Inclusion and education

partial participation: Children with a developmental 
disability are nominally enrolled in mainstream schools 
but placed in developmental groups, where they do not 
benefit from daily interaction and inclusion in mainstream 
classroom activities.
For instance, 
in 
15
countries,
admissions depend on medical-psychological 
assessments and other selection procedures set by the
school principal
.
Even though 
24
out of
30 education systems
in the region state that they accept all learners in mainstream schools, 
potential admissions are rejected in many countries as a result of
exclusionary mechanisms
and 
administrative barriers
.
1 
References to Kosovo shall be understood to be in the context of Security Council resolution 1244 (1999).
Of the 30 education systems reviewed,
17 do not include children with disabilities
in primary and 21 in secondary education
120
GLOBAL EDUCATION MONITORING REPORT 2021

---

Alternative settings continue to exist (
Figure 7.1
), 
impeding equal access. Children with disabilities may 
receive home schooling when families cannot afford a 
special boarding school or live in remote areas.
Local schools register a child year after year in the same 
grade, and this administrative grade retention allows the 
school to be flexible with the support offered to children 
but, usually, only a reduced curriculum is accessible. In 
some cases, special settings for children with a disability 
are presented as a privilege, as some specialized 
institutions maintain a high reputation, such as the school 
for the deaf-blind children in the Russian Federation. 
Community beliefs and stereotypes about certain groups, 
bullying or victimization and low expectations also allow 
alternative settings to emerge. In Montenegro, separate 
school facilities exist near Roma settlements.
The region has been characterized by above-global-
average rates of institutional childcare, a legacy 
of an approach that wrongly regarded segregated 
provision as more efficient (Mladenov and Petri, 2020). 
Deinstitutionalization has lowered the number of 
children referred to such care. The number of children in 
residential care in Georgia fell from more than 20,000 in 
1989 to fewer than 1,000 in 2016 as a result of national 
commitment and international support (Ulybina, 2020). 
However, progress has been far from even across 
countries, despite substantial external technical and 
financial assistance. Slow progress has been at least