Inclusion and education

partnership agreements are far less binding but can also 
directly or indirectly influence education systems.
All but five of the countries covered in this report are 
members of the European Higher Education Area, which 
aims to increase higher education system coherence. 
All but six are members of the Council of Europe, an 
intergovernmental organization that promotes democracy, 
human rights and the rule of law, and is known for 
actions related to protection of minorities. Its education 
programme sets standards on quality education and on 
democratic citizenship and human rights. All countries in 
the region belong to the Organization for Security and 
Co-operation in Europe, which commits members to a 
‘human dimension’ of security that includes full respect 
for human rights, fundamental freedoms, rule of law, 
democratic principles and tolerance. 
Education systems in the region are trying to shed the 
legacy of the medical model
This region, more than any other, has had to overcome the 
legacy of the medical model, which was applied to children 
with disabilities during the socialist regime.
They attended special schools and were segregated by 
type of disability (Phillips, 2009; Mladenov, 2017).
Children with mild and severe intellectual disabilities or 
psychiatric diagnoses were even denied education. The 
language used was full of discriminatory terms. Teachers 
were prepared for special education in so-called defectology 
departments; in some countries the term persists to this 
day. They were prepared to provide high-quality support 
to children with a particular need, but not skills that 
would help them be included in social and economic life 
(Lenskaya, 1995). 
This report shows that a major shift towards an inclusive 
and rights-based approach to education is taking place 
throughout the region. Policies increasingly place a 
duty on schools and other education providers not to 
discriminate against any learners, whether in terms of 
admission into or exclusion from mainstream education 
or in terms of actual education provision. New legislation 
in many countries describes the concept of inclusion 
and its requirements, and some countries are producing 
A major shift towards an inclusive and 
rights-based approach to education is 
taking place throughout the region
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GLOBAL EDUCATION MONITORING REPORT 2021

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appropriate curricula and examination materials. Initial 
teacher education programmes are being revised or 
restructured and professional development programmes 
have been designed for teachers who had not received 
training in this field.
Yet, while 
most countries in the region are transitioning 
from the medical to the social model of support to all 
learners, in which needs are addressed predominantly
in mainstream schools, the rate of change is slow.
The number of special schools is falling but the number 
of mainstream schools providing high-quality support to 
children with special education needs is not growing at 
the same rate. The role of teacher assistants is becoming 
increasingly important but is not always properly defined 
in national legislation or in practice.
Many changes are 
happening on paper, while deep-held beliefs and actual 
practices remain little altered.
Systems in the region also need to address other types 
of exclusion
Education system responses to the needs of children 
with disabilities is just one of several signs of government 
commitment to inclusion. Many countries in the 
region participate in large-scale cross-national learning 
assessments, such as the Programme for International 
Student Assessment (PISA). This offers another viewpoint 
on the broader challenge of inclusion. Among 15-year-old 
students in 23 countries in the region, 71% achieved 
minimum proficiency in reading, on average, in PISA 2018. 
However, the average was 57% for students in the bottom 
20% of a socio-economic status index (defined in terms 
of home belongings, parental education and occupation), 
compared with 84% for the top 20%. In Bulgaria and the 
Republic of Moldova, the gap was almost 50 percentage 
points. In some countries, particular disadvantaged groups 
did even worse than the bottom 20%: in the Russian 
Federation and Turkey, those who did not speak the 
language of the test at home averaged 12 percentage 
points less than those who did, and in Slovakia the gap was 
18 percentage points. In Hungary and Romania, fewer than 
3 in 10 students living in rural areas achieved the minimum 
level (
Figure 1.3
). 
This analysis, moreover, does not include the entire 
population of 15-year-olds and underestimates the extent 
of inequality in learning. In their attempt to be effective 
and efficient, standardized learning assessments contain 
the seeds of exclusion. First and foremost, PISA excludes 
those who left school before age 15 or did not manage 
to reach at least grade 7 by that age. Its sample does not 
include remote and special schools. It excludes students 
with an intellectual disability or a moderate to severe 
physical disability that would not allow them to perform 
in the testing environment, along with those with limited 
proficiency in the language of the test. Other exclusions