INCLUSIVE VS SPECIAL EDUCATION….

January 8, 2020 is the day of schools resuming after the Christmas holidays…. for many families, this is exciting because although it may not be the beginning of the academic year, it is a new year and that new parent may have just gathered the courage to entrust their child into the care of someone who is not family or supervised nanny at home. For other families, parents can eventually have some peace after the many ‘stop’, ‘don’t do that/go there’, ‘come back here’ and many others similar caution statements….

For yet another group of families, this is the time that they hurt the most because school heads are shutting doors in their faces because ‘they do not have trained personnel or facilities to take care of children like him/her’. I’m talking here about parents raising children with additional educational needs as a result of a disability.

Education is a right for all citizens of school-going age in Ghana, therefore, no person is to be denied access to education because that will be an infringement of their basic right, right? In 2016, Ghana launched the Inclusive Education policy, a guideline that took over three years of broad consultation and reviews to put together. The Inclusive Education policy defines the strategic path of the government to educate individuals with special educational needs based on the 1992 constitution, other relevant national development action plans, strategies and policies. Article 25 (1) of the constitution states that ‘all persons shall have the right to equal educational opportunities and facilities, with a view of achieving the full realization of that right: basic education shall be free, compulsory and available to all.’

For the purposes of this policy, inclusion is defined in its broadest sense as ‘ensuring access and learning for all children, especially those disadvantaged from linguistic, ethnic, gender, geographic or religious minority, from an economically impoverished background, as well as children with special needs, including those who are challenged in any form.’

This policy had some guiding principles, one of which is that, ‘all aspects of education, including methods, assessment, school culture and environments, present opportunities for promoting inclusion, that individual differences among learners are a source of richness and diversity, and not a problem and that regular schools with an inclusive orientation are the most effective means of combating discrimination, building an inclusive society and achieving education for all among others’. (please refer to the Inclusive education policy).

So, from the above premise, education, especially basic education, is supposed to be free, compulsory and available to all, right? Is that the reality on the ground? Then the Inclusive education policy added that access and learning should be ensured for all children….as well as children with special needs, including those who are challenged in any form…hmmmm! Whose responsibility is it to do the ‘ensuring’, Ministry of Education? How are they to do this ‘ensuring’? The wording of our policies are beautiful on the surface but when you sit down to the analysis, it lacks specifics.

How do regular schools get an inclusive orientation? What efforts have we made to ensure that our regular schools are becoming inclusive oriented? Heads of schools are quick to point parents to take their kids to any of the 10 regional special schools, because the children have special needs. Yes, they do but we have a policy that is directing otherwise…

We have about 46 Colleges of Education in this country that has special education as part of their course outlines. Most of these Colleges of Education also have Demonstration schools now. So let’s say that we have 46 Schools that can help trainee teachers practice the special education that they learn as part of their teaching practice before they graduate. If each of these schools has 50 teachers coming out of school every year, that is about 2,300 teachers graduating with basic practical knowledge of special education every year! So what does school heads mean when they say they don’t have the personnel? Oh I get it, the special education course is just theory, similar to everything else…. all talk, no action!

According to Kids Together Inc. (https://www.kidstogether.org/inclusion/benefitsofinclusion.htm) the benefits of inclusive education for students with disabilities include friendships, peer role models for academic, social and behavior skills, increased inclusion in future environments, greater opportunities for interactions, increased parent participation, among others. The benefits for children without disabilities are meaningful friendships, increased appreciation and acceptance of individual differences, respect for all people etc.

Inclusive education is the way forward and it won’t just happen because we have a nice policy on the shelves. Inclusive education is also not ‘planting’ a child with additional education needs in a regular classroom, it takes more than that. We can do better and we should do better! To all teachers reading this, Ayekoo to you in advance for the good work you do.

Share your thoughts on this with me please…

Aunties Darlene, Tina and Ivy, well done already. To the broader Team at Multikids Inclusive Academy, shout out to you all and welcome back to the grind J