Equal Access

The Step by Step program promotes and supports equal access to quality education for minorities. Teachers in Central Asia incorporate minority cultures into classrooms. Programs in Southern Europe address the needs of refugee children and the fallout from war.

Roma are the largest ethnic minority in Europe, numbering over eight million and stretching across many national borders. Most of the three million Roma children in Europe do not have access to quality education. About one third of Roma children are assigned to ìSpecial Schoolsî based on culturally biased testing and receive an education designed for the mentally handicapped. Another third are not enrolled in school at all. The great majority of Roma drop out even before completing primary school.

In thirteen countries with significant Roma populations, Step by Step is proving that Roma children can succeed in supportive educational environments. In Step by Step classrooms, Roma children are treated like all other children, and given the opportunity to reach their full potential. As a result of high expectations, Roma children achieve academic outcomes similar to their mainstream peers. Roma teaching assistants are placed in classrooms to facilitate the learning of the majority language, to serve as a bridge between the school and the Roma community, and to bring the Roma language and culture into the classroom. Governments have acknowledged the success of Step by Stepís Roma initiatives, often resulting in major Roma education policy changes.

Effective teaching and learning for minority-language children in preschool

Materials on supporting second language learning in kindergartens  were published in 2006 within the framework of a Socrates Programme Comenius 2.1. project "Effective teaching and learning for minority-language children in preschool" funded by the European Union. 

They consists of

• Teachers' Guide "Speaking for Diversity: Promoting Multilingualism in Early Childhood Education"
• Training Modules  for adult educators  
• Compendium of learning materials

The project as well as materials  were designed and implemented by ISSA, its national members in Estonia (Hea Algus) and Slovakia (Nadacia Skola Dokoran) with input from international partners from Italy (Cooperazione per lo sviluppo dei Paesi Emergenti/COSPE) and the Netherlands (Sardes Education Services).

The materials present background, theory, and activities for teachers of minority language children who are learning a second language in the classroom, and actively promote the inclusion of children's home language and culture in the classroom and cover the following topics:

• The benefits of multicultural/intercultural and child-centered approaches for  second language learners
• The long term social and cognitive benefits of supporting children's home language while learning new languages
• The theories and applications of first and subsequent language development in children
• The developmental psychology perspective on second language learning and the impact of  factors such as age, personality, motivation, and the environment
• Effective classroom teaching and learning strategies for  second language learners
• Assessing and planning instruction for second language learners
• The importance of building bridges with families and communities of minority language speaking children
• Development of bi-literacy

Inclusion of Children with Special Needs

An important indicator of a vibrant democracy is the extent to which people with disabilities participate actively in society. In order to achieve this, children with disabilities must have access to high-quality, appropriate education. SbS promotes inclusive education — a system in which children with disabilities attend their local school and learn in classrooms alongside their peers.

The following activities support SbS efforts to serve children with disabilities in inclusive educational environments:

• The development of pre-service and in-service training programs that prepare teachers, specialized service providers, families, and administrators to meet the individualized needs of children with disabilities in inclusive settings;
• Collaboration among teachers and principals, technical agencies, and government officials to develop and sustain needed fiscal and administrative procedures;
• Dissemination of research that contributes to our knowledge of best practices for children with differing types of disabilities;
• Restructuring social, educational, and health systems to meet childrenís needs in inclusive settings;
• Development of community awareness programs that help communities accept and support children with special needs and their families.

ìWhen the children who are learning now alongside children with special needs grow up and become policy makers and architects, they will shape the world with their own hands. They will make this world acceptable for people like their classmates. They will learn to ignore differences. They will learn to treat people fairly, not only people with special needs, but also people of different races or cultures. What we do now for the children is a start for the whole change...î —Mykola Swarnyk, head of a parents association, Ukraine

ISSA Disability Program Committee Develops Disability Category Definitions

The Disability Program Committee is please to announce to you the new disability category definitions to be used by ISSA and OSI when counting children for purposes of data collection. In addition, we hope that these terms will be used by country teams in order to influence more appropriate identification of children with disabilities within your countries. Advocacy and dissemination strategies will be shared with you at a later date. The first opportunity to use these terms will be in the upcoming RAND Evaluation Study soon to be conducted. The Disability Program Committee wanted you to be aware of these terms and their definitions now so that you could use them knowledgeably in your response to the RAND Evaluation. Please find below the thirteen categories and their definitions.

Click here to download the Disability Definitions (47 KB doc file)

Education for All and Children with Disabilities: International Policy and Practice

by Phyllis Magrab, PhD, Director, Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development

Published in Educating Children for Democracy, Issue Number 6, Winter/Spring 2004

Issue Addressed
The right to education is a basic human right and the foundation for a more just society. Half a century ago the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) asserted education to be this basic human right, a right that was reaffirmed in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Importantly, the Convention also recognized that there are particular problems to overcome in order to truly ensure educational opportunities for all children. For this reason, the Convention has been followed up in recent years by a movement that has sought to turn the educational rights of the child into a reality. This movement, Education for All (EFA), was launched at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 by the major international and bilateral organizations and was attended by almost all of the nations of the world. In the year 2000, a decade later, 176 countries gathered in Dakar, Senegal at the World Forum on Education for All to review the progress made towards this goal. While, in general, countries have worked to address the educational rights of children and 10 million more children attend school each year, the tendency of countries to focus on the “easy to reach” and neglect those excluded from basic education for social, economic, or geographic reasons was notable in the review of progress. For example, 98% of children with disabilities in developing countries do NOT attend schools. As a result, the forum declared that Education for All must take into account the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged, which includes, among others, those with special learning needs and assure that Education for All really means ALL.
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