Question & problem
Classroom assistance can be defined as reasonable accommodations designed to give all students equal access to learning in a regular classroom setting. Classroom assistance enables learners with disabilities to continue 'access to learning’ and 'learning to access' education on a regular basis. Consequently, in addition to enabling access to learning, classroom assistance should support learners with disabilities to take ownership of their learning and self-advocate during the learning process. While there is a lack of consensus on what classroom assistance comprises, there are three core dimensions: a) people (e.g. pupils, teaching staff, and administrators or non-teaching staff), b) classroom teaching and learning media (e.g. assistive technologies, gaming, etc) and c) the support structure (e.g. family, friends, peers, and cohorts). This brief summarises how to implement classroom assistance to promote effective teaching and learning for pupils with disabilities in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Quote
Recommendations
Key recommendation
Action
- The school leadership at mainstream schools should adopt a stakeholder-consultative approach to address the educational needs of learners with disabilities. Engaging learners with disabilities and their support structures (parents, guardians, experts in specific impairment, health conditions, organisations for disabled children and caregivers) in designing and implementing classroom assistance.
- Prioritise education 'entry', 'engagement', and 'empowerment' to develop agency, a sense of self-worth, and well-being in learners with disabilities to enable them to continue accessing and learning to access education on a regular basis.
- Encourage learners to take ownership and self-advocate in the facilitation of the learning process and its outcomes.
- Foster feedback across different groups of learners with disabilities in order to evaluate the design, and impact of appropriate classroom assistance.
- In order to integrate routine monitoring and evaluation of classroom assistance methodologies, classroom support staff should be trained and encouraged to collect data on lesson quality and enactment as part of their regular performance indicators.
Key recommendation
Action
- Multiple stakeholders should be identified and assigned roles in the implementation of classroom assistance policies and programmes.
- The educational leadership at national, provincial, and district levels should engage and collaborate with private and public sectors, including civil society and non-profit organisations.
- Mechanisms for engaging with stakeholders should be defined, including the why, when, how, and where of engagement.
- Collaboration across sectors should be with stakeholders who are familiar with working within the cultural context, and focus on enabling independence, self-agency, empowerment, and self-attainment among learners with disabilities, as well as social inclusion, peer support and positive attitude among the cohorts.
- Decision-makers (provincial, and district leadership, and school heads) should initiate, support, and collaborate on procedures that enhance access to feedback from learners with disabilities and other stakeholders in order to inform the review of policy and programmes relating to classroom assistance.
- Stakeholders should advocate for increased funding and capacity development to establish a progressive narrative for inclusive education in LMICs.
Key recommendation
Action
- Education policies and guidance on classroom assistance should be reviewed and updated regularly to reflect the evolving needs of learners, and the changing landscape of education, including guidance on creating resilient classroom assistance programmes that can be sustained.
- The review should involve co-creation and shared goal-setting for classroom assistance policies, drawing on input from a range of stakeholders.
- Policies should consider intersecting factors, such as gender, setting (rural/urban), and the socio-economic status of learners when designing and implementing classroom assistance programmes that addresses the unique needs of learners in LMICs.
Key recommendation
Action
- Research should focus on producing empirical indicators for effective classroom pedagogy in LMICs, including teacher training and competence, in order to inform good governance and capacity-building efforts.
- Conduct longitudinal studies to generate evidence-based knowledge for enhancing effective teaching and learning among learners with disabilities.
Challenges
Challenge #1: Lack of consultation with pupils with disabilities in the development of classroom assistance policies and programmes.
- The limited involvement of students with disabilities in the design of classroom assistance policies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) can have negative consequences in the development process e.g. classroom assistance guidelines that are inadequate, inappropriate, and ineffective in addressing the needs of students with disabilities.
- Not having proper accountability and transparency measures for the consultative process can create an environment where students are present but not given equal voice or representation, engaged only for a certain time period or in specific stages of advisory cycles, or lack the necessary support to enable them to participate meaningfully.
- There is a need to engage in constructive dialogue with all education stakeholders at national, regional, district and community levels in strategies to support education for learners with disabilities and co-create practices that uphold inclusive learning for all learners in a regular classroom.
Challenge #2: Need for multi-stakeholder collaboration to make classrooms accessible.
- Bringing together key stakeholders in the process of making classrooms more accessible promotes a sense of shared responsibility and the generation of more contextual and sustainable solutions within varied settings. However, identifying the right representatives (e.g. public, private and community stakeholders) and ensuring meaningful and long-term stakeholder collaboration requires access to resources which may be limited in many LMICs.
- Moreover, there can be contextual barriers to long-term stakeholder collaboration that limit active participation from community stakeholders, including stigma related to having a child with disabilities, language barriers and financial considerations to participation (e.g. cost of travel, losing productive days)
- It is also important for these collaborations to be locally-led, but in many LMICs, there can be limited training opportunities for organisations to steer such networks, ensure that stakeholders are aligned towards the same goal and in developing shared ownership towards action, especially among policy makers with competing priorities.
Challenge #3: Current evidence focuses on specific conditions/impairments like autism, mobility, and deaf/hard of hearing, making it difficult to generalise conclusions for children with all types of disabilities.
- There is a need to investigate all types of impairments among children of school-going age within the educational setting of LMICs.
- There is still scope for the investigation of how social barriers (e.g. poverty, caste and gender factors) can create extensive educational disadvantages than from disability alone and the understanding of how these social barriers can be addressed within local contexts.
Challenge #4: There is limited evidence on how to sustain classroom assistance through all stages of education.
- Although inclusive education requires a comprehensive and coordinated approach across all educational stages, many programs for classroom assistance are limited to certain educational levels e.g. primary education and do not carry over as children are promoted to higher classes. This may be due to lack of resources to train teachers across the schooling system or a change in administration with limited buy-in.
- Without exploring delivery-related factors (e.g. funding, school leadership, organisational policy frameworks, infrastructure, community engagement and partnerships) for making classroom assistance inclusive across all educational levels, there is limited evidence for how to sustain the benefits of an inclusive education system for disabled pupils.
Challenge #5: There needs to be more research specific to the benefits of classroom assistance in inclusive education within the LMIC context, making it difficult to make recommendations to support and enhance its use in these contexts.
- While there exists effective strategies for increasing participation and addressing disability-specific exclusion within classroom settings in countries with inclusive education; these recommendations may not be applicable in other less-resourced settings due to varied reasons and manifestations of stigma.
- This does not justify an exclusion of literature, but rather an amalgamation of evidence to consider insights from high-income countries that may be transferrable across contexts and conduct further research in LMICs to inform inclusive education policy in LMICs.
Finding the answers
We conducted a systematic search of the literature to identify review papers from LMICs, focusing on the benefits of classroom assistance for disabled pupils within a mainstream classroom setting. In the first stage, electronic database searches were conducted in Google Scholar, EBSCO Host and Web of Knowledge, and four databases in Wilson Web (Education Full Text, Education Index Retro, ERIC and Social Science Full Text) through which 635 papers were identified. The second stage entailed abstract reading, which obtained 45 review papers for LMICs, of which only four were selected after inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied. In total, four reviews on inclusive education in LMICs were reviewed along with four peer-review literature articles including impact evaluations of inclusive education and 3 country case studies, all from low-income resource contexts.
Recommendations & actions
Key recommendation
Action
- The school leadership at mainstream schools should adopt a stakeholder-consultative approach to address the educational needs of learners with disabilities. Engaging learners with disabilities and their support structures (parents, guardians, experts in specific impairment, health conditions, organisations for disabled children and caregivers) in designing and implementing classroom assistance.
- Prioritise education 'entry', 'engagement', and 'empowerment' to develop agency, a sense of self-worth, and well-being in learners with disabilities to enable them to continue accessing and learning to access education on a regular basis.
- Encourage learners to take ownership and self-advocate in the facilitation of the learning process and its outcomes.
- Foster feedback across different groups of learners with disabilities in order to evaluate the design, and impact of appropriate classroom assistance.
- In order to integrate routine monitoring and evaluation of classroom assistance methodologies, classroom support staff should be trained and encouraged to collect data on lesson quality and enactment as part of their regular performance indicators.
Key recommendation
Action
- Multiple stakeholders should be identified and assigned roles in the implementation of classroom assistance policies and programmes.
- The educational leadership at national, provincial, and district levels should engage and collaborate with private and public sectors, including civil society and non-profit organisations.
- Mechanisms for engaging with stakeholders should be defined, including the why, when, how, and where of engagement.
- Collaboration across sectors should be with stakeholders who are familiar with working within the cultural context, and focus on enabling independence, self-agency, empowerment, and self-attainment among learners with disabilities, as well as social inclusion, peer support and positive attitude among the cohorts.
- Decision-makers (provincial, and district leadership, and school heads) should initiate, support, and collaborate on procedures that enhance access to feedback from learners with disabilities and other stakeholders in order to inform the review of policy and programmes relating to classroom assistance.
- Stakeholders should advocate for increased funding and capacity development to establish a progressive narrative for inclusive education in LMICs.
Key recommendation
Action
- Education policies and guidance on classroom assistance should be reviewed and updated regularly to reflect the evolving needs of learners, and the changing landscape of education, including guidance on creating resilient classroom assistance programmes that can be sustained.
- The review should involve co-creation and shared goal-setting for classroom assistance policies, drawing on input from a range of stakeholders.
- Policies should consider intersecting factors, such as gender, setting (rural/urban), and the socio-economic status of learners when designing and implementing classroom assistance programmes that addresses the unique needs of learners in LMICs.
Key recommendation
Action
- Research should focus on producing empirical indicators for effective classroom pedagogy in LMICs, including teacher training and competence, in order to inform good governance and capacity-building efforts.
- Conduct longitudinal studies to generate evidence-based knowledge for enhancing effective teaching and learning among learners with disabilities.
Policy priorities
Disability programming must be integrated as a priority into mainstream policy frameworks like legislative tools from the Ministry of Basic Education/Primary and Secondary Education to support early childhood development, infant, junior and secondary/senior education. Furthermore, multi-sectoral or inter-ministerial educational programmes for classroom assistance should uphold ‘access to learning’ and ‘learning to access’ to enable the benefits of classroom assistance for learners with disabilities. Adopting classroom assistance within teaching and learning designs and methods in the pedagogy should be contextualised for low-resource settings like rural schools.
Conclusion
Despite progressive initiatives, for example in Zimbabwe, classroom assistants such as caregivers and parents are used as a form of classroom assistance in early child development and primary education. The usage of assistive technologies still needs to be explored as societies still struggle to raise fees, uniforms, stationery and even food for the child to attend school. Evidence of the benefits is still scarcely documented within inclusive education in LMIC settings. Compared to high-income countries, classroom assistance as a concept is still in its infancy. Therefore, decision-makers (education national, provincial, and district leaders, researchers, and policymakers) need to generate data using scientific methodologies to explore the benefits and sustainable delivery mechanisms of classroom assistance in mainstream classroom setting in LMICs.
Gaps & research needs
There are limited studies and reviews within LMICs on the types and spectrum of benefits of classroom assistance for diverse children with different impairments and the severity of impairments within a classroom setting. Gender awareness and intersectional variables are missing in the reviewed literature yet play a role in inclusive education, particularly in the primary and secondary levels of early child development. Of the reviewed empirical studies in LMICs, the majority are one-off studies with small sample sizes for autism, deaf/hard of hearing, mobility impairments, and a generic focus on children with disabilities.
Acknowledgements
Peer Review: This brief was peer reviewed by David John Musendo, PhD Candidate at the International Centre for Evidence on Disability, LSHTM, Sarah Marks, Research Fellow at the International Centre for Evidence on Disability, LSHTM and Onaiza Qureshi, Knowledge Exchange Officer at Disability Evidence Portal, LSHTM.
Publication details: © London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, February 2023.
Suggested citation: Tawanda Makuyana. Evidence Brief: What evidence is there on the benefits of classroom assistance for children with disabilities in LMICs? Disability Evidence Portal, 2023.