Inclusive education: Global priority, collective responsibility
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Inclusive education: Global priority, collective responsibility Yao Ydo1
Accepted: 27 October 2020 / Published online: 20 November 2020 © UNESCO IBE 2020
Just over ten years ago, a special issue of Prospects was dedicated to the theme of inclusive education. It appeared right after the 48th session of the International Conference on Education (ICE), with its theme “Inclusive Education: The Way of the Future”. This conference, which took place in Geneva in 2008, and was organized by UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE), focused on ways of providing education to the hundreds of millions of people around the world with little or no access to learning opportunities. The long-term objective was to support UNESCO Member States in providing the social and political conditions which every person needs in order to exercise their human right to access, take an active part in and learn from educational opportunities. During the conference, ministers, government officials, and representatives of non-governmental organizations discussed the importance of broadening the concept of inclusion to reach all children, under the assumption that every learner matters equally and has the right to receive effective educational opportunities (Opertti et al. 2014). In this way, greater clarity was achieved regarding the idea of inclusive education.
Inclusion and equity In many countries, inclusive education is still thought of as an approach to serving children with disabilities within general education settings. Following the lead provided by the IBE conference in 2008, however, it is increasingly seen more broadly as a principle that supports and welcomes diversity among all learners. This means that the aim is to eliminate the exclusion that is a consequence of attitudes and responses to diversity in race, social class, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, migrant status, and ability. As such, it starts from the belief that education is a basic human right and the foundation for
* Yao Ydo [email protected] 1
UNESCO International Bureau of Education, P.O. Box 199, 1211 Geneva 20, Switzerland
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a more just society—hence the more recent emphasis on equity, which implies a concern with fairness. Moving forward, 2016 was a particularly important year in relation to the inclusion agenda. Building on the Incheon Declaration agreed at the World Forum on Education in May 2015, it saw the publication by UNESCO of the Education 2030 Framework for Action (UNESCO 2015). This emphasizes inclusion and equity as laying the foundations for quality education. It also stresses the need to address all forms of exclusion and marginalization, disparities and inequalities in access, participation, and learning processes and outcomes. The importance of including children with disabilities is an essential strand within this international policy agenda. This was stressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations 2006), which states: “The right t
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