The Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) recently released their 2023 rights tracker for Aotearoa New Zealand.
It makes for grim reading. For a wealthy country, Aotearoa New Zealand continues to have low HRMI scores for the rights to education, food, health, and work, despite our country having the resources to achieve much more.
In terms of disability and children, New Zealand’s scores for the right to a good quality education fare poorly when compared to what other countries are achieving with the same level of resources.
![screenshot of the groups NZ as a society is strugglign to adequately provide an education to: Maaori, homeless, and people with disabilities screenshot of the groups NZ as a society is strugglign to adequately provide an education to: Maaori, homeless, and people with disabilities](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa494769a-8f42-4eeb-af99-cff71520fd16_1116x484.png)
There are intersectionalities here too, which is a topic for another post - suffice to say for now that there is much we can do better in this space. When looking across the last decade, New Zealand’s score for the right to education has plateaued and fallen.
This is deeply concerning.
The most recent (2022) UNCRPD monitoring committee specifically singled out the lack of inclusive education opportunities for children with disabilities in their concluding observations:
The Committee recommended that New Zealand develop a comprehensive deinstitutionalisation strategy, with specific timeframes and adequate budgets, to close all residential institutions, including group homes and residential specialist schools.
The response by the New Zealand government was a cabinet paper, titled United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Government response and proposed mechanisms to support implementation.
Section 41.2 of this cabinet paper contains this response by the Ministry of Education:
The UN Committee has provided recent guidelines on deinstitutionalisation. They clearly indicate that schooling settings like residential specialist schools are seen as institutional given that they are only available to children based on impairing factors like behaviour.
The Guidelines also indicate that institutional settings cannot be seen as an authentic choice for students and their families.
The Ministry of Education has noted recommendations related to Residential Specialist Schools subject to further consideration of New Zealand based research and evidence and decisions by the Minister of Education. Unlike other noting recommendations, there is a possibility that these could be changed after the Minister’s consideration.
Yet, directly contravening this recommendation, the Minister of Education recently announced $89 million in funding for three (3) residential specialist schools, primarily for property development and repair. This does nothing to improve the daily reality of the majority of disabled learners who attend mainstream school.
What is inclusive education and why does it matter?
Inclusive education is a fundamental human right for every child with a disability. An inclusive education system is one that accommodates all students whatever their abilities or requirements, and at all levels – pre-school, primary, secondary, tertiary, vocational, and life-long learning.
There are 4 ‘levels’ of education accessibility:
Exclusion: students with disabilities are denied access to education in any form.
Segregation: education of students with disabilities is provided in separate environments designed specifically and only for disabilities, and in isolation from students without disabilities.
Integration: placing students with disabilities in mainstream educational institutions without adaptation and requiring the student to fit in.
Inclusion: education environments that adapt the design and physical structures, teaching methods, and curriculum as well as the culture, policy and practice of education environments so that they are accessible to all students without discrimination.
When disabled learners receive a quality, inclusive education they are more likely to achieve outcomes such as completing secondary schooling and going on to further study and employment. There are a number of flow-on benefits from this, for the individual, for employers, and for society in general.
For example, research on the Special Olympics program utilized the talents of people with intellectual/learning disabilities as co-researchers in the data collection process. The researchers with intellectual/learning disabilities were able to:
Establish an easy rapport with study participants.
Contribute to the comfort of the participants in the study.
Expand on interview questions in novel and different ways.
There are lots of ways to be inclusive; ensuring adequate funding, resourcing, social and practical supports, and access to a variety of training opportunities - all in a sustained systematic fashion, makes a huge difference; to the learner, to the family and whaanau, to the school community, and to wider society.
Our lives are interconnected; we are all better off when our educational services are fully inclusive.