Moving from intention to action is key to inclusive education for all

Inclusion benefits everyone

Education is a fundamental human right, yet for many of the 240 million children with disabilities around the world it remains a distant reality.

Children with disabilities are consistently left behind, being almost 50 per cent more likely to have never attended school and 42 per cent less likely to have foundational reading and numeracy skills than their peers without disabilities.

When girls and boys with disabilities also face additional discrimination related to their gender, socio-economic situation, status as a refugee, or other life experience, the barriers to participation in education can be even higher.

Girls with disabilities are the most excluded group of children from primary school to higher education settings.

Educating children with disabilities helps them to develop skills that enhance well-being, allow them to contribute to their communities and increase their earning potential as adults. For example, providing assistive technology to meet the learning needs of children with disabilities increases their later lifetime income by more than US$100,000 (around £75,000) in low and middle income countries.

Diverse classrooms are an opportunity to enrich learning, promote respect for differences and create more just and cohesive societies. To create inclusive learning environments, teachers should be trained to use inclusive teaching methods and taught how to educate students with varied backgrounds and abilities.

When teachers are trained to support different learning needs, the quality of education is enhanced for all learners.

How can education systems become more inclusive by 2030?

Inclusive education requires collaboration across different sectors and stakeholders. Education actors including policymakers, civil society, communities, families, people with disabilities and their representative organisations all have a role to play.

There are multiple pathways to integrate disability inclusion into the broader education agenda through strengthening systems.

At a time when gains in inclusive education are at risk of reversal, all players must take concrete action to ensure disability inclusion remains at the top of the global education agenda. Stakeholders could begin by adopting the following recommendations:

Embed inclusion from the start

Inclusion must be intentional. Inclusive development requires thought at every stage from mainstream disability inclusion to planning, policy-making, financing, practice and reporting. When inclusion is embedded into strategies and programmes, the impact can be substantial. Under its 2025 strategy, GPE supported partner countries to ‘hardwire’ gender equality, which has led to 90 per cent of partnership compacts (countries’ plans to transform their education systems), including a priority reform that takes gender equality into account.

As development agencies update their strategies ahead of the 2030 agenda deadline, they should ensure that approaches including children with disabilities are integrated into strategic objectives, guidance for country-level work, results frameworks and asks to donors.

Support the collection and uptake of data and evidence

Governments require accurate data to identify inequities in education access, participation and learning.

Data on students with disabilities, both in school and out of school, must be collected systematically, and disaggregated by factors such as gender, displacement/refugee status and geography. This allows a more nuanced understanding of the barriers faced by different groups of students and enables evidence-based, targeted interventions.

Education management information systems should be strengthened to incorporate data on children with disabilities. This disaggregated data should be used to plan education reform, inform individualised education plans and targeted initiatives for learners with disabilities, as well as enable more equitable resource allocation.

International agencies must support efforts to strengthen education data systems in partner countries. They should also use disaggregated data to inform their own programmes, integrate data on children with disabilities into results frameworks, include disability specific targets and build an evidence base of what works to make systems more inclusive.

Support equitable financial allocations

The huge financing gap for education makes it imperative that limited resources are used strategically and reach the most marginalised. Inclusive schools help improve the efficiency and ultimately the cost-effectiveness of the entire education system.

The costs of making systems inclusive are often less than expected and a significant portion of expenditure benefits all learners. For example, accessible infrastructure and an inclusive curriculum benefit all children.

Decisions about how to allocate limited financial resources (whether domestic or international) should not only assess the cost of each intervention, but also whether results are distributed fairly.

International agencies can also support governments to design, implement and evaluate equity-based budgeting, and ensure that the lessons learned and evidence gained from these experiences are disseminated widely.

Disability markers, such as the one by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – Development Assistance Committee, can be used to track the extent to which aid is inclusive.

By adopting a disability marker, international agencies can support a robust and transparent system to track and report on education expenditure, and to assess how equitable these investments are.

Engage diverse voices to promote mutual accountability and monitoring of inclusive education

Governments and international organisations should adopt a learning mindset, engaging continually with organisations of people with disabilities (OPDs) and others to strengthen approaches to inclusion.

They should encourage engagement in national and international education platforms, such as local education groups, and take steps to make processes inclusive for people with disabilities, who are often best placed to advise on the barriers they face to access quality education.

In Zambia, Sightsavers worked with the Zambia Federation of Disability Organisations to empower children with disabilities to access education. Through community engagement, Sightsavers supported communities in Chinsali to identify children with disabilities and encourage them to enrol in their local school, exceeding the target for enrolments.

The project also helped local stakeholders develop skills to advocate for the rights of children with disabilities. This led to an increase in the number of local OPDs from three to 23 in Muchinga Province. Through their advocacy, the OPDs ensured newly constructed classrooms were accessible.

The journey to inclusion is different for every country. For more ideas about how to strengthen inclusive education in every context, read the joint recommendations that were made by more than 20 organisations ahead of this year’s GDS.

This article was first published by GPE on 17 April 2025.