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The international symposium "Ensuring the right to quality inclusive education for persons with disabilities: From commitment to action", co-organized by UNESCO, the Leonard Cheshire, and the Ministry of Education of Portugal brought together a wide range of stakeholders across the globe to discuss progress, successes achieved and challenges to ensure full participation and access to quality learning opportunities for all learners.

The symposium aims were to:

• review persisting, as well as new challenges, due to the COVID-19 pandemic that are hindering the fulfilment of the right to inclusive education for learners with disabilities.
• facilitate the exchange of experiences on factors influencing successful inclusive policies and practices for learners with disabilities and strengthen dialogue and cooperation amongst stakeholders at policy and practice levels.
• explore how the inclusion of learners with disabilities in inclusive settings can be more effectively addressed by governments with regards to the commitments of Article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the CRPD General Comment 4 on article 24, and Sustainable Development 4 SDG 4, to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

The programme included:

Opening session - Accelerating efforts towards inclusive education for learners with disabilities. (Video recording: English - French - Spanish)

Session 1 - From legislation to inclusive practices: Re-designing policy frameworks, funding and monitoring arrangements across sectors for inclusive education for learners with disabilities. (Video recording: English - French - Spanish)

Session 2 - Revisiting the teaching and learning process to ensure access and participation of learners with disabilities.

Session 3 - Moving towards inclusive and safe learning environments, including by addressing violence and bullying against learners with disabilities.
 

Closing session - Rebuilding a Stronger Global Disability Inclusive Education System post COVID-19. (Video recording: English - French - Spanish)

The 2020 GEM Report assesses progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on education and its ten targets, as well as other related education targets in the SDG agenda. The Report also addresses inclusion in education, drawing attention to all those excluded from education, because of background or ability. The Report is motivated by the explicit reference to inclusion in the 2015 Incheon Declaration, and the call to ensure an inclusive and equitable quality education in the formulation of SDG 4, the global goal for education. It reminds us that, no matter what argument may be built to the contrary, we have a moral imperative to ensure every child has a right to an appropriate education of high quality.

The Report also explores the challenges holding us back from achieving this vision and demonstrates concrete policy examples from countries managing to tackle them with success. These include differing understandings of the word inclusion, lack of teacher support, absence of data on those excluded from education, inappropriate infrastructure, persistence of parallel systems and special schools, lack of political will and community support, untargeted finance, uncoordinated governance, multiple but inconsistent laws, and policies that are not being followed through.

CBM’s Disability and Gender Analysis Toolkit has been developed to support staff, partners and allies in strengthening capacity to address systemic and deeply entrenched discriminatory practices and specifically to meet their Programme Quality Standards. It provides practical tools for stronger disability and gender analysis to inform planning, practice and systems. The toolkit provides practical assessment templates and guidance for individuals, organisations and programmes to identify strengths and gaps and to develop focussed action plans to improve practice.

Scoping Progress in Education (SCOPE) brings together administrative data, household surveys, learning assessments and education finance from various data producers, notably the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, to explore the progress made towards SDG 4, the global education goal.

It complements the printed edition of the Global Education Monitoring Report, enabling users to interact with the data to understand the achievements and challenges of countries and regions as they aim to reach the targets. Shareable and downloadable, users can create images and data files to explore further, print, or use online or in presentations

Providing evidence-based research and information on effective teaching techniques, the toolkit offers information on how to teach early literacy skills to students with different categories of disabilities, including how to best apply these theoretical approaches in practice in Low- and Moderate- Income Country (LMIC) settings. Although the toolkit provides information on multiple aspects of literacy (grammar, spelling and writing), the techniques and interventions focus on the concept of reading as taught in the early years of primary school.

Specifically, the toolkit describes:

• the phases of literacy for students with disabilities
• supports and services that can be used to gain literacy skills
• specific instructional techniques using the framework of UDL (Universal Design for Learning)
• suggestions to monitor students’ progress
• funding practices and suggestions for a phased approach to move towards inclusive education
• a self-reflection checklist that covers many of the items in the toolkit to help educational systems recognize possible gaps and areas for improvement

“The 2019 GEM Report continues its assessment of progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on education and its ten targets, as well as other related education targets in the SDG agenda.

Its main focus is on the theme of migration and displacement. It presents evidence on the implications of different types of migration and displacement for education systems but also the impact that reforming education curricula and approaches to pedagogy and teacher preparation can have on addressing the challenges and opportunities posed by migration and displacement. It gives voice to experiences in host and home communities.

With the help of case studies, it illustrates approaches which work and could be scaled up. In this way, it aims to be a tool for practitioners. It will make the case for investing in education of good quality in rural areas suffering from depopulation and in slum areas suffering from large population inflows; in countries with high rates of emigration and those with high rates of immigration; in short-term refugee emergencies and in protracted crises. Its analysis, conclusions and recommendations advance the aims of SDG 4 and its call to leave no one behind.”

"The present report has been prepared in response to Economic and Social Council resolution 2015/4, in which the Council requested the Secretary-General to submit to the Commission for Social Development, at its fifty-fifth session, a report on the implementation of that resolution, including the Chair’s summary of the discussions and the proposals made during the multi-stakeholder panel discussion on disability at the Commission’s fifty-fourth session. The report provides an overview of the inclusion of disability in existing international development frameworks, as well as of the status of persons with disabilities in social and economic development. It notes that, worldwide, persons with disabilities are still at a disadvantage in many aspects of their participation in development processes, mechanisms and institutions. The report presents the information concerning: (a) the review and follow-up mechanisms of relevant international frameworks on disability-inclusive development; (b) the role of the Commission for Social Development in mainstreaming disability in the development agenda; (c) summary of the multi-stakeholder panel discussion on disability held at the fifty-fourth session of the Commission for Social Development; and (d) conclusions and recommendations"

A compendium of papers from various stakeholders setting out “established and maintained effective coordination mechanisms” for the high-level discussions on sustainable development and the post-2015 development agenda

High-level political forum on sustainable development, Convened under the auspices of the Economic and Social Council, 26 June-8 July 2015

E/HLPF/2015/2

UNESCO together with UNICEF, the World Bank, UNFPA, UNDP, UN Women and UNHCR organized the World Education Forum 2015 in Incheon, Republic of Korea, from 19 – 22 May 2015, hosted by the Republic of Korea. Over 1,600 participants from 160 countries, including over 120 Ministers, heads and members of delegations, heads of agencies and officials of multilateral and bilateral organizations, and representatives of civil society, the teaching profession, youth and the private sector, adopted the Incheon Declaration for Education 2030, which sets out a new vision for education for the next fifteen years.

Towards 2030: a new vision for education

Our vision is to transform lives through education, recognizing the important role of education as a main driver of development and in achieving the other proposed SDGs. We commit with a sense of urgency to a single, renewed education agenda that is holistic, ambitious and aspirational, leaving no one behind. This new vision is fully captured by the proposed SDG 4 “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” and its corresponding targets. It is transformative and universal, attends to the ‘unfinished business’ of the EFA agenda and the education-related MDGs, and addresses global and national education challenges. It is inspired by a humanistic vision of education and development based on human rights and dignity; social justice; inclusion; protection; cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity; and shared responsibility and accountability. We reaffirm that education is a public good, a fundamental human right and a basis for guaranteeing the realization of other rights. It is essential for peace, tolerance, human fulfilment and sustainable development. We recognize education as key to achieving full employment and poverty eradication. We will focus our efforts on access, equity and inclusion, quality and learning outcomes, within a lifelong learning approach.

Action and commitments required to implement the agenda are presented.