.
The follow-up is also community-based and is critical in fostering
"continuous evaluation". Attendance of children is locally monitored
and neighbourhood blocks are free to determine and revise appropriate
issues and strategies (creating residential study camps for
girls, for example). |
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The Myanmar all children in school (ACIS) project is concerned
with fairly broad systemic reform to reduce the severe national-level
exclusion. To get there, it focuses on an integration of three
levels: the community, engaging them in enrolment surveys and
school mapping, local data management and PTA training; teachers,
providing decentralized training for multi-grade and learner-centred
teaching, in-class supervisory support and materials development;
and school structures, through promotion of school clusters
and improved monitoring and evaluation. Significant for the
potential sustainability of increased student participation,
ACIS appears to be having a positive impact on the relationship
between community and school: local teachers hired through community
donations; a "growing willingness" of teachers to talk with
parents about their children's progress; and community-based
identification and enrolment of previously 'invisible' children
e.g. migrant workers (Bentzen:11) |
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The Kolondieba district community schools project in Mali (supported
principally by SC-US) aims at addressing deep-seated, poverty-based
exclusion. It is a particulary cogent example of the dilemmas
facing communities and their children as they try to act on
the very mixed "causes and consequences" of that exclusion.
Poverty is clearly the overarching issue for the community,
with very few of its own resources and minimal national support.
Families live at subsistence level, speak the local language
with limited capacity in French and have little access to the
few and distant government schools. At the project's start in
1992, only 12% of the 207 villages in the district were reached
by the formal system (Muskin:2) and there was little to indicate
that that situation would change. Community schools appear to
be succeeding, however, as a way to shift the paradigm -- from
one of children trying and failing to accommodate the format
of the formal system, to one of the community ensuring a school
designed to suit them. |
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Based on explicit commitments by the community to ensure enrolment,
regular attendance and girls participation, and to pay salaries
of locally-hired teachers and monitor their work, the project
has created learning environments to which children apparently
want to come and in which they are, on the whole, succeeding.
Teaching is in the local language, of subjects selected by the
community as important to their children's current (and likely
future) lives. Literacy, mathematics and French (at the higher
levels) are also taught, as a base to children who eventually
choose to move into the formal system. |
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It appears to be specifically in these efforts to localize the
content, process and ownership of the school that its success
lies; but so, too, lie its core dilemmas. Teachers can be hired
locally because they are minimally trained, and paid locally
because they are paid very little. Curriculum can be relevant
because it is developed locally, but it has little reference
to the national system. All of these are characteristics consistent
with fundamentals of creating inclusive learning, but not necessarily
with inclusion beyond the community. |
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There are, thus, critical questions to be asked of all such
community-based programmes. Whether the approaches are sustainable,
and whether they should be: whether they risk confining excluded
children to further exclusion in "pockets of learning", positive
but inevitably isolating. Children are learning in their community
schools; in the Mali case, they are even laying a basis of French
language competency and there appears to be interest at the
national level for extending the approach. Nevertheless, these
communities and their supporters need continually to explore
matters of children's long-term "best interest": if the structures
and methodologies of the education can be adapted and sustained;
whether eventually the students must move out of the community
to move up in the education system, and whether that system
can somehow come into the community without undermining the
latter's coherence and culture. |
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| 1-b
Holistic and Synergistic Action |
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| At the
Local Level |
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One example of a community-based programme which has gone a
considerable way in answering some of these questions has done
so because it has also gone a long way in developing an integrative
programme for excluded children and their families. Based in
a slum area of Jaipur (India), the bodh shiksha samiti is a
good example -- in the extent to which it has become part of
the very fabric of the community, in the long time-line it has
allowed itself in getting there, and its forging of a genuine
two-way link to the formal system. |
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The effective owners of the Bodh schools are the migrant and
landless labourers, disadvantaged castes and traditional artisans
who live in the community. Previously with no access to schools
sufficiently affordable, flexible or "welcoming" for them, the
community agreed in the late 1980s to engage with a small group
of social activists to create a school as a form of "collective
endeavour" for their children's education (Bodh Shiksha Samiti:3).
Seven schools have been built by the community over the decade.
Also built have been a "sense of ownership" and a bridge between
school and community (Ibid:5). The Bodh has ensured children's
inclusion by becoming part of the community itself. It has been
a process through which people in "an organized framework pool
their ideas, concerns, aspirations and resources, and develop
a dynamic networking of communication among students, parents
teachers and Bodh organizers" (Ibid:5). |
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Together, they have worked through many of the core issues of
exclusion: dealt with the absenteeism of working children and
appropriate forms of discipline; negotiated teaching methodologies,
balancing the benefits of active versus rote learning; selected
curriculum topics appropriate to the life of the community;
created relevant and affordable teaching materials; and jointly
assessed children's on-going progress. Confronting many of the
barriers to the inclusion of socially marginalized children,
the Bodh programme is holistic. It includes all aspects of community
education, from pre-school through to adult literacy. Mothers
and older children are trained as part-time resource teachers,
creating another tie between school and community. |
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At the same time, emphasis is put on the continuous training
of the fulltime teachers in methodologies stressing participatory
learning. The entire primary curriculum is divided into three
broad ability groups, among which children can easily move as
appropriate to their competencies rather than being fixed by
age. Curriculum topics are flexible, but ensure coverage of
basic issues, such as hygiene and nutrition, which are immediately
useful to children and their families. A core of community-agreed
generic skills training (language and math, analysis and reasoning)
and attitude development (independence, cooperation, motivation
for learning) aims at building children's capacities for future
learning. |
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All of this is intended to give the act of learning, and the
process of education, a more valued place in the community,
encouraging parents and children to pursue further study in
the formal system. Toward preparing for this end, textbooks
and written exams are eventually introduced and, important to
realizing that "seamlessness" which is key to inclusive education,
an "adoption programme" has recently been begun to work with
and train teachers from the formal system in the main principles
and teaching approaches of the Bodh programme. The aim is systematically
to integrate aspects of the two education approaches. |
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| Within
Schools |
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Reaching excluded children and encouraging their participation
requires making education, and especially schools, easily accessible,
physically and emotionally welcoming and oriented to each child's
learning capacities and needs. A self-evident point, it is one
both the international community and national education systems
have taken a long time in coming to. In the broadest sense,
it means a much greater attention to conceiving and organizing
schools holistically. |
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More specifically, it means assessing, and acting to improve,
schools on the same dimensions along which they have been keeping
and pushing the most vulnerable children out: on the quality
of their environment, to create safe and girl-friendly physical
facilities, policies and practices of non-violence and mutual
respect; on their modes of delivery, to explore use of school
clusters, multi-grade teaching, double-shifting and distance
technologies; on their methods of facilitating learning, to
use interactive small-group arrangements, peer and child-child
tutoring, teacher-generated curriculum; on the role of their
teachers, to encourage teacher-teacher support groups, peer
counselling, in-service mentoring; and on their partnerships
with families, to develop school linkages, school-based ECCD,
parent literacy and work-related programmes, PTA and school
councils. |
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Such actions imply major shifts in thinking, in perspectives,
in relationships and in ways of working. They require that those
designing the innovations, and especially those delivering them,
be open and ready for change, for taking risks and for reflective
experimentation. Support for learning of this extent is, unfortunately,
not often provided for in education reform efforts, especially
when the targeted community is of low status or politically
invisible. However, while application of change may not have
gone very far since Jomtien, and the traditional top-down, information
transfer model of schooling remains the norm, serious efforts
are continuing to be made to cast the efficacy of that traditional
model into doubt and create a new one. |
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The nomenclature for identifying these more holistic approaches
varies among agencies and organizations. However, while problematic
for the outsider trying to sort through the terminological stew,
there are common threads evident across most of them. DFID's
latest education policy framework, for example, speaks of a
whole school development approach, "designed to bring together
and integrate the many inputs and processes which constitute
the learning environment and the learning experience of children"
(DFID:24-5). The approach includes inter alia a focus on school-based
planning, on motivating and supporting teachers, on creating
safe and secure school environments, on partnerships with families
and community agencies, and on setting and monitoring reachable
learning goals. |
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The wholesome education school programme in Bhutan, supported
by SC-US, has a similar point of departure. Set within the broader
context of an education reform effort with community-based change
as its base, it includes aspects of community development education,
PRA and skill-development for out-of-school youth, and children's
clubs. The programme's goal of increased inclusiveness is reflected
in its integrative schools-based management and teacher-focused
orientation. Considering "the needs and rights of the whole
child, (it) bridges health and education", encouraging schools
to "come up with their own plans" and helping them develop "a
self-assessment tool (to) help sensitize teachers to the concept,
and show them that there are things they can do and ... concrete
steps (they) can take ..." (Rights-Based Approaches: 23) |
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One of the potentially most influential initiatives in this
regard is the concept of the child-friendly school (CFS). Perhaps
most energetically promoted by UNICEF, the concept is becoming
increasingly reflected in similar approaches of agencies such
as WHO, Save the Children and Radda Barnen, bilateral donors
and a number of national governments. In essence, the CFS framework
aims at creating education systems and school settings which
are inclusive, effective, equitable and secure for all children.
The child-friendly school seeks to engage children and their
parents in all aspects of the learning event; to be more welcoming
of the diversity of children, and to keep them longer in the
education environment. It seeks to be more nurturing, academically
professional and programmatically flexible. The underlying premise
of the CFS is that all children must be provided positive learning
opportunities, and that all must be expected to succeed no matter
what their background and whether in or outside the formal school
setting. |
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The child-friendly concept thus widens the framework. It assumes
that learning, and society's commitment to supporting it, encompass
children from birth through adolescence, whatever capacities
they bring and whatever their learning needs. It assumes the
need for partnerships with families and communities in developing
facilities and programmes which are physically safe, foster
a sense of security, well-being and self-confidence, and help
children to respect themselves and others. It aims at promoting
responsible and collaborative citizenship through abuse-free
schools, codes of conduct, anti-bullying policies and training
in peer mediation for "peaceful playgrounds". For teachers as
well as children, it includes norms against all forms of harassment,
no-tolerance policies against violence, and development of positive
disciplinary alternatives to corporal punishment which are clear,
consistent and provide support to teachers in their fair application.
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By engaging with families, the CF school seeks to become a place
where children and adults can have conversations about issues
of immediate concern to them (HIV/AIDS, drugs, sex, work and
conflict) and about the values, attitudes and behaviours underlying
them. |
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While certainly applicable to all children, then, the flexibility
and responsiveness inherent in the concept is especially important
for reaching the excluded in the "especially difficult circumstances"
where children, adolescents and families are particularly at
risk. They are important when normative social controls are
breaking down -- due to the rapid and unmanaged social change
of communal conflict, urban stress or rural dislocation; and
when families are not able to support their children because
they are themselves fighting fragmentation or alienation. |
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Two programmes currently underway in Thailand reflect different
approaches and emphases to the child-friendly concept and give
a sense of its scope. Working under the auspices of the Office
of National Primary Education, the children's integrated learning
and development (CHILD) initiative in the Northeast (with input
from UNICEF) and the child-friendly schools programme (CFS)
in the North (supported by SC-US) are both intended as fairly
holistic interventions. Each involves several layers of activity,
various strategies for engaging with schools and their communities
and different types of content. Both deal with a range of schools
and children, confronting problems of exclusion to varying degrees.
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Situated in the poorest region of the country, CHILD takes a
broad-brush approach to the child-friendliness concept, aiming
to create a "constructive context" in which children's learning
is enhanced through the school, in collaboration with the community
and in a holistic way. It begins with a "futures search", to
mobilize teachers, parents and students in thinking and talking
about children's protection and development rights and agreeing
to take action. The first most concrete action, offered as an
enabling incentive, is on the micro-level, introducing for the
school's consideration a relatively simple computer-based MIS
technology. Including computer and training, the technology
helps teachers organize and track data related to students'
academic and health status. |
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The innovation at this level is not dramatic. It is easily accessible
to teachers of even the most resource-poor schools and is, for
the most part, manageable in its first stages by the expertise
available. It moves previously scattered pieces of hand-noted
data on each child into more visible patterns, "whole pictures"
of a student's developmental progress. In this, the key strength
of the intervention is the tool it provides teachers to do more
easily and effectively what they already do. At the same time,
the project allows for growth. Teachers and schools are becoming
increasingly more interested and expert in analytical manipulation
and in thinking and talking together about students in more
holistic and integrative ways. Some are looking for ways to
add new and more locally important data to the MIS -- on drug
use, absenteeism, nutrition, and are working with students and
parents on ways to address problems revealed by their analyses.
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The Child-Friendly School/CFS project operates on the other
side of the country, in a region characterized by relative wealth,
the persistent social inequities and social trauma of marginalized
Hilltribe communities, high rates of drug abuse and child prostitution
and epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS. The project is framed explicitly
within the core themes of survival, protection and development,
equity and participation. It begins with a relatively intensive
Self-Assessment Process asking parents, teachers and students
to define their ideal of a child-friendly school, and to contrast
that with what they perceive to be the current situation. It
then pursues a broadly-focused intervention strategy based on
a negotiation of the perceived gaps and creation of an agreed
"school charter". Specific activities aim at strengthening home-community-school
links, promoting the safe and secure psycho-social development
of children, and introducing the notion of participatory active-learning
into classroom practice. |
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For both projects, the logic of the child-friendly and teacher-engaged
school appears to be proving intuitively sound in both regions,
irrespective of their social, economic and cultural differences.
In large part, the positive response is a function of the holistic
and non-restrictive nature of the concept which allow each of
the projects to be framed and implemented with considerable
flexibility and adaptation. Each has been able to base the precise
entry point, focus and evolution of its interventions on its
respective schools, teachers and students as coherent organizational
"systems". |
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More problematic here, and in "piloting" initiatives generally,
the physical and psychological distance of the programmes from
each other and from the national education policy centre makes
communication and joint action difficult. From the perspective
of articulating, managing and sustaining a nationally coherent
and integrated "child-friendly reform programme", it is obviously
more difficult to promote change in a situation where each reform
application and trajectory is different in approach and emphasis.
It is more complicated to create and organize training materials
and action, to plan inputs, or to track outcomes jointly. If
the impact is to be sufficiently national in support and scope,
it is especially important for projects like these to create
and maintain transparent and regular communication, horizontally
between the work in the field and vertically with the policy
centre. Underlying principles of action must be openly and regularly
discussed and implementation must be monitored and outcomes
assessed in co-operation with the communities expected to be
benefiting. |
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Though with limited attention to teaching and learning quality
and academic performance, WHO's overlapping health-promoting
and healthy school initiatives are conceptually consistent with
that of the child-friendly school. They also are concerned with
a holistic conception of children, with their lives both inside
and outside the school and with building linkages between the
school, family and community. Their main emphasis, however,
is on mental and social health as the underpinnings of children
learning to make sound choices (on things like nutrition, sexual
behaviour, interpersonal relationships) and to protect themselves
from high-risk behaviours, violence and abuse (to make better
judgements, for example, and assess the veracity of advertised
information). They aim to foster healthy school environments,
deliver appropriate health messages and interventions through
the auspices of the school and its curriculum, and promote healthy
life-style behaviours. They also project a more activist role
for the school in providing input to health-promoting and violence-reducing
public policy; re-orienting community health and referral services
to ensure effective diagnostic and remedial support for vulnerable
children; and mobilizing community participation around child
health and protection issues. |
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A third variation on this same theme is that of inclusive education
introduced at Salamanca. Intended to capture the ideals of CRC
and EFA commitments through schools which are welcoming of all
children, irrespective of capacities, UNESCO in particular is
promoting this terminology as direct counterpoint to education
which excludes. Inclusive education aims to be "transformative".
It includes advocacy (creating public platforms for people with
disabilities), capacity development (training teachers, decision-makers,
community leaders) and management strengthening activities (guidance
for school staff, curriculum developers, supervisory systems).
As with child-friendly and health promoting schools, much of
the focus of "inclusive schools" has been on networking and
professional development -- to spread the idea in principle
and ground it in practice. It is concerned with |
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identifying
all forms of exclusion and barriers to learning within national
policies, cultures, educational institutions and communities.
It has implications for redirecting resources, inter-sectoral
collaboration, teacher training, curriculum development,
local capacity building and community involvement. It is
about developing an education within communities which is
relevant to local needs and maximizes the use of community
resources to overcome problems. It requires everyone involved
in supporting learning at whatever level in identifying
and responding to priorities for development as they exist
locally. It emphasizes the roles of communities and centres
of learning in creating and sustaining each other (UNESCO/d/:16)
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All of these programme approaches are, or should be, attempts
to create learner-friendly schools; schools with teachers and
managers who are able to recognize and build on the differences
children bring to school, in gender, age, background and capacities.
Simultaneously, they should be schools which actively seek out
and remove the barriers to learning which might exist within
their own arrangements and resources, barriers which prevent
accommodating the mix of children who do come and which serve
to keep others out. As a typology, it is critical that these
are schools in which ECCD programmes are given high priority,
tailored to the specific learner characteristics of the young
child and the active inclusion of their primary care-givers.
They must be schools which give consideration also to the particular
learning styles and priorities of adolescents, as children-in-transition,
to provide opportunities for genuine participation and to help
them make linkages between the knowledge and skills of the school
and those of the world outside. |
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They must be schools which help students at risk to test the
parameters of their values, knowledge and capacities to act
by inviting input from, and collaboration with, other youth-oriented
institutions and services of the community. The recent efforts
to implement a stronger life-skills orientation in and across
programmes, to strengthen students' abilities "to translate
knowledge, attitudes and values into action" (Baldo& Furniss:1)
are especially critical for students in marginal communities
who may have no chance other than school for guided exploration.
They are important, too, for specific at-risk children and adolescents
-- for child workers, young soldiers, teenage parents, those
who are HIV/AIDS affected -- who may be able to engage only
in nonformal education settings. Again, the priority must be
on forging links, on developing a porous education system, one
enabling children and young people to move back and forth as
their changing situations warrant. |
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| Within
Education Systems |
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An example of an effort to move in the direction of greater
synergy among various education development initiatives is beginning
in Lao PDR. It is a country with few resources, little bureaucratic
capacity and almost no civil society participation. Most of
its children are indigenous and most remain vulnerable, excluded
from even minimal learning opportunities. Education interventions,
however, are beginning to happen in a number of sub-sectors.
The overarching framework of all the donor interventions is
important in their attempt to be explicitly integrative. |
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One of the more important structural components of these activities
is the cluster school, intended to serve as a way to "increase
the participation of parents in the schooling of their children,
to improve access to good teaching and learning materials, to
increase learning achievement and wastage rates especially among
remote and indigenous areas" (Dykstra:7). An arrangement of
some half dozen schools linked administratively, the cluster
serves to promote common use of materials and interaction among
teachers and principals, including extended opportunities for
joint training and more regular supervision. Parents are also
encouraged to use the facilities of the cluster, and to contribute
to its governance. |
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The administrative clustering of schools, and implementation
of joint activities is no doubt a necessary condition of sustainable
synergy; it provides the skeleton. Equally important in this
case, however, are the apparent commitments to ensuring that
all other education interventions also reinforce one another
in content, process and community focus; and that all of these
are based within an essentially learning-for-implementation
paradigm. Thus, clusters are located in the same communities
as village-based early childhood programmes, creating and facilitating
parent-teacher-student associations to deal with issues of access
and retention especially for indigenous children. |
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Resource centres are built to train teachers from the clusters
in materials production and localizing curriculum. These, in
turn, complement efforts of the National Teacher Training Programme
to upgrade untrained and unqualified indigenous teachers in
the use of child-centred methods, increase their knowledge of
the new curriculum, and help them work in multi-grade classrooms
"which comprise the majority of schools in ethnic areas". None
of this is very dramatic in the telling; it is also labour intensive
and slow in such a vertically managed and centrally controlled
country. Nevertheless, it is an approach suited to institutionalizing
an inclusive system. |
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| With
Out-of-School-Learners |
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Holistic education recognizes the fact and critical importance,
of learning beyond the school. Unlocked a decade or so earlier
by the Faure Report, Jomtien opened wider the door to the legitimacy
of nonformal education. In its potential for flexibility of
outreach and interactive teaching methodologies, out-of-school
learning is not only legitimate. It is necessary if all children
and young people are to have access to a comprehensive and truly
seamless education. Community, nonformal, literacy and adult
education are all terms which, in principle at least, operationalize
the EFA "expanded vision" of all people being able to address
their basic learning needs at any and all points in their lives.
"For basic education to be equitable", and for it to be useful
and inclusive, "all children, youth and adults must be given
the opportunity to achieve and maintain an acceptable level
of learning" (EFA: art 3-2). NFE is intended to do this. |
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Building on considerable experience from the previous half century,
the decade following Jomtien has seen an increasingly positive
recognition accorded the right and value of this kind of learning.
It is seen often as the basis of marginalized and fragmented
communities becoming "empowered". Much of this progress has
been realized under the ambit of specific communities of people
at risk (women, people affected by HIV/AIDS, subsistence farmers,
street children) or of sectors with a strong outreach agenda
(primary health care, water and sanitation, Agenda 21). |
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Although as always evaluations tend to be somewhat anecdotal,
many of these programmes appear to have been fairly effective
in mobilizing change at the grassroots level, at least for the
short-term benefit of those involved. Much of it has involved
children's learning, directly and indirectly, through early
childhood development programmes and functional literacy or
jobs training for youth. Unfortunately, there appears to have
been relatively little community-based education aimed specifically
at designing NFE programmes for the long-term. Nor do many attempt
to strengthen linkages between families and the formal school;
PTAs and other such mechanisms remain often little more than
channels for eliciting school fees and local services. |
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One potentially significant impact of the increased status being
accorded nonformal education with particular relevance for excluded
children, however, are programmes allowing them to come back
-- either to formal schools or more informally organized learning
activities. Children who for whatever reason have been kept,
or put, out of school are being given more opportunities to
find appropriate "learning spaces" when and as they are ready,
irrespective of age or school history. Such second-chance education
is especially positive where it combines curriculum elements
of the formal system with more nonformal delivery arrangements;
another movement toward the critical criterion of seamlessness.
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The Mauritius basic education for adolescents programme on the
island of Rodrigues addresses a situation of primary completion
rates at less than 50%, with few children who drop out having
the knowledge or skills either to manage their lives (problems
of early marriage, drugs and alcohol, child labour are growing)
or to find productive work. The BEFA programme provides a mix
of life- and livelihood skills modules, delivered through a
variety a venues, often facilitated by secondary school students.
Participants are, in part, drawn to the programme by mobilization
and outreach activities; in part also because the community
and their families are active supporters of the programme. Unfortunately,
while there is some co-operation with the formal school in BEFA
management, there is less indication that the strengths of BEFA
(learner-centredness, participatory approach, links with the
community, peer-peer delivery) are being adopted by the formal
side. |
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Uganda's complementary opportunities for primary education (COPE)
project is in a much stronger education environment and, while
also concerned with presenting formerly excluded children with
"an alternative educational strategy", it has been able to do
so with greater expectation of sustainable results. Significantly,
COPE takes cognisance of the fact that many of these children
have stayed out of school through conscious family decisions
based on the logic of their circumstances. Living in poverty,
families have considered their children's ability to work to
outweigh the vague potential of an education system seen as
of low quality. COPE is important in being a strongly "community-based
initiative .... the community's choice of teaching times, school
year and instructors gives it the power to provide an acceptable
alternative to the formal system." |
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It is important, too, in attempting to de-link age from grade,
involving children 8-14 in multi-age groupings and learner-centred
methods. Classes are small enough to allow some use of participatory
methods, individualized attention and continuous feedback to
students on their progress. Significantly, it also emphasises
strengthening the capacity of locally-recruited teacher-instructors
through community-based in-service training. |
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COPE is understood to be a temporary solution to the problem
of excluded children, one no longer needed once the formal system
is able to provide "quality, affordable and accessible opportunities
for all children" (UNICEF/Uganda:19). This may be an overly
short-sighted perspective in situations of probably fairly chronic
poverty. Even once the formal system is better established,
it seems likely that significant numbers of children and youth
will continue not to enrol or to drop out early. This suggests
that permanent action against exclusion requires programmes
like COPE to serve in an equally permanent role, extending the
parameters of what constitutes "legitimate" education. NFE,
functional literacy and training programmes have long provided
a recapturing role of a kind, but rarely in ways which allow
learners to draw on, or integrate with, the resources and contents
of formal education. Even more rarely do they do so in ways
which push that system to change. Both are centrally important
in ending exclusion. |
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| III-2
Enabling Processes |
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| Engaging
with Teachers |
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As suggested elsewhere, the changes required to make education
systems and schools inclusive imply new learning, sometimes
in a major way, for both organizations and individuals. The
common, and perhaps ultimate, thread in any successful such
change is the capacity of teachers to become more effective
at enabling the participation of children and facilitating their
learning. Considerable effort has been made over the decade
to improve this capacity, but in order to reach the excluded
much more is needed. |
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Teachers are key because they are, for most children, the main
reference to school and the formal processes of learning. For
all children, "home and family lives to not simply disappear
when they begin schooling. They take with them to school their
health and ill-health and their contrastive accumulations of
privileges and disadvantages" (Comber:4). How well each child
does in school is clearly a function of the repertoire of capacities
each brings. It is as equally a function of the teacher's ability
to create an environment which allows each child to use and
strengthen that repertoire to the fullest extent possible. |
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For at-risk children especially, it is critical that teachers
have the capacity to create a facilitative learning environment.
The factors which make children's learning vulnerable in the
first place (deprivation in their early years, marginalized
culture or language, pressures of poverty or work) cause them
to suffer further where teachers are ill-prepared, uncertain
or uninterested; or where the curriculum is inflexible. Suggestions
on the "that" of inclusion are easy enough to make: child-friendly
use of small groups, peer and cross-age tutoring, home-based
support. Much more difficult for teachers is the "how". Ultimately,
it falls to the teacher to ensure that the life-realities brought
by the child are duly recognized. It is the task of the teacher
to make the connections between family and school; to "struggle
with the connections between curriculum, school organization
and the personal learning needs of students and design environments
where learning can take place" (Leiberman&Miller:21) |
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Capable teachers, committed to the well-being and learning of
students, will to a significant degree compensate for most factors
leading to a child's exclusion. When teachers have the motivation
to reach out to each child as an individual learner and to parents
as the critical third partners in their children's success at
school, children will be included. Where teachers are prepared
to build and maintain their professional competence in creating
a secure and nurturing learning environment, ask challenging
questions, encourage ideas and guide a discovery process, most
children will succeed. The key lesson of the past decade, and
confirmed by earlier ones, is that good teachers are the bottom-line
of any serious or sustained effort to bring vulnerable children
into educational programmes and keep them there. |
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Unfortunately, another major lesson of the decade is that teachers
in many countries are also at the bottom of the line when it
comes to recognizing their needs as professionals. Large numbers
of the countries most in need of a strong teacher base are unable,
or disinclined, to put the necessary attention into creating
one. Little if any of the potential for child-friendly and inclusive
schools will be realized if teachers are not themselves educated
with the knowledge and skills of learner-oriented teaching,
through training and supervisory approaches using the same methods.
Their potential will fail if teachers are not sufficiently remunerated
to stay in the classroom rather than seek second or third jobs
outside; or if they cannot reach a level of standing and rapport
in the community which allows them to work in partnership with
parents and other social agencies. |
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This is not to suggest that progress is not being made. Chile's
improving quality and equity in rural basic schools programme
is an attempt to break the isolation of rural teachers, enhance
their sense of professional quality and strengthen their ability
to engage as partners with the wider community. Structurally,
this is being done through teacher-managed learning clusters
or "micro-centres" (Richards:2). Operating within a conceptual
framework of mutual learning, shared problems and professional
development, these centres enable "development of conversations
and the exchange of tales between teachers". Through joint research
and curriculum development activities, the centres are expected
to become "practicing, learning communities" for the eventual
decentralization of rural school design and development (Ibid:2).
Communities are involved. Though parents, social agencies and
the private sector, the aim is to broaden the scope of issues
with which the teachers and their schools become engaged, developing
partnerships in the process and creating a "synergy for action".
Joint analyses of the "challenges of poverty" facing communities
and their children allow dealing with them in more collaborative
ways (Ibid:4). |
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Even the problems with teacher education in Pakistan noted earlier
are at least to some degree being confronted, albeit largely
through the auspices of donors, private institutions and NGOs.
All are concerned with teachers and teaching issues linked to
children at-risk and excluded. Programmes train female teachers
in remote rural areas and help them establish primary schools
for attracting girls. Associating teacher training with community-based
programmes encourages local school management. Rural teachers
are trained to guide children in learning from education radio
programmes. The diagnostic skills of teachers are strengthened
for identifying students with math-related learning problems.
Other programmes are designing durable teacher training delivery
strategies: in-service coupled with supervised practicum; internship
training; and teacher-teacher, in-class mentoring through school
clusters (Putting the Child First:22-24). |
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Many of these programmes are apparently showing some success.
It will be important that the teachers involved are supported
with regular supervised monitoring and in the long-term, however.
Ensuring an explicit focus on excluded children will also be
crucial, along with tracking impacts on their learning, changes
in their enrolment and retention, and whether there is any kind
of "halo" effect resulting from the more narrowly-targeted training
of these interventions on teachers' broader knowledge and skills
(e.g. do the teachers apply the math-oriented diagnostic methods
to more general assessments of children's capacities?) |
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There are examples, too, of attempts to link the strengthening
of teachers' capacities with systemic school reform. Myanmar's
school-based healthy living & AIDS prevention in education (SHAPE)
has entered the environment of AIDS and child-centred curriculum
--difficult to do in that country -- expressly through a "teacher-up"
school change process. Student workbooks and written curriculum
emphasizing interactive, exploratory and action-oriented learning
are being created through in-service teacher training workshops
using these same methodologies. Cumulatively, the process provides
teachers a hands-on experience in the effective classroom management
of important and relevant healthy behaviour matters. In the
process, they are building their commitment to, and control
over, the content and methods and strengthening their capacity
to share that expertise with colleagues, parents and township
education officers. |
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One controversial idea in respect of maintaining a professional
teaching body is to give greater control to communities over
the hiring, monitoring, paying and firing of teachers. On the
one hand, it makes sense. It is important to engaging at-risk
families and children in schools that they share in making determinations
as to who the teachers will be and how they will behave. Also,
"in an increasing number of countries ... parents are becoming
worried about teacher absenteeism and are demanding to be more
involved..." (Gaynor:16). On the other hand, "... the rights
of teachers must be safeguarded" (Ibid:17). Even the Malian
community is not always regular in paying its teachers. |
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As in all other exclusion issues, the answer is one of balance.
Continuing dialogue among all parties needs to be coupled with
a recognition of system responsibilities. It is unrealistic
to expect economically and socially marginal communities fully
to cover the costs of the teachers they need or to provide teachers
the professionally-informed and consistent monitoring they need.
Nor is it equitable. National commitment to the CRC implies
national commitment to assuring the means of creating and maintaining
good education for all. Central governments must be involved
to ensure training and monitoring professionally competent teachers,
and to generate and better distribute budgets for doing so.
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| III-3
Local Relevance |
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| Decentralization
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Decentralization, in principle, provides the logistics and structures
for enabling education to be more locally relevant. It is intended
to provide an environment more likely to encourage parents to
be partners and children to participate. The decentralization
of education systems has been increasingly recommended and tried
over the decade as fundamental to reaching the hard-to-reach.
Schools which are able to make decisions at the local level,
in partnership with families and students and in collaboration
with other child-related agencies, should be able to understand
what the needs and capacities of such children are, tailor their
programmes accordingly and, together with these others, monitor
impacts. Genuine decentralization should also allow schools,
together with their communities, to adapt more quickly and flexibly
to changing conditions, and to change those conditions, as they
engage in joint situation analyses of exclusion and begin to
take the actions to remove barriers and open opportunities.
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Unfortunately, few educational bureaucracies have yet to allow
this level of autonomy. Fewer still provide the human resources
or the means of generating income which would enable a community
to exercise such a mandate effectively. Decentralization implies
new knowledge and behaviour; it requires community members and
school staff to learn what the issues are and how to work collaboratively
on them. |
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Toward undoing the extreme exclusion of children created by
apartheid, for example, the South African Schools Act aims at
almost revolutionary organizational change in moving management
of schools to the local level and "opening of school doors to
all children" (Luswata:3). The "emphasis on governance implies
that the professional management at the school level must incorporate
co-operative management and partnership among teachers, the
principal, learners and the teacher representatives such as
unions, professional associations and other stakeholders ....
(It) will have implications for the ethos and management styles
.... schools will have to respond to diversity, deal with the
disadvantaged and advantaged, and handle children of different
race, sex, language and cultural backgrounds". An obviously
very serious commitment to decentralization, the programme implies
a comprehensive reconsideration of the goals and tasks of education,
in the schools themselves and in their relationships with its
associated communities. It also implies the need for an on-going
and participatory knowledge and skills "mapping" of the match
between the capacities required and those available. The levels
of learning implied are tremendous. |
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Decentralization involving such major systemic change is fairly
rare. More typically, the strategy is simply to declare a one-off
event to deconcentrate. Schools and communities are given the
added responsibility of managing the substance and operations
of local education, but none of the enabling conditions necessary
for doing so: little new money and no new mechanisms for generating
it; no framework or facilitated support for the kind of cross-cutting
"change process" elements included in the South African case.
Because such actions are taken often in already fragile education
systems, within poor and politically marginal communities, by
failing to include such enabling conditions, many cash-strapped
central governments seeking to divest themselves of all unwanted
burdens are simply producing more exclusion. |
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Thus, though research is still limited in this area, there are
indications that efforts at school-based management and locally
controlled budgets under these conditions are doing little actually
to improve school or student performance. In some cases, they
are creating obstacles by failing to induce capable teachers
to take on stronger leadership roles (Fiske:27); by causing
tensions in the schools as staff and leadership struggle to
set priorities with no real frame of reference for doing so;
and by forcing especially margin students, asked for increasing
amounts of special fees, to drop out. Also, decentralized management
is a highly political act in a highly political system (Fiske:5).
It can threaten fundamental beliefs and values about the role
of education; it can change power relations, resource allocations
and control. Local exploitation can be as harmful as that from
the centre. |
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There is also the more fundamental suggestion from some research
that the basic assumptions underlying decentralization may need
to be rethought. Marginalized or traditional communities may
not always share the belief that their collective management
of schools is a good thing; that either the schooling or the
effort they have to make in sharing responsibility for it "will
pay off"(Maclure:32). Even where the aim is limited to the development
of local materials, there may be little benefit seen by those
families which are at risk. From the perspective of marginalized
parents who want a broader world for their children, "a locally
generated curriculum may well fail to meet that criterion" and
risks creating "educational ghettos that end up restricting
those who are inside them" (IWGE:56). |
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Perspectives and values can change, of course, and effective
balances created. But the task is large. Equity will not happen
simply by increasing the authority of local leadership to act.
It requires support to the development of interactive, transparent
and facilitative relationships, within and between the community,
the school and the national system. It requires establishing
a shared vision, mechanisms for negotiating competing opinions
and ways to monitor agreements. Learning is key to all of this,
within the school, the education system and the community (Fiske,
1996; Shaeffer, 1994). This includes looking beyond the local
leadership to engage directly with the excluded families and
providing them professional support and resources. It also implies
a certain degree of caution on the part of national policies
and donor advocacy. Misplaced assumptions and inadequately conceived
change can leave vulnerable children in a worse situation, with
no or weaker schools to attend; fewer, less motivated and more
often absent teachers from whom to learn; and a lower level
of knowledge and skills on which to draw. |
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| III-4
Protecting the Most Vulnerable |
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The first part of this section has considered themes related
to all children excluded from education. The remainder looks
more expressly at some of the specific conditions in which children
are being put at risk. |
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| 4-a)
Girls |
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Within every category of the most seriously excluded, and on
all basic human needs dimensions including education, girls
continue to be found at the bottom of the equity ladder. EFA
and the CRC, backed by all other international conferences,
give particular focus to girls' education. In consequence, modest
advances have been made in providing relevant education to greater
numbers. More is now known about the impact of gender discrimination
in different cultures and social groups on levels participation
in education: on access, the nature and quality of their learning,
and the causes and consequences of their exclusion. There have
also been gains in overcoming some of the barriers. Though absolute
numbers of girls not enrolled or leaving school before completion
are still high and growing in too many countries, there has
been a small reduction in the percentages. |
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While the quantitative gains girls have made in education are
important, they have perhaps been especially significant in
the efforts to make gender-based interventions integrative.
Most attempt to draw together a number of development dimensions
-- health, protection, social learning and participation, social
equity. Invariably more holistic than many other types of school
reform programmes, those for girls' education are finally starting
to provide "an appreciation of the web of constraints and barriers
to schooling girls", including often deeply-held cultural, religious,
social and political values about the roles girls and women
should play in society (USAID:10-11). Girls bear a double burden
in this, since they also face the barriers of all children living
in situations of family poverty, inadequate infrastructure,
unenforced child labour laws etc. |
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In the urgency of dealing with girls' exclusion, some of the
traditionally very narrow approaches to promoting effective
and equitable education generally are being broken down. Mauritania's
newly-begun child-friendly learning environments programme reflects
some of this in addressing several exclusionary realities of
education in the country: pedagogically weak and physically
uncomfortable schools, low participation rates for girls and,
one cause of this, parents demands for "higher quality standards"
before allowing daughters to enrol. Though the situation for
boys in the Caribbean would suggest this is not always the case,
the programme makes the not unreasonable assumption that in
creating a physical and pedagogical environment welcoming to
girls, it will effectively create one which is inclusive of
all. |
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As it defines the girl-friendly school, then, it is one which
is "affordable in cost for the parents and in harmony with their
cultural habits, with a canteen to feed them and simple but
proper sanitary facilities necessary to Moslem girls of a certain
age .... A small school garden for teaching pupils to cultivate
their own vegetables and diversify their diet, indispensable
in this country where malnutrition is nearly always related
to a lack in food variety" (PAM/ UNICEF proposal). The programme
also recognizes the need for community links, working with parents
to encourage their taking "mutual responsibility with teachers"
for managing the school, improving its physical environment,
supporting the use of child-focused, participatory methods,
and creating school cooperatives to generate income. |
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Another important outcome of such programmes is the confirmation
that, while action against the exclusion of girls must be affirmatively
emphasized, it cannot be done in isolation. The imperative is
for a broadly inclusive and effective education serving all,
including girls. Synergy is again key: "the most effective solutions
are those that address multiple barriers"; that girls' education
programmes work best where they are coherent with their environment
and "fit within a country's national development agenda and
strategies"; where they are integrated with overall educational
reform; and where "efforts to improve girls' education (are)
owned by a country's citizens ... by all groups in the society"
(USAID:11-13). Corollary to this, intervention strategies work
best where they have built "linkages, partnerships and means
of collaboration" among all implicated actors: civil, public
and private; have encouraged innovation; and focused on making
the often hidden life of schools open and available for broad
social participation. |
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Guinea, for example, would appear to be pursuing such a logic
in its efforts to turn around the gender gap in its primary
schools. Following an analysis of barriers to girls' participation,
policies were adopted initiating a national campaign on behalf
of girls' education, removing regulations against pregnant girls
returning to school and requiring schools to have proper sanitary
facilities. While none of these were revolutionary in themselves,
when coupled with a general systemic education reform process
involving free textbook distribution, teacher training and hiring
of more women teachers and school-health interventions, improvements
happened. An apparent result has been a rise in girls' enrolment
of 16% over the past eight years (World Bank/b/:2). Similarly,
the home schools programme for girls, developed on the outskirts
of Karachi, is considered in large measure to have succeeded
"... by being responsive to their context .... (by) the programme's
structure, flexibility, and ability to respond well to the concrete
needs of the local community" (Farzanegan:62) |
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Despite their increasing popularity, the verdict is not yet
clearly in with respect to the sustainable value of incentive
programmes in encouraging or rewarding families' more positive
attitudes and behaviours towards sending girls to school (Prather:3).
For the period they are in place, they can be effective in bringing
girls into school. There is also potential for social transformation
where the benefits persist long enough to enable girls successfully
to complete at least one level. A good experience can "open
the door" to them sending their own daughters to school and,
in this sense, incentives can have durable value in helping
break the exclusionary cycle. |
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As a strategy for inclusion, however, they are less than effective
where they simply fill the gap of socio-economic inequity, a
financial stop-gap. They need, at the same time, to make the
effort actively to change the poor performance of schools; to
engage policy-makers in seriously reassessing the conditions
keeping families in poverty; and to encourage families to reconsider
value systems which keep girls away from school in the first
place. |
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| 4-b)
Working Children and Child Labour |
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The issues of working children, and most especially in its more
malignant manifestations as child labour and sexual exploitation,
have been at the centre of concern about excluded children throughout
the decade. In the various attempts to balance children's learning
with their earning a living, fundamentally different philosophies
have emerged. Among children's advocates, educators and child
protection services, donors and employers and parents, very
different emphases and approaches to intervention have been
tried, implicating all sectors and with mixed results. |
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Underlying all of them runs a culture-based continuum. At one
end, the so-called "eurocentric idea of childhood" holds that
children should not work at all and thus that street children
and child labourers are "victims". At the other, is the position
that children's work is "an essential part of community and
family membership as well as a means of socialization and education"(African
Contexts...:Sect 3.2.3). In the middle, a somewhat more uncertain
view that, while "cultural context must be respected", culture
cannot be the "trump card" when children need to be protected
from harm and their development ensured (Ibid). |
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The focus is shifting toward this middle, to one aimed less
at controlling the problem than at enabling those children and
families involved to make better decisions as to what is in
the child's best interest. In line with this, compulsory education
as a means of ending at least the most excessive forms of child
labour, a mainstay of the post-Jomtien discussion, is waning
as "the" answer. References to the experience of western countries
are proving too muddied by intervening variables to very usefully
inform policy. The much quoted case of Kerala is similarly confounded
by the fact that in addition to making education compulsory,
it made "a long-term commitment politically and socially to
place a high premium on (it) and 60% of the State budget to
support it. Expansion of the school system and the attainment
of universal basic primary education ... to all intents and
purposes eliminated child labour ... particularly its abusive
forms" (Suvira:54). In other words, it was the application of
a synergistic model which made the change possible, not legal
dictate. |
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Compulsory education on its own as a regulation is, in any case,
far too simplistic. The Philippines in 1993, for example, had
a literacy rate of 94% and still large numbers of working children
(Ibid:54). Also, it makes little sense to compel parents legally
to send children to schools where facilities are few, teaching
is poor and there is no reasonable way to enforce compliance.
Making a more enabling environment through the law may be necessary,
but needs to be supported by simultaneous and sustained attention
to creating public demand for the education of all children,
to ensuring quality educational services, and to mobilizing
a strong social stigma against work which denies children the
chance to learn. |
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At the most macro level, it is critical that greater and more
shared responsibility be taken at national and international
policy and action. Review of global trade practices and monetary
policies, measures to alleviate endemic poverty, regulations
controlling "undocumented" worker migration, action on environmental
degradation and socio-political conflict -- all of these are
critical to ensuring a limit on children's having to work and,
when they do, that their rights to protection and education
are maintained. |
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Misunderstanding and discrimination underlie much of the negative
response to working children, especially to those working on
the street. Bringing the facts of these children's lives, and
why they are there, more forcefully into both national and local
discussion is becoming an increasingly important line of action.
Where national programmes have been effective, they have reflected
strong collaboration among major stakeholders: international
agencies, national social, industrial and financial policy-makers;
factory owners and unions; educators, families and the children
themselves. The media have also been important partners. Making
"publicly visible" the incidents, causes and implications of
especially exploitative child labour has been a core element
for action in Brazil, in conjunction with an "All Children in
School" national mobilization process. |
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Critical, too, is the initiation of systematic and locally-specific
processes for remedial and preventative action. One sign of
progress in this latter respect has been decentralization, the
"devolution downwards from the centre to various administrative
levels, particularly the municipality". The idea of African
mayors as defenders of children underlies the child-friendly
Johannesburg initiative, and provides a good example of mobilizing
this type of co-ordinated thinking and action, both to end exploitative
child labour and to encourage children into school. |
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Developed as "metropolitan programmes of action for children",
the aim is to give formal recognition of children's rights to
participation and protection (The African Contexts...: Sect
3.3). The six action points of the Initiative, developed to
implement children's rights at the local level, are equally
relevant to an education-based analysis: map vulnerable groups,
as part of a situation analysis of children's exclusion; inventory
local action toward coordination and augmentation; set 'do-able'
goals for children in a local action plan; disaggregate and
monitor child-focussed indicators of disparities; evaluate actions
to chart progress; establish a local level policy coordination
team to follow-up cross-sector impact. |
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As another example of collaborative mixed-level action, support
to schools and multi-agency outreach programmes is beginning
to prove effective at finding lost children and helping them
rebuild a sense of neighbourhood (IWGE:68). In the context of
the economic crisis in Indonesia, a programme in East Java works
with local government, schools, NGOs and the community to identify
which families have children who are vulnerable to dropping
out or have already done so. It takes remedial action to help
them back into school and provides alternative education opportunities
for 'hard' core children who will never re-enter the formal
system (UNICEF/Indonesia: memo note). |
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Both nonformal and formal approaches clearly need to be at the
centre of all such action, and again they need to be linked.
Effective programmes have been characterized by their flexibility
in breaking down artificial boundaries between formal, nonformal
and work-based learning arrangements, and by their creativity
in balancing the learning and earning needs of families and
children. They have reduced the "territoriality tendencies"
of schools in opening options for fluid work-study schedules,
relevant and responsive curriculum contents and flexible delivery
modes. Children who need or want to work have been able to move
back and forth between systems considered equally valid; one
not the poor cousin of the other. |
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Collaboration and integration at local levels also allow the
socio-cultural dimensions of working children and child labour
to be reflected. The multi-partner alternative basic education
programme for children of seasonal migrant workers in Mexico,
for example, establishes learning sites in the camps where the
children are; tailors its schedule to dates of harvesting; generates
curriculum materials based on the specific indigenous languages
of the children and life-stories created by them; and involves
children in the management of the classroom through student
assemblies. To avoid marginalizing children further by being
a "second-rate poor school for the poor", the programme links
with the formal school system. The curriculum is accredited
at the first two grade levels (further levels are planned),
enabling graduates to move into the regular system as they can.
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The dilemma in all programmes concerned with working children
is one of balance. It is important that children who want and
need to work be able to do so at levels and in situations where
they can still participate in education and be protected from
harm. It is also paramount to get children out of labour which
is exploitative, dangerous and denies them a future. The design
and management of intervention programmes must be at once appropriately
comprehensive and at the same time realistically do-able. A
goal which includes all possible dimensions -- elimination of
child labour, protection of working children, guaranteed primary
school enrolment and good quality learning, alternative educational
activities and parent involvement -- is important in sorting
through the full range of implicating factors and actors and
ensuring long-term commitment to a broad vision. But evolving
a sustainable and management agreement on how actually to work
through all of these is equally critical if those goals are
progressively to be realized. |
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This means developing step-wise plans for identifying resources,
ensuring or creating an enabling legal framework and undertaking
necessary capacity development for the agencies and individuals
involved. It also means ensuring that all of those involved
in children's work-related exclusion from education, employers
and schools through to parents and children themselves, take
ownership of the problem as it affects them and as it is within
their purview to address. |
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Families, again, are core in this regard. They urge, sometimes
force, children into work; they can equally encourage them into
school. Wherever available, they need to be part of designing
and implementing interventions. They should be included as joint
learners with their children in programmes for literacy, numeracy
and work-skills, and in learning better "family-living" skills.
Many -- single parents (especially teenage girls), parents with
HIV/AIDS, families involved with drugs or domestic abuse --
may also need support in developing capacities to manage and
protect themselves in the face of limited resources and hostile
environments. Many street children have support groups beyond
their families, often other children. These also count and can
be among the strongest bases for peer-managed learning programmes.
NGOs, often created from current or former working children
as well as social workers and educators, are also critical education
delivery channels. Employers, as users of children's services,
are similarly necessary as participants, if the fire is to be
put out and not just prevented (Tay in IWGE:66). Engaging them
in the development (and resource support) of on-site education
programmes is sometimes the only way of realizing an effective
learning-while-earning balance. |
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Children themselves must be the central participants in any
effort to define the "problem" and determine "solutions". It
is important to acknowledge the legitimacy of their motives
for being where they are. In terms of education, the interests,
needs and availability of these children for learning are issues
about which they must also have a say (Lowry:1). Many are already
learning and doing so fairly well given their ability to survive
in extremely difficult, uncertain and dangerous conditions.
The onus is on education systems and schools to encourage them
to engage in learning which will help them to live with more
stability and safety in the society, to contribute to that society
and to gain more of its benefits. |
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Unfortunately, it appears that mainstream education communities
do not know enough about how children in these circumstances
would like, or are able, to engage with organized learning.
According to the IWGE consultation, many ministries of education,
in fact, do not care to know, tending " to disassociate themselves
from the problem of disadvantaged groups in general, and street
children in particular, simply because they do not regard themselves
as responsible for children who are not actually in school"
(IWGE:67/italics added). The CRC requires, however, that they
do become knowledgeable toward reaching all children, including
these. More case studies, longitudinal analyses and programme-based
action research are clearly crucial if "seamless education opportunities"
are to be created to support working children (and to lessen
the pressure on others to start). |
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"Meet and move" is perhaps the main overall message for programmes
aimed at securing the safety and development of all of these
children: meet them where they are in terms of their own priorities
and capacities and help them to move forward. Educational interventions
"must be conceived to arouse a desire for learning .... opportunities
for experiential learning embedded in activities which present
solutions to concrete needs" (Lowry:8). Brazil's Projeto Axe
pedagogy of desire attempts such an approach in encouraging
these children "to dream and wish" and offering "concrete opportunities
to help the child realize those dreams" (UNICEF/b/:57). Reading
and mathematics are coupled with work which is creative and
skills-producing. The programme seeks to match the sense of
adventure children can often find in the streets, and that which
is at the base of most effective learning. "Life on the streets
is risky, but also fascinating .... These kids are used to risk.
Here, we create positive risks and challenges". |
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| 4-c)
Children in War |
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In seeking to create inclusive and enabling learning environments
for all children, of particular and increasing importance is
the situation of those children and adolescents in conflict
and at war. The Johannesburg EFA 2000 Conference was unequivocal
in expressing the urgency for African countries to make peace
a priority. Communal violence and war, and the policies of exclusion,
racism, marginalization, discrimination and militarism which
underlie them, are killing people and economies at an alarming
pace in the region. Education systems, and children's access
to them, are being undermined in equal measure. |
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In turn, education systems have a central role to play in addressing
the crisis in a fundamental way. They need to give immediate
and genuine attention to strengthening community, student and
teacher capacities for cooperation, inter-cultural communication
and conflict resolution. They need to help address "the prevention
and resolution of all forms of conflict and violence, whether
overt or structural, from the interpersonal level to the societal
and global..." (Fountain:3). |
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Though still rare, various forms of peace education are being
developed toward promoting the attitudinal and behavioural change
required to realize this end. Helping students develop better
awareness and knowledge about the core issues of peace and peacefulness
is seen as a way of developing shared values and norms. Internalization
of relevant analytical and social skills in areas such as interest
negotiation and conflict resolution is being supported through
teaching children about their own and others' rights and responsibilities
and providing concrete opportunities to test these ideas. A
role-play programme in Mauritius, for example, asks students
to act as lawyers to resolve conflict on the use of mother-tongue
language in the classroom or children wanting to go to work
instead of school. A psycho-social healing programme in Croatia
trains head teachers and psychologists to support classroom
teachers in facilitating rehabilitation and promoting conflict
resolution (Ibid:7,12). By helping children develop ways they
can deal with discrimination or abuse in their own contexts,
peace education programmes aim to strengthen their capacities
to prevent, or at least limit, their own exclusion. |
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In a related way, global education focuses on children's development
of knowledge and skills for living peacefully and effectively
as "...citizens who demonstrate tolerance of, and respect for,
people of other cultures, faiths and world views, and who have
an understanding of global issues and trends" (Middle East Global
Education Handbook:5). It is concerned with promoting capacity
and guiding behaviour change through more learner-oriented curriculum
design, school management and teaching methods. It recognizes
that "children learn best when encouraged to explore and discover
for themselves and when addressed as individuals with a unique
cluster of beliefs, experiences and talents" (Ibid:5). There
is a clear emphasis on "acquiring the skills, abilities and
knowledge needed to cope with life" and presumably to act, where
appropriate, to change it. "Learning to learn and thereby learning
to solve problems..." is core. (Dall in Pike et al:2). In all
of this, global education is also closely related to the child-friendly
school concept. |
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Graca Machel's study in the middle of the decade, under the
auspices of the UN Secretary General, was critical in bringing
the issue of children as soldiers and their exploitation as
victims of war onto the global agenda. While there is clearly
a very long way to go in changing the situations causing and
sustaining the conflicts, the importance of systematic efforts
to link education and child protection within their contexts
is becoming much clearer. More, and more effective, strategies
and collaboration are critical to mitigate the effects of war
and post-war trauma. Principal among these are those which support
recovery and reintegration of children into family and community
settings in ways which re-establish their self-worth, confidence
and ability to learn. |
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The emerging concept of "permanent emergencies" (IBE:11), basically
the idea of enduring conflict as a feature of exclusion, is
important here. It suggests a necessary blurring of the line
between emergency and development, in situations of pre-, mid-
and post- conflict, when considering impact on children. In
this perspective, it is related to the position of the peace
educators that "peace does not merely imply the absence of overt
violence .... but also encompasses the presence of social, economic
and political justice" (Fountain:3). Structural violence, reflecting
a situation in which such conditions of justice are not available
for marginal communities, is a key condition of the wars which
eventually follow. In this way, it is one of the critical disabling
factors which must be included as a sign of children's exclusion
-- from development in general as well as education. It reinforces
the idea that inclusion in relation to conflict is not a short-term
concept, or goal. Rather it must be set along a continuum of
learning which aims at preventing harm, promoting development
and enabling sustained integration. |
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The implications for education systems are significant. Ways
need to be found of enabling children and young people in pre,
post and mid-war situations to stabilize their social relationships,
manage their basic needs and generate resources. It is especially
critical in these situations that the barriers between types
of education content, delivery methods and facilitators come
down. Children and adolescents must be allowed easy and facilitated
access to the knowledge and skills they need. They must be provided
the "zone-of-peace" necessary to engage in learning. The position
of adolescents is especially vulnerable here (Machel:para32).
They are the children who have likely experienced the greatest
traumas, as child fighters and victims of rape and other abuses.
They are the ones who have to deal with the transition not just
of war to peace, but from child to adult, creating yet more
pressure for high-risk behaviours in terms of work, drugs, sexual
behaviour, use of violence. They are also typically the children
the least well understood by families or education systems with
respect to the "special needs and special strengths" they bring
to enabling their own learning and recovery. |
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Again, wherever possible, education interventions need to be
done within the immediate context of children's families or
primary care-givers, and the community within which they are
most likely to stay through the reintegration period. "Children’s
well-being is best ensured through family and community-based
solutions .... (based on) local cultures and drawn from an understanding
of child development" (Machel:para32). Education interventions
must also take into account the needs of these adults for learning
as they adapt to an often very different post-conflict situation
of work, governance and social relations. This last includes
relations with their children, especially where they have been
involved with actual fighting; "...families are also worn down
by conflict, both physically and emotionally, and face increased
impoverishment ... links between education, vocational opportunities
for former child combatants and the economic security of their
families. These are most often the determinants of successful
social reintegration" (Machel:para53). |
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Education in the context of armed conflict has a clear role
in helping children to normalize their lives, maintain and re-establish
peer relationships, improve self-esteem and find work (Machel
para 54). One example of an integrative programme strategy aimed
at doing this is the accelerated learning project in Liberia.
Implemented as a component of its overall Back to School Initiative
and the broader context of school rebuilding and textbook distribution,
teacher training, girls' education and life-skills programming,
it seeks to encourage war-excluded children to come to school.
The aim is to get them as quickly as possible to their appropriate
education level through a "compressed" 6-year primary curriculum
done in three. It assumes children will move quickly, given
their motivation and readiness, being older and more experienced,
and teachers' ability to teach for skills competencies rather
than a pre-set curriculum and small class size. It also assumes
being able to attract good leadership and mobilize community
interest and support. It remains a question as to whether initiating
the work through limited pilot projects will provide sufficient
perspective for determining the feasibility of these, but there
appear to be signs of some progress (despite an unfortunate
reluctance among some donors to collaborate). |
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There is no choice to making serious efforts in creating appropriately
child-friendly and inclusive education programmes in situations
as desperate as these. Traditional approaches will not apply;
flexibility, responsiveness, collaboration and effectiveness
must be the defining criteria. While Machel correctly cautions
about the need to ensure methods are tailored to fit the cultures
of the communities involved, active and participatory learning,
group discussion and problem-solving, peer support and child-child
arrangements have been successful in most cultures. Initiatives
like the gardens of peace in countries as diverse as Sri Lanka
and the former Yugoslavian countries hold strong potential for
facilitating holistic and integrative learning. They need to
be more fully analysed and shared. |
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In Palestine, the Tamer Institute is creating learning environments
for children which "emphasize the importance of personal and
collective self-expression as a way of transforming their suffering
into hope, and developing in them resilience and an ability
to come to terms" with their situation (UNICEF/MENARO: presentation
by A Nasser). Weekly journals are used by older children as
forums of self-expression to raise issues of common concern
"and even challenge policy makers to constructive dialogue".
Drama helps "alleviate and deal with violence". Dialogue and
discussion circles help young children "tolerate and respect
each others' views and bridge their differences". Such approaches
ensure a focus based directly on the experiences, learning capacity
and interests children bring with them. Linkage is again key,
and it is important that ways be found to give greater public
value to such nonformal activities, and to incorporating them
into the formal system. |
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Other types of innovations are being developed. The UNESCO/UNICEF
teacher emergency pack and "school-in-a-box" are examples. These
are being used in other programmes, such as UNICEF's child-friendly
spaces programme in Kosovo, an attempt to provide returning
and displaced children "with a sense of normalcy crucial to
their psychological recovery and social integration" (Wulf:5).
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Common to all education programmes set within the context of
humanitarian emergencies, they must be based on the specifics
of their situation; the degree of "structuredness" appropriate
to the children involved (their physical, emotional and livelihood
needs, their capacities, age and gender); to the physical environment
(persistence of the violence or environmental degradation);
to the resources available; and to the expected duration and
trajectory of the emergency. In all cases, the fundamentals
will be the same: teaching which is child-based and, as much
as possible, negotiated with families in ways which facilitate
re-engagement, nurturing and tolerance; and which is flexible
and pedagogically effective, ensuring intellectual development,
physical and emotional well-being and viable survival and coping
strategies (UNICEF/d/). All of this, of course, makes the training
and support of teachers once again a critical matter,"... to
reconfirm their own personal safety and professional confidence,
including how most effectively to work with children who are
suffering trauma" (Machel:para55) |
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| 4-d)
Indigenous Children |
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As discussed in the previous section, indigenous communities
are particularly fragile within the spectrum of excluded communities.
Not only are they excluded by the fact of their history and
culture (children of nomadic tribes in Sudan, for example, face
exclusion simply by living the traditional life), they are susceptible
to further risk by the very interventions intended to support
and include them. It is especially important for these communities
that the education interventions directed at them seek with
vigour to be community-based, interactive and genuinely participatory;
that they be based on local culture, development priorities
and social context. |
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The degree of risk posed to these communities by interventions
is directly proportional to the extent of exclusion they are
already facing. The more they are unique and the greater their
isolation, the wider will be the communication gap between them
and outside agents; the less their margin for experimentation;
and the more limited their capacity or willingness to say 'no'
to the innovations -- especially where these are presented as
ways to make the life of their children significantly better.
Excluding actions are often subtle and unintended, conveyed
in projects based on foreign cultural paradigms which, in turn,
guide the way questions are asked, problems are defined, and
options are identified. The CRC makes it an imperative for governments
to take the initiative in bringing education to where such communities
are; it is less clear about the best, most protective, route
for getting there. |
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There are, however, some indicators. A decade-long programme
of primary school curriculum development in Canada undertaken
jointly by an aboriginal community and a university began with
the assumption of equity in values and culture, but also with
an agreement that one side was more equal than the other. The
fundamental goal was for a curriculum which would maintain and
strengthen the integrity of the indigenous culture. Professional
pedagogical principles, the western cultural input, were necessary,
but not sufficient and not first. Partnership began with creating
a mutual "vision" statement: "it will be the children who inherit
the struggle to retain and enhance the people's culture, language
and history; who continue the quest for economic progress for
a better quality of life; and who move forward with strengthened
resolve to plan their own identity" (Pence:3) Around this core,
community elders and leaders, teachers, students and education
specialists, "generated" a teacher education and school-based
curriculum. Content and methodology blended local and external
values, modern sector and traditional knowledge, male and female,
young and old. The generative process is to continue; the curriculum
will evolve as it is applied, as people and conditions change,
and as new learning emerges. |
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| 4-e)
Children with Disabilities |
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The conception of an inclusive education is an overarching one,
implying a change of mindset and expectations toward opening
education to all children. Countries such as Mozambique and
Palestine have adopted as a principle the inclusion of excluded
groups in their Education Sector Programmes as a whole (UNESCO:
Special Needs Education memo:Nov99). As a principle, it needs
to become much more prominent, and actively applied, in all
countries. Its basic criterion is that schools conform to the
characteristics of the child, and not vice-versa. It affirms
action on behalf of children in direct correlation to their
and their families need for outreach. It gives special attention
to child-child strategies: children of different ages, learning
styles and capacities working as pairs or in groups to ensure
everyone's positive involvement. It includes home-linkages,
through visiting teachers, community resource people and portable
learning packages. In Saudi Arabia, inclusion is being addressed
through the use of special resource rooms, specialist teachers
assigned to work with mainstream classrooms, 'mobile teachers'
to provide training to schools in ways of managing integration
and consultant teachers who give advice and guidance on a referral
basis. |
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Discrimination of any kind is very much a function of culture
and individual perspective. Exclusion from education on the
basis of disability is less a matter of any actual inability
to learn as of a belief that certain types of people cannot
learn and need not be helped to try. Action against such exclusion,
then, needs to be understood within the context of the professional
and community belief systems which maintain it. Actions to include
affected children need to work at changing these perceptions
from within those systems, through provision of more accurate
information, opportunities to test ideas, examples of effective
strategies. The matter of labelling is an especially sensitive
one in this context. It is important to recognize that children
with special needs or disabilities are not all "of a kind" in
the needs and capacities they bring to their learning. Social
policies and education systems (and especially teachers) need
to have sufficiently sensitive ways to know who the children
are who need extra support, on what basis they need it and what
specifically it should be. |
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Too broad or nebulous an approach to assessing children leads
both to too many children being labelled deficient, and thus
denied regular access to school; and to too many with special
needs being overlooked, and thus denied access to appropriate
support. In both cases, children are without resources appropriate
to their effective learning. Slippage in progress made to ensure
constructive definitions of children's special learning needs
as expressed by the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada
are important to note. The Association is concerned about apparent
moves by education ministries both to discourage teachers from
requesting assessments because systems "cannot provide the services",
and to "de-label" students with special needs, to refer not
to learning disabilities, but to learning differences. Because
only the first is recognized under the Canadian Human Rights
Act, it is less easy for parents to make a case of denied access
to effective education (Campbell:1,6). |
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On the other side, attaching a deficit-defining label to children
is equally damaging in allowing systems to justify their exclusion.
It becomes a particularly dangerous approach when the label,
and exclusion from regular school access, are too-loosely applied
to children of ethnic minorities, indigenous communities or
others who are seen as "different". There is risk in labelling
when, what is seen as "adaptive and 'intelligent' in one culture,
can be (seen as) maladaptive and even 'unintelligent' in another"
(Sternberg in Franklin:116). Exclusion into sometimes lower
quality special education risks being used as "the primary solution
for ... learners whose cognitive and behavioural patterns are
incompatible with schools' monocultural instructional methods"
(Franklin:116). Thus, for example, Romany children in some European
countries are over-represented in special needs institutions,
and noteworthy by their non-participation in regular classrooms
where they are culturally and linguistically a minority (Ainscow/Haile-Giorgis:20,24).
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In a similar way, child sex workers and war-injured children
are often not encouraged to resume their education where their
behaviour is seen as disruptive, and emotionally traumatized
children are kept away as being unable to learn. What is indisputable
is that schools and societies need to accept responsibility
for ensuring that there are no children who "do not fit"; that
exclusion is understood not as a function of the "impairment
of an individual, but ... a socially created barrier to participation"
In-service teacher education and specifically tailored curriculum
materials can help increase their familiarity with children's
different types of learning styles and capacities, strengthen
their sense of confidence in being able to work with them and
allow them the room they need to manage their own learning (UNESCO/ICF-EFA
1998:7). |
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| 4-f)
Children affected by HIV/AIDS |
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As an example of children with special needs, children affected
by HIV/AIDS are perhaps uniquely at risk. Either as affected
or infected, these children and youth are vulnerable at all
points in their lives, including their relationship with the
school: how they are treated there and under what conditions
they are able to stay. HIV/AIDS creates fear, discrimination
and exclusion. Affected children are forced into sporadic or
non-attendance by having to assume responsibility for family
income and childcare. |
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In regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS is wiping out
all education gains. As one participant at the Johannesburg
2000 Conference put it, "the pre- and post- AIDS world are not
the same world; they constitute a shift in new paradigm". In
areas of Kenya, 52% of children orphaned by AIDS are not in
school compared to 2% of non-AIDS orphans. In Malawi, 10% of
education personnel had died of AIDS by 1997. More than 30%
rates of infection are reported among teachers in three southern
Africa countries. |
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As the socio-economic crisis of HIV/AIDS grows, school and education
systems have no option but to become consciously and energetically
part of the solution for children. This includes support to
the human resource capacities of families of affected children,
as well as to the children themselves. Nonformal, community-based
and formal education programmes are needed to work together
in strengthening the capacity of those affected to adapt to
the psycho-social, work and home management changes confronting
them. They are needed to help children develop the knowledge
and skills to access support networks, those which can give
them guidance in dealing with the health aspects of the infection,
but also with the human rights and ethical dilemmas related
to issues such as expulsion from school or denial of medical
care. One clear message coming out of the AIDS crisis is that
any justification for the segmentation of education systems
is no longer tenable. Countries, communities and children cannot
afford it. |
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Somewhat unique to the widening circle of the HIV/AIDS crisis,
one particular "learning group" for such interventions so far
largely ignored are the grandparents of AIDS-affected children.
As parents become ill and die, their children are increasing
being left with older relatives who often know little about
the disease, and have limited experience with social services
agencies and the school and are less capable or comfortable
in dealing with them. Many are not able or willing to counsel
or manage these grandchildren, to urge them to go to school
or to teach them at home. Adults can, of course, learn and the
family focus again matters. It is a question of reaching out
to them using methods appropriate to their own educational and
work experience, in a language and format they can understand
and with which they can engage. |
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Programmes of continuing in-service teacher support are also
critical, both for experienced teachers facing burn-out and
for new ones who may have been incompletely prepared in the
rush of replacing staff who leave. Curriculum designs and contents
need to be flexible and responsive. They need to provide a "basket"
of learning opportunities to affected children, to reflect the
increasing randomness with which they can participate in school.
Ever younger children are needing to have an education which
provides basic life and livelihood management capacities. Transition
and out-of-school classes; more educative childcare programmes
and youth clubs; child-child and peer learning initiatives;
collaboration with local private sector agencies to create apprenticeship
arrangements are some of the actions being developed to address
this widening range of demands on the system. |
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