Education: Disability Financing

Lord Bruce of Bennachie Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

I am very happy to give that assurance, and I pay tribute to the noble Lord for his work on the steering group of this very valuable report. We are still digesting a lot of its conclusions—but, undoubtedly, the one that we should focus on is that 90% of children in the developing world with disabilities are not in school. Clearly, that is contrary to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and to at least goal 4—and probably goals 8 and 10—of the sustainable development goals. It is something that we are committed to responding to, and I will be very happy to speak to the noble Lord afterwards to outline some of the thoughts that we have in this area about what we hope to bring forward in response to the report.

[Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)]

In response to the report on disability from the International Development Committee three years ago, the Government adopted a disability framework. What progress is being made in evaluating the data to identify how many disabled children in particular are affected in countries where DfID has programmes and to what extent is DfID targeting them, as well as on employing disabled staff in the department to ensure that there is a real connection between the rights of disabled people and the need to serve their needs?