Universal Primary Education for differently abled

Needs attention: Those concerned with the education of differently abled children are worried about the World Bank report which has come down rather heavily on the quality of education in schools in India saying students are not able to even read and do subtraction.

Amidst the legal battle over the implementation of the Uniform, Equitable Education System (Samacheer Kalvi Thittam) and its impact on the quality of education, there is another reason to be worried about the quality of education in schools.

The World Bank’s Global Monitoring Report for 2011 has made a critical observation on the quality of education in India.

Under ‘Goal 2: Achieve Universal Primary Education’ the bank says, “In India, even though most children of primary school age were enrolled in schools, 35 per cent of them could not read a simple paragraph and 41 per cent could not do a simple subtraction.”

The bank also goes on to say: “The disconnect between spending and outcomes partly reflects the failure of spending on human development to reach poor people. Public spending on education is generally believed to be an effective means to reach the poor, but empirical evidence fails to support this assumption.”

This cannot be any truer. The report has worried many academics, more so those who work in the disability sector.

Their concern is that if the state of education in mainstream school is as the bank has pointed out, then the quality of education imparted to differently abled children will be worse.

“If students cannot read a simple paragraph and do a simple subtraction, then what is to be expected of special children, who study in the very schools,” asks M.N.G. Mani, Secretary General, International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment.

Differently abled children study in mainstream schools as per a Government of India programme under Sarva Siksha Abiyan (education for all) to “integrate” the children with regular students. In the schools the differently abled children study, they have the assistance of special education teachers.

In the 35 States and Union Territories there are 27.80 lakh children with special needs. They are attended to by 10,014 teachers with special education qualification. This works out to a teacher catering to the needs of as many as 270 children with special needs.

Mr. Mani says assuming that around 20 per cent of the 27 lakh children need teachers’ assistance on a day-to-day basis, there are only 10,014 teachers for the 55,000 students. The student-teacher ratio works out to 55:1, which is high by any given standards.

“Imagine a special education teacher attending to the challenging needs of 55 differently abled children.”

He suggests that there are two ways the Government of India can address the issue – one, by opening up special education to a large number of people or, two, incorporating special education papers in regular education programmes so that all those who pass out of teacher education courses are qualified to teach children with special needs as well.

“It is important that the Government does so because earlier the intervention a child gets, the better will be his or her progress.”