Inclusive ECCD: - Consultative Group on Early Childhood Care and ...

INCLUSION Coordinators’ Notebook, Issue 22
ily to isolation, rather than the inclusion they need.
What children are at risk of having special needs?
There are three recognised categories of risk.
1. Established Risk. These are children who come
into the world “differently-abled”; they have an identifiable
disability when they are born. These include
children who are blind or deaf at birth. Established
Risk also includes children with neurological problems,
and those who are mentally retarded. (Luz Maria
is a child with Established Risk.)
2. Biological Risk. These are children who have a
physical problem at birth that can be remediated. For
example, low-birth weight babies need more support
than normal babies in order to survive and thrive.
With appropriate support they can do well. (Lijembe
is a child at risk biologically.)
3. Environmental Risk. These are children who
may well develop special needs because their environment
causes them harm and/or does not support their
optimal growth and development. Children within
this category live in poverty; they are from ethnic
minorities that do not receive the services available to
others in the country; or they are being raised in conditions
of war and violence. (For example, Farouk.)
In all three categories, early intervention can make
a difference in the child’s quality of life. While intervention
for children with Established Risk will never
make them normal, they can be given support that
helps maximise what they are able to do. For children
in the other two categories, early intervention
can have a significant impact on their ultimate development.
The question arises, How should the needs of these
children be addressed? When children with
Established Risk are identified in resource-rich countries,
their needs are generally addressed through specialised
but separate programmes. In the Majority
World, when children with Established Risk are identified,
there are generally few services available to
them. While many in the Majority World are seeking
to duplicate systems and specialisations that have been
created in resource-rich countries to accommodate
children with Established Risk, in the Special
Education field as a whole there has been a shift in
thinking about how children with special needs
should be served: In both the Majority World and
resource-rich countries, questions are being raised
about how appropriate it is to have specialised-butseparate
services for children with special needs.
In the field of Special Education there is currently
much wider understanding and acceptance of the fact
that every child has a right to as full, independent, and
‘normal’ a life as possible. Many child advocates argue
that, in spite of the fact that some children may be different
physically and/or mentally, all children have a
contribution to make to society. All children have the
right to be included in the activities that constitute daily
life. The policy of inclusion promotes a process that
allows ALL children to participate in ALL programmes.
In applying the philosophy of inclusion in
the field of early childhood care and development, the
goal is to create effective <strong>ECCD</strong> programmes that are
available to all children, rather than creating special
programmes for young children with special needs.
Therein lies the challenge! Since inclusion is a relatively
new approach, however, there are as yet limited
examples of application in actual early childhood
programming.
While it is clear that all three risk categories will
produce children with special needs, Categories 2
and 3 (Biological and Environmental Risk) have been
a primary focus of <strong>ECCD</strong> programmes in the Majority
World in recent years. The area that has not been
addressed adequately are children with Established
Risk. Thus in this article we try to look more specifically
at how to create inclusive <strong>ECCD</strong> programmes
for children with Established Risk.
The basic thesis we will explore in this article is
that quality <strong>ECCD</strong> programmes provide a model
that can be used for the development of inclusive
programmes for children of all ages. It is particularly
important that these programmes be developed for
children from birth onwards, as many of the biological
and environmental conditions that result in children
having special needs can be ameliorated
through early attention.
In our discussion on inclusive <strong>ECCD</strong> programmes,
we offer a brief description of the history of attention
to those who are differently-abled for the purposes
of understanding how we have arrived at the
concept of inclusion. Then we define principles of
programming for inclusive <strong>ECCD</strong> programmes, and
we identify some of the issues related to creating inclusive
early childhood programmes, and, finally, we
determine what we need to be working toward. In
the article that follows, “Moving Toward Inclusion,”
we provide some case studies of the processes that
have been undertaken to create inclusive <strong>ECCD</strong> programmes
in the Majority World.
Origins of the Concept
of Inclusion
A Brief History of
Support for Children
with Special Needs
A review of the history of attention to children with
special needs as it evolved in Europe is illustrative of
the ‘special education’ shifts in resource-rich countries
over the past 200 years. Tuunainen (1997) outlines
five phases. During Phase I (1775–1875), there
was an acknowledgment that there were children
3