Abstract:

Since the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) opened for signature in 2008, 185 of the 193 UN member states have ratified the treaty and therefore agreed to participate in a lengthy and complicated review process every four years. Since the establishment of the Committee in 2008, its first review in 2011, and until April of 2022, 92 countries and the European Union have completed a full cycle of monitoring, reporting, and review. Six countries have participated in a second review: Spain, Australia, Hungary, Mexico, El Salvador, and Ecuador.

The Concluding Observations that variously praise, critique, and guide State Parties are arguably the most important dimension of the monitoring process. This brief paper focuses on the Concluding Observations for Article 24 of the CRPD. Its core directive asks States to ensure inclusive education: all children and youth with disabilities accommodated in general classrooms for their entire education careers. Special education and its attendant special classes and special schools is not possible.

Against the backdrop of the generous data from all the Concluding Observations, this paper focuses on the six selected countries to assess progress from review to review, specifically in terms of education placement; whether pupils with disabilities are accommodated in inclusive or segregated environments. Analysis of the data show that the most common concern voiced by the Committee focuses on how access to general education is blocked for a large proportion of individuals with disabilities who, if not entirely excluded, are placed in segregated schools and classes. For example, the Committee expressed concern about Mexico’s special education model in 2014, reiterated in 2022; it regretted that many students in Hungary were excluded from the general education system. The Committee chided Spain for limited progress and the continuing segregation of students. The 2019 set of Concluding Observations for Australia echoed multiple areas of concern first aired in 2013.

Taken together, the individual responses of the six selected State Parties examined here, and confirmed by related data across all the Concluding Observations and current literature, suggest that the Committee’s overriding concern with education placement and fully inclusive schooling, together with its distaste for special education, is not met with equanimity by State Parties. To the CRPD Committee, State Parties must intensify their efforts to move toward inclusive schooling in order to ultimately ensure that all children and youth with disabilities are fully included. For individual countries, a host of caveats emerge when implementation and practice are foregrounded, Movement toward adopting the agenda is problematic. Of the six countries scrutinized, the links between the CRPD and local policy are weak: none seemed commitment to undertaking the systematic national education reforms necessary to comply with the principles, norms, and rules articulated by Article 24. Segregated schooling and superficial inclusive practices persist. We conclude that the normative incongruities between the international mandates of Article 24 and national policies are likely to persist: fully inclusive schooling may prove impossible to implement at this time, or perhaps at any time.

Keywords:

Inclusive schooling, segregation, CRPD Committee, Concluding Observations.