Module on Inclusive Education

Inclusive education is a key strategy to ensure that all children benefit from quality education to develop their skills and realize their full potential. Inclusive education involves the process of strengthening conditions in and capacities of education systems so they can cater to all children, regardless of sex, ethnicity, language, socio-economic status, nationality, area of residence and disability status, among other characteristics. Inclusiveness in education involves all aspects of the education system that can facilitate equality in having meaningful and successful participation in those systems.

UNICEF and the Washington Group on Disability Statistics (WG) have developed the Inclusive Education Module (IEM), a set of questions to understand the environmental factors affecting school participation. While the IEM was specifically designed to capture the educational experience of children with disabilities, its questions are applicable to all children, regardless of their disability status. This means that its use will help national decision-makers understand the educational experience of all children.

While not disability-specific, the questions were developed in line with the biopsychosocial model of disability which emphasizes the need to gather information on both individual characteristics as well as environmental barriers to participation for children with long-term impairments. Multiple rounds of testing of different formulations of the questions showed that the best was to identify barriers to education faced by children with disabilities was to ask about characteristics of all aspects of the school environment for children with and without disabilities.

To address inclusion related to disability, the IEM set of questions is designed to be used in conjunction with the UNICEF/WG Child Functioning Module (CFM) . The CFM, released by UNICEF and the Washington Group on Disability Statistics in 2016, provides a population-level estimate of the number of children with functional difficulties. The IEM can be added to any survey that includes the CFM or both can be added to surveys that address education. When used together, the CFM and IEM will enable disaggregation of education characteristics and outcomes by disability status and identify both facilitators and barriers to school participation in order to inform policy to improve full inclusion in education for children with disabilities.