Inclusive Education

The Right to Education (RTE) Act mandates 25% reservation in private institutions for children from marginalised communities, including children with disability. While the laws reinforces APD’s approach to promoting inclusive education for socio-economically challenged children with disability (CWD), the reality on the ground presents a grim picture.

Despite the Right to Education, many children with special needs are unable to receive an education because of financial hardships, inaccessibility to mainstream schools and lack of sensitisation to their needs. In this inclusive education program, differently abled children enrol into regular schools while receive the specialised attention and care (therapy, corrective surgeries and medical intervention) they need to progress. APD works with the schools to develop supportive infrastructure, trained teachers, customized curriculum and study materials.

We have got over 46,600 specially-abled children to school since 1972.

Shradhanjali Integrated School (SIS) is a recognised primary school up to Class VII under the SSLC Board, Karnataka, with a capacity to educate 200 children. The school maintains an 80:20 ratio of Children with Disability (CWDs) and non-disabled children to promote inclusion. SIS focuses on activity-oriented learning, promoting sports, arts and crafts to ensure all-round development SIS also provides books, uniforms, healthcare, rehabilitation, and adapted learning techniques.SIS promotes inclusive education and this model is much needed to sensitise the mainstream schools to accept the inclusive education system convincingly. This model has ensured 90% mainstreaming with most children moving on to regular or special schools of assistive technology and using individualized education plan helps in giving the required focus and attention to each child, basis their comprehension levels and other limiting factors caused due to disability. There are significant other needs of CwDs which needs to be catered to in order to make them productive assets for India. One of the first needs is to ensure that the progression of the disability is controlled by providing the requisite therapy, medical advice, aids and appliances. APD ensures this by providing these on a regular basis. Parents of the students are not in a position to afford significant transportation needs for coming to school. SIS provides safe, secure and friendly transportation facility from the doorstep of these CwDs using three buses. SIS also runs a kitchen which provides nutritious mid-day meal to these students on a daily basis. Our beneficiary families are very poor and our aim is to always ensure that there is no dropout due to financial reasons.

The Association of People with Disability (APD) is a non-governmental organization working in the field of disability for the past fifty-nine years. APD aims to empower persons with disability to become active, contributing members of the society. At any given time through it's wide-ranging institutional and district development programmes, APD directly touches the lives of approximately 30,000 Persons with Disability (PWDs) and builds the capacity of partners, government officials and caregivers.

The community-based programs include therapeutic services, mobility aids, integrated education, advocacy, horticulture, mental health, and livelihood.

Operational areas:

• Education

• Livelihood

• Early intervention, spinal cord injury and community mental health

• Strategy, advocacy and resource support to organisations. (RSO)

Our “District Disability and Development Programme” is operating in 13 districts of Belagavi and Kalburgi regions of Karnataka and Bengaluru. Here we work with government agencies, self-help groups and other stakeholders on identification, assessment, referral, capacity building, lobbying and implementation of disability rights, to encourage the system to make much-needed provisions for people with disability. Currently, APD is working with over 30,000 PWDs in these three districts.

The impact on learning is being assessed through various indicators, rubrics and tools. The assessment of the children with CP and learning disability is being done with the help of the worksheets, games and the activity sheets uploaded in the digital board. Even the hearing impaired children are being assessed with the help of the videos and the sheets uploaded. The assessment of each child is being recorded in the individual register of the teachers. The use of the interactive board is not only focused on to the scoring of marks in the exam, but also to update the students with the events of the world.

It has been our experience that when an appropriate media (e.g. audio-visuals) is integrated into the curriculum to complement the traditional method, higher learning outcomes in terms of achievement scores result. The students being taught with the audio-visual aided instructions achieved better than students who were taught with traditional methods