Inclusion and education

FIGURE 3.13: 
In Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia, there are large 
differences between schools in student socio-
economic background
Index of social inclusion, selected education systems, 2018
45
55
50
60
65
70
75
80
85
90
95
Index of social inclusion (%)
Russian Fed.
Romania
Latvia
Peru
Chile
Panama
Hungary
Albania
Colombia
Estonia
Bulgaria
Belarus
Lithuania
N. Macedonia
Czechia
Georgia
Brazil
Bosnia/Herzeg.
Croatia
Mexico
Rep. Moldova
Kazakhstan
Poland
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Turkey
Ukraine
Canada
Montenegro
Iceland
Norway
Kosovo
Denmark
Sweden
Finland
OECD average

More inclusive

Less inclusive
Notes:
The index of social inclusion is the percentage of variation in 
the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status of 15-year-
old students that results from differences within rather than 
between schools.
Source: 
OECD (2019a).
4
References to Kosovo shall be understood to be in the context of Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999)
.
64
GLOBAL EDUCATION MONITORING REPORT 2021

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While Roma children are much less likely than non-
Roma to attend school, those who do attend have often 
been educated separately. In the Czech Republic and 
Slovakia, most Roma children were educated in majority 
Roma schools. Special needs identification has been 
used to segregate Roma children in special schools or in 
segregated classes within mixed schools, with separate 
entrances and cafeterias. In one of the few comparative 
studies, at least 5% of Roma in Croatia, Hungary, the 
Republic of Moldova and Romania, and at least 10% in 
Bulgaria and Slovakia, attended segregated classes in 
mainstream schools (Brüggemann, 2012).
Such practices continue, as country-specific data suggest. 
In Slovakia, Roma constituted 63% of all children in special 
classes and 42% of those in special schools in 2018. 
Classes to support children who were not ready for the 
first grade of primary school were almost exclusively 
Roma. In 2018, a Metropolitan Court ruling in Hungary 
obliged the education ministry to stop admitting new 
students to 44 segregated schools and imposed a fine 
to be used on monitoring desegregation (European 
Commission, 2019).
Monitoring of inclusion in schools should be 
ambitious
Monitoring inclusive education means monitoring 
the quality of education of all children. In the region, 
25 education systems reported having frameworks 
for quality assurance across all levels of the system, 
while 17 had frameworks to monitor and evaluate 
implementation of policies on inclusion in education. 
In the Estonian Education Information System, every 
school can see the recommendations of an external 
advisory team on implementation of support services 
and school management measures. The Ministry of 
Education and Research external evaluation department 
regularly monitors the data schools enter, comparing 
them with the advisory team recommendations. When 
measures taken by a school are not consistent with the 
recommendations, clarification is requested and advice 
provided. Administrative supervision may be initiated.
Countries often lack a unified data collection authority. 
Various authorities and procedures are involved, 
without cooperation. In Belarus, data on children with 
disabilities and special education needs are collected by 
the education, health, and labour and social protection 
ministries for their own purposes, but the data often do 
not match. In Bulgaria, state and municipal institutions’ 
databases are not synchronized. Moldovan districts lack a 
single system collecting and processing data on students. 
In Ukraine, the education, health and social sectors have 
no national database on children from birth.
Some countries, such as Serbia, are working on linking 
children’s individual education records to personal