Education: Disability Financing

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Low of Dalston]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the #CostingEquity report on disability responsive education financing, published by the International Disability and Development Consortium, which outlines the steps and resources necessary to deliver the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 on inclusive education.

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Lord Bates) (Con)]

My Lords, we welcome the IDDC’s report. Disability has been underprioritised in the past and, as a result, insufficient global resources have been allocated to education. We recognise the challenge and are steadily taking steps to scale up our own response and encourage others to do more.

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for that Reply. The Minister will be aware that more than 32 million children with disabilities in low and middle-income countries are out of school and denied an education. That is why 40 NGO leaders have endorsed a joint call to action to invest in disability-inclusive education, in which they have agreed to make education for children with disabilities in developing countries a top priority and to urge donors to increase funding for inclusive education and make disability inclusiveness a necessary criterion for accessing funding for all education programmes and projects. Can the Minister assure the House—and from his Reply I am very hopeful that he can—that the UK Government will follow the same approach and support these recommendations?

[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.