The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the provision on the Convention of the Rights of the Child in 1989, the World Declaration on Education for All in Jomtein the year after and the World Conference on Special Needs Education in Salamanca in 1994 highlight the challenge of creating more inclusive education systems and bring to light a number of emerging issues for education systems in general. The 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar underscores the importance of meeting each “Education for All” EFA goal, one of which seeks to “ensure that learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life-skills programmes”. More recently, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities aims to ensure that persons with disabilities are able to enjoy their human rights on an equal basis with others; the said Convention was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in March 2006 and enforced two years later. This international movement aims to change the society’s ethos and practices through the promotion of inclusive models that uphold students’ academic learning, social skills, positive attitude change and peer relations.
According to the international landmark, Salamanca Declaration, the term “special needs education” asserts that “human differences are normal and that learning must accordingly be adapted to the needs of the child rather than the child fitted to preordained assumptions regarding the pace and nature of the learning process.” In this regard, education systems should accommodate all children regardless of any physical, intellectual, social, emotional, linguistic or other encumbering conditions they may have or are exposed to. Needless to say, “this should include disabled and gifted children, street and working children, children from linguistic, ethnic or cultural minorities and children from other disadvantaged or marginalized areas or groups, all of which create a range of challenges to school systems.

Thus, in the context of this framework, the term, ‘special educational needs’ refers to the needs of all children and the youth that arise from their disabilities and difficulties.

In most developed countries, efforts to support and include children with special needs in a regular education system have undergone rapid growth. In this regard, the leading country is the United States of America; in the last 30 years, new directions have expanded the scope of their efforts in the field. Major interventions include: special education laws, inclusion movements that comprise culturally- and linguistically-diverse students, education reform policies and the increased use of computer technology. In the US and other developed nations, a continuum of alternative placements are made available to students; these require schools to provide a wide range of support services such as assignment in a general classroom, resource room classes, separate classes or schools to meet the needs of students with disabilities. Students with special needs have the right to function comfortably in their environments; they have the right to a learning experience in a least restrictive environment (LRE), which ensure that to the maximum extent possible and appropriate, students with special needs are taught in school with non-special education students.

Unfortunately, in Lebanon and in most countries in the Arab region, special needs education is taking shy and slow steps towards inclusion and support of children in their classrooms and their wider communities. As an importer of the inclusion philosophy and practices, the region has yet to determine how these ideologies should be encouraged, respected, and adapted. For the past ten (10) years, the Arab Region has witnessed a slow yet positive progress in the expansion and development of knowledge and practices in special needs education. This is attributable to the work of international non-government organizations, such as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which promote the culture of inclusion in the region and have produced many key documents and agreements in this regard as well as the work of regional NGOs that have adopted international agreements have opened up spaces for local dialogue, modification of some approaches, creation of resources and have kept the momentum going for interventions or efforts in the field. In some countries like Jordan, major work has been done at the legislative level through reform and national policies. This, however, does not in any way reflect the pattern or progress of the Arab region in shaping its framework to support children with special needs; it is extremely difficult to identify approaches commonly used to extend assistance to these children in the region.

This slow progress in the Arab region is leaving majority of children with special needs behind and this lack of support services and appropriate interventions for children with special needs has many direct, indirect, short- and long-term negative consequences such as: higher school drop-out rates, serious social and communication problems, lower literacy rates, increased levels of anxiety, withdrawal and depression and low self-esteem. The sluggish development in the field can be attributed to the lack of laws supporting children with special needs, non-existence of a national special education strategy, lack of professional qualifications for special education teachers, low salaries and compensation, high staff-turnover and retention, lack of monitoring and data indicators, relatively large classes, lack of assessment and evaluation tools, disparities of geographic distributions, aggravated by people’s reservations and negative attitudes towards the proposed changes.

A major factor contributing to the shortfall in the field is the inadequate preparation of teachers to deal with or handle children with special needs in their classrooms. Majority of kinder gardens and elementary regular classroom teachers in the region are untrained to deal with and address individual differences in learning abilities in the classroom setting; without sufficient training, teachers are ill-equipped to support the needs of ALL the children in their classrooms. The negative attitude of teachers towards children with special needs further aggravate the issue. Majority of schools in the region still maintain strong reservations about the concept of inclusion of all students and the provision of the necessary accommodation for different student needs; their view remains that supporting children with special needs is a LUXURY, not a PRIORITY.

Therefore, it is imperative that the immediate focus and attention be given to the issue of “special needs education”, which was referred to by Salamanca Declaration as “an issue of equal concern to countries of the North and South.” Policies and legislative reforms in the field should be a priority in the agenda of governments in the region while the society as a whole should be further educated and informed about the rights of children with special needs so differences are viewed in a societal rather than in an individualized context. Greater effort should be exerted in early identification and intervention strategies and emphasis should be on making available regular inclusive schools that embrace transition and vocational skills programs.
It is hoped that future interventions will witness more serious steps towards addressing the rights of all children with special needs in the region such as more collaboration and coordination between and among countries and effective facilitation of a symmetrical transfer of knowledge and practices within and beyond the region.

International documents on Inclusive Education:

• The United Nations Declaration on The Rights of Disabled People (1975)
• The United Nations Convention On the Rights of Child (1989)
• The World Declaration on Education For All (1990)
• The Standard Rules for the Equalisation of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities” (1993)
• The Salamanca statement and framework for action (1994)
• The Madrid Declaration (1997)
• Key Principles for special Needs Education from the European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education (2003)
• The Declaration of Malaga (2003)
• The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (article 24) (2006)