EENET asia Newsletters : Fourth issue June 2007 Contents

Regional Workshop on Inclusive and Child Friendly Education

New Delhi, India 21-23 November 2006

This South Asian regional workshop was co-organized by UNESCO, UNICEF and Save the Children. The purpose of the workshop was to share experiences of inclusive and child friendly education practices in the South Asia region and to develop recommendations on how to further promote more rights-based approaches to education in the region within the framework of EFA. Participants of the workshop included policy makers, practitioners, teachers, researchers as well as representatives of NGO’s, INGO’s, UNICEF and UNESCO.

During the workshop the following was done:

1. The potential of inclusive and child friendly approaches as a means to improve the overall quality of education and improve education systems to ensure education for all was discussed.
2. Child friendly approaches to formal and non-formal education were shared and promoted.
3. Recommendations were developed for how to implement inclusive national EFA plans of action building on recent regional and national initiatives.
4. Child friendly approaches to education in emergency situations were discussed.

After the opening session a series of plenary presentations and discussions formed the necessary background for the participants before the working sessions. During these presentations the three core topics of the workshop: early childhood care and education, teacher training and inclusive approaches to emergency and recovery situations were given particular attention. The participants developed in the working sessions recommendation for each country. The content of the plenary presentations and the recommendations developed can be found in the full workshop report.

In addition to the development of the country specific recommendations, one of the most important results of the workshop was that it successfully helped bring together efforts on inclusion in South Asia in three important aspects:

1. Terms and ideas - Child Friendly, Child Rights, Inclusive Learning Friendly Environments, Child Friendly Schools. The terms are many and the confusion can often be a problem, especially for policy makers and practitioners. A common question has been: are these competing models or different names for the same things? The workshop sought to bring these terms together in a broad holistic definition aiming at creating more inclusive learning for all, both in classrooms and in other “learning environments”. The title of the workshop reflected this, being a mixture of the UNICEF term “Child Friendly Schools (CFS)” and the UNESCO term “Inclusive Learning Friendly Environments (ILFE)”.
2. Vertical cooperation - As the workshop was a collaboration between UNESCO, UNICEF and Save the Children, and including organizations such as PLAN, IDP Norway, and various INGOs and NGOs, researchers policy makers and practitioners the workshop was able to bring together people who work with inclusive education in different ways and across different levels of work and allow them to share and learn from each other.
3. Regional cooperation - Bringing together people across countries was perhaps one of the most important outcomes in it self.

The full workshop report including the recommendations that were developed and the complete information on the speakers, presentations, participants and conclusions will shortly be available at www.unescobkk.org/ie and for further information you are also welcome to contact the author of this article at k.bergsvag@gmail.com or Johan Lindeberg, UNESCO Bangkok at j.lindeberg@unescobkk.org.

EENET asia Newsletters : Fourth issue June 2007 Contents