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

INCLUSION Coordinators’ Notebook, Issue 22
readiness. These programmes have a major economic value for
the individual, the family and the society in preventing the
aggravation of disabling conditions. Programmes at this level
should recognise the principle of inclusion and be developed in
a comprehensive way by combining pre-school activities and
early childhood health care.
Salamanca World Conference on Special Needs Education
Article 53
Thus there is clearly an internationally-endorsed
mandate to create inclusive programmes for children
with special needs, and to develop those programmes
for children from birth onwards.
■ There is a recognition of the limits of a
medical model to meet the needs of all
young children.
With the increase in resources going to children
with special needs, and a greater understanding of
how the body works, in the 1950s there was a move
in resource-rich countries to greater and more finite
specialisation. Categories were created based on a
medical definition of a child’s disability. This has led
to a tendency to perceive problems in accordance
with the psycho-medical paradigm, the result of
which is to identify the child by his/her classification.
This narrow focus often leads to segregation
and exclusion of the child from learning environments.
As noted by Ainscow (1994), there is a
“growing understanding that handicapping conditions
are much more widely spread, more varied and
more complex than systems of categorisation based
largely on medical criteria tend to indicate”. (4)
Children’s behaviour and characteristics are more accurately
reflected on a continuum than in discrete
categories. Furthermore, diversity among all children
is normal.
What a paradox: in order to help, we accept labelling,
discrimination, and exclusion which in many cases can
cause severe problems to the children and to their
families. Tuunainen 1997, 22
■ There is a move to a primary, rather than
curative, health-care focus in the Alma-Ata
Declaration, 1978.
The concept of primary health care had an impact
on the provision of support for children with special
needs in several ways. First, the primary health care
position advocates that it is more important to bring
about even small improvements in the health of the
entire population rather than to provide the highest
standard of care for a privileged few. Second, it
recognises that non-professionals with appropriate
but minimal training can provide crucial services.
(O’Toole 1991, 13)
The implications of the public health approach for
children with special needs suggests that, rather than
allocating scarce resources to a few, a broader range
of services should be made available to the many.
The model of using specialists to deliver one-on-one
service to individual children has proven to be a very
expensive model. Through the inclusive approach,
the role of professionals is to train caregivers and
others in the community to create a supportive environment,
that may or may not require some technical
inputs from a specialist. For the most part the
basic skills and strategies for dealing with diverse
needs can be transferred to those who have the most
constant contact with the child.
■ There is a move from a model that focuses
solely on the child, to one which sees the
child in a wider social, economic and political
context.
There is a move away from the medical model
which isolates children, to a social, ethical and economic
understanding of what it means to have special
needs. This view arises from a realisation that a
child’s progress can be understood only in respect to
particular circumstances, tasks, and sets of relationships.
As summarised by Ainscow (1994), there is “an
increasing recognition that the difficulties encountered
by young people in their general development
are likely to arise as much from disadvantageous circumstances
as from individual characteristics.” (4)
For children of primary-school age, one of the
“disadvantageous circumstances” may well be the
school system. Children with special needs related
to learning constitute 90% of the children with special
needs within the school-age population. (UNESCO
1997) It is quite likely that the formal education system
fosters an increase in the number of children
with special needs, rather than meeting their needs
and supporting children’s development.
■ There is a recognition of the limits of
segregated approaches.
Specialisation has led to one-on-one therapies,
where the specialist works with the child for a very
limited amount of time during a given week (perhaps
as little as an hour). This attention is often provided
out of the context of the child’s daily life, does not
always allow for the transfer of skills to those who
are part of the child’s environment, and does not
take into account children’s needs to be part of a social
group. Social learning is a critical part of children’s
experience. The social isolation experienced
as a result of segregated programmes can have a negative
effect on the child’s development. As noted by
Holdsworth (1997), “Exclusion in the early years can
reinforce exclusion throughout life.” (9)
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