Disabled black kids get raw education deal – SAHRC

DURBAN: Disabled black children – especially those in remote rural areas – face a raw deal when it comes to getting an education, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) said yesterday.

Commissioner Lindiwe Mokale, addressing a workshop of stakeholders in Durban, said: “The burden faced by black disabled children is disproportionately high. Children with disabilities have a raw deal.”

Mokale, the commissioner responsible for children and basic education, said that only about a quarter of disabled children enrolled in school were likely to finish.

Mokale said that where a child required special schooling, there were too few schools in the country to cater for those with special needs.

She said societal attitudes towards children who were slightly disabled pushed parents to enrol their children in dedicated special needs school, when in fact they could be catered for at normal schools, where only minor adjustments in terms of facilities and teaching were required.

Very often in remote areas, she said, transport was a major problem for disabled children.

“You should not have a mother pushing their disabled child in a wheelbarrow in a bid to get her child to school.”

She said there had been an improvement to the newer schools in giving children access to facilities.

Mokale added education departments needed to get a better understanding of the needs and the number of disabled children that had to be catered for.

She said the Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal education departments had been unable to respond to a recent request by the SAHRC as to how many disabled school-going children there were.

Without such information, she said, the departments would not be in a position to timeously and properly cater for disabled children at the provinces’ schools.

“The situation that prevails puts children with disabilities at a major disadvantage,” she said.