Education for Young People with Disabilities (UK Aid)

Tom Brake Excerpts

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Westminster Hall

[The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Tom Brake)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am indeed playing a rather unusual role today, but it is refreshing to be taking part in a consensual debate, with cross-party agreement about what DFID does. I wish the same could have been said about our debates on the Bill that became the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014, for which I was one of the responsible Ministers. The House’s consideration of the Recall of MPs Bill has also not involved the unanimous cross-party support demonstrated in this debate.

We heard about the background of the participants to the debate, which I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) on securing. I was interested to hear about his past life as a teacher. Indeed, the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) was also a teacher. I have not been a teacher, although both my parents were at some point in their working careers, so we are all in good company. Given that this is a cross-party, consensual debate, I would like to acknowledge the role that the Labour Government played in helping us to get to our current position in respect of international development, our spending on it and the prominent role we play on it internationally.

I do not think that I am going to be the next Clem Attlee, but those of us in this select group of Members of Parliament can play an important role in making sure the priority that successive Governments have placed on international development remains. There is an awful lot of pressure on the international development budget, and one prominent party—the UK Independence party—would, if it had its way and was represented in large numbers in this place, simply seek to do away with it, or at least a significant part of it, even though one can only imagine what impact that would have on things such as Ebola. I therefore welcome the fact that we are having a consensual debate. I also congratulate my hon. Friend on the role he plays as co-chair of the all-party group, which monitors these issues.

My right hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for International Development is in Bangladesh on a departmental visit, and my right hon. Friend the Minister of State, Department for International Development, is in Berlin at a conference on the Syrian refugee crisis. They have asked me to pass on their apologies for not being able to attend this important debate, but the issue is a particular priority for the Department, and my right hon. Friends will pay close attention to the debate and respond to any points that I do not have a chance to deal with. If I have any credentials at all in terms of my ability to respond to the debate, they will be that I was the Liberal Democrat international development spokesman for a number of years.

In the global context, disability continues, as we have heard, to be one of the primary causes of educational disadvantage and exclusion, creating the largest single group of girls and boys who remain out of school. Even in those countries close to achieving universal primary enrolment, children with disabilities continue to miss out on education and, as a consequence, on opportunities to access meaningful employment and a sustainable route out of poverty. My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion cited an example of a school with a ramp, but said that in practice, however, if any child managed to get into that school in a wheelchair, they would not physically be able to get into the classroom because of overcrowding. Anyone, including me, who has been on such visits abroad—in my case to Ghana—will know that a very basic school with little more than mud floors will not be an ideal environment for someone with a disability to access education.

What is positive is that all Members have probably been lobbied in the past few months by school children in their constituencies about the need to ensure that all young people, including those with a disability, go to school. I certainly have, and I congratulate St Mary’s in Carshalton, which joined the Send All My Friends to School campaign. The school asked me to go along and receive the cut-out figures the children had created of pupils and to send them off to the Prime Minister. I did that, and I am pleased that he responded to the pupils’ letters about that important campaign.

The challenges involved in ensuring that disabled children can learn are fourfold. First, responsibility for children with disabilities in the countries in which we work is divided across education, health and social protection, which often results in a focus on social welfare and special treatment, rather than on inclusion and equity. Secondly, there are often school-level barriers, including physical access, inflexible and inappropriate curriculums, inadequate teacher training—that has been mentioned frequently in the debate—and discriminatory attitudes that reinforce the marginalisation of children with disabilities. Again, my hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion referred to that. It is not simply a question of providing accessible schools; it is also about changing the mentality of some of the people responsible for ensuring that children get to school and, once there, are fully involved in the educational process.

[Mr Mark Williams]

On the first of those points and the issue of cross-departmental responsibilities, and given the visits that my right hon. Friend has made to Ghana—hon. Members have no doubt visited other countries where this would apply—does he share my frustration that in the Government Departments of countries I have been to there is all too often a silo mentality, meaning that that the issue gets lost? Kind and generous words can be heard in health, social services and education Departments, but action on the ground is impeded by a failure to work together. I should be grateful for anything we can do to encourage countries to leave the silo mentality behind.

[Tom Brake]

I agree entirely, but even in a well-run Government such as ours, there is still always a risk that there will be a silo mentality and that Departments will not communicate with each other as would entirely befit them. There are ways for us to help, but we have not managed to perfect that even within UK borders.

The third of the four challenges is that we struggle to understand the extent of the problem, because of a lack of disaggregated data by sex, type of disability and level of functioning. That makes educational planning for inclusive learning extremely difficult. Linked to that, the evidence base on learning outcomes for inclusive education for children with disabilities focuses largely on high-income countries—particularly the US and UK—and there are challenges in identifying good-quality evidence from low and middle-income countries. Finally, there has been a lack of the political will and commitment needed to drive improvements in learning for children with disabilities, and that has limited the ability of Governments, donors and others to assess, monitor and address the situation of those children.

I am pleased to say that the UK is at the forefront of seeking to address those challenges. Through DFID’s work, the UK is committed to ensuring that all children are able to complete a full cycle of quality education, and we are increasingly focusing on the most marginalised as part of the “leave no one behind” agenda, which includes a special focus on children with disabilities. In September 2013, we made two public commitments: first, to ensure that all directly funded school construction is fully accessible; and, secondly, to work with partners to improve data on children with disabilities and special educational needs in and out of education. My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion and the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), made the point that getting quality data is one of the keys. It is not possible to deal with a challenge without knowing the scale of it, and it is fair to say that at the moment we do not.

Across DFID’s global and country programmes we are supporting a range of activities to support access to education and learning for children with disabilities. Depending on the context, we are working through either partner Governments or local and international partners. In the majority of our programmes we support an inclusive approach to ensure that all children can be educated in mainstream schools. In our most mature and innovative programmes, such as Pakistan’s Punjab programme, we are looking at new partnerships with respect to children with learning disabilities. The Pakistan office is currently assessing the feasibility of implementing our school construction standards in the £104 million reconstruction and rehabilitation programme. Current projections indicate that 50,000 classrooms may be reconstructed or rehabilitated. That work is really about extending the present programme of ensuring that all new schools are fully accessible. DFID’s policy on accessible construction has since triggered similar commitments among other global partners, including UNICEF.

Often children can suffer many types of disadvantage. DFID’s girls’ education challenge, which targets the most marginalised girls, is funding disability-focused projects in Uganda, Kenya and Sierra Leone, totalling more than £9 million. My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion referred to that and asked whether DFID would be able to create a disability education challenge fund. I suppose the answer is that the girls’ fund is clearly a new model, which has not been tried before, to ensure that 1 million of the most marginalised girls get the quality education that they deserve by 2016. As it is a new programme, its effectiveness will need to be assessed, and we perhaps need to get through that challenge before we embark on a new disability education challenge fund. However, I shall draw the proposal to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Under-Secretary.

My hon. Friend talked about disaggregated data. There is a critical gap with respect to evidence and data on disability prevalence, on which DFID is focusing. As he will know, the Government hosted an important conference jointly with the UN on 23 October to improve disability statistics. During the conference we committed to developing guidance on disability data disaggregation with the UN’s Washington group on disability statistics. We are certainly working towards the goal that my hon. Friend set out of ensuring that disaggregated data are available, and that we can identify where the key problems are and what is effective in ensuring that education reaches the most disadvantaged. To improve education-specific data, we are supporting UNESCO’s institute for statistics in regularly publishing education indicators disaggregated by specific population groups, including people with disabilities, and in developing new standards for school censuses and surveys related to marginalised populations.

As hon. Members know, the true benefits of education accrue only if children achieve good learning outcomes. Our recently published inclusive learning topic guide brings together for the first time evidence on what works in inclusive learning for children aged 3 to 12 years in low and middle-income countries. It focuses on the varied learning needs of children who either are not benefiting from the learning opportunities available to them, or do not have the opportunity to engage in learning at all, owing to their impairments and disabilities. It explores the role of inclusive approaches in contributing to inclusive societies and, ultimately, inclusive growth, and addresses some of the contested and debated issues around terminology, discrimination, and segregated and inclusive schooling. The topic guide supplements our guidance note on educating children with disabilities, and both resources are available freely to all policy makers.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion and the hon. Member for North West Durham asked what was being done to train staff in inclusion. DFID is rolling out training to its in-country staff on the inclusive learning topic guide. Once the framework has been developed, we will consider how we can continue to upskill our country staff. That is work in progress.

At the global level, we are working closely with the World Bank, the Global Partnership for Education, UNICEF, Australia, Germany, Sweden, the United States Agency for International Development and Norway to ensure that more countries eligible for GPE funds implement an inclusive approach to education, with a specific focus on children with disabilities. Our influencing efforts made disability a priority for the June replenishment of the GPE. Twelve countries pledged at that event to do more for children with disabilities, including Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Ghana.

My right hon. Friend the Under-Secretary is an unrelenting champion for children with disabilities and I know that she raises the issue at every opportunity, in every meeting, with ministerial counterparts when she travels to partner countries. I do not know, but I imagine that she has travelled to Nigeria recently. My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion raised the issue of disability not being mentioned in the business case for the Nigeria education programme. I reassure him that the programme is in line with DFID’s three priorities in education: improving learning, focusing on girls and ensuring that the most marginalised can learn. DFID business cases are used primarily to assess the evidence on and financial basis of programmes, and do not contain all the detailed information on programme delivery. Disability will clearly be part of the programme.

The International Development Committee’s recent inquiry into DFID’s work on disability recognised that we are doing some impressive work already, but that more ambition would be transformational. DFID is committed to developing a framework to strengthen our work on disability further, and it will be published on 3 December—I think that my hon. Friend referred to the end of November.

My hon. Friend asked how the framework would be implemented. As he knows, we have made two public commitments: first, about accessible schooling; and, secondly, about improving disability data. Through the second commitment, we are working to develop disability-sensitive indicators, which currently do not exist, to measure progress on disability-sensitive education and inclusive learning. That is how we will be able to monitor that things are, in fact, working, and that this is not just fine words without matched fine action, to which the hon. Member for Wirral South referred.

I thank the hon. Lady for her support. I am sure that the teachers present will have given her top marks for her presentation, so I do not think she needed to worry about that. I hope I have answered most of her questions, but I might need to return to her point about whether DFID has the skills base to develop disability policy. If I do not get inspiration about that point, I will make sure that my right hon. Friend the Under-Secretary hears that that is a particular concern, and I am sure that she will want to respond directly. As my right hon. Friend makes disability issues a priority, however, I am sure that she would not want a situation in which there were not the necessary skills in her Department to deal with that critical issue.

As the 20th anniversary of the Salamanca framework for action passes, we must ensure that co-ordinated action from Governments, donors and other key stakeholders is able to secure better access to schooling and inclusive learning outcomes for disabled children, as well as wider benefits for inclusive societies. The economic and social costs of exclusion are high. Many low and middle-income economies suffer greater losses from maintaining large out-of-school populations than they would from increasing public spending to achieve universal primary enrolment. It is clear that enrolling all children in basic education is a productive and smart investment. The economic benefits of education are well established and the inclusive growth to which it can contribute is, by definition, grounded in societies that are open, equitable, tolerant and just.

As I have just received inspiration, I can say in response to the hon. Member for Wirral South that DFID has increased the specialist headquarters staff to two. We also have a secondee into the Australian Government, who are world leaders on disability policy. There has been some strengthening of the team but, none the less, my right hon. Friend the Under-Secretary may want to respond to that point in writing.

Recognising and valuing diversity within learning communities and welcoming all children into the classroom must be pivotal components in all learning strategies. Leaving no one behind at school and in wider society is essential not only to a sustainable approach to development and poverty eradication, but to the attainment of the freedoms, dignity, tolerance and respect that are fundamental to our common humanity.