Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Dec. 5th, 2023

[Naser Faruqui]

On the question of feminist assistance policy and the importance of girls' education, I want to intervene briefly on that, because we know that some girls are out of school. On the challenge of getting them back into school, I want to point to one of our programs in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, which is sort of a boot camp for girls who are out of school to get them foundational literacy and numeracy skills.

We're doing that at a fraction of the cost of achieving numeracy and literacy in the formal school system. In fact, when they get back into school, they do better than the kids that were in the formal school system. It's being scaled up.

Mr. Chair, if you would allow me, I have a couple of observations on some of the previous questions. Do I have any time to respond?

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

You may have another minute, please, but we are limited.

[Naser Faruqui]

Thank you so much.

Mr. Lake, to your question about why so many kids who are seven or eight are not being helped when they have disabilities, the point about early interventions is so important because sometimes you don't know, early on, that they have disabilities, and by the time they're seven or eight, it's too late, and they've dropped out of the system.

I want to come back to my point about the importance of pre-primary. We don't normally have JK in developing countries, but one of our innovations is scaling a 10-week program in the summer that gets the benefits of JK. As I said, it helps these community centres identify kids with disabilities early on so that they can be supported. I think that's really important. In Uganda, in fact, the government is using that set of community-based preschools as their data collection point, holistically as well as for kids with disabilities.

On the point about refugee populations, I want to say, briefly, that one part of the solution is tech, but it's not just tech. We have a program we profiled for International Women's Day at the UN last year, which is game-based learning. It works without Internet. We found that the scores for math increased by 50% and that girls caught up to boys within five months.

The real importance—

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Can you wrap it up, please?

[Naser Faruqui]

Yes.

The real importance there is that when the kids are out of school, referring to the kind of programs that I did before—because often in refugee environments, they're not in school—then relying on those innovations that can get them back in school and using game-based learning can be very effective.

I'll stop there. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you.

Ms. Paré, go ahead. We have to be fair, since you didn't get a chance to answer Mr. Zuberi's question.

You have the floor for one minute.

[Mona Paré]

Thank you.

Your question was about occupying powers. In international law, any group that has the effective control of a territory has the same obligations to the territory as does a legitimate government, or the state itself, that would normally control the territory. That means international human rights law would apply, as well as, obviously, international humanitarian law.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Ms. Paré.

I would like to invite Mr. Ehsassi to take the floor for five minutes, please.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Allow me to start off by thanking all the witnesses for their time and for their expertise. It's been very helpful hearing from each of you.

I want to start off with an issue where obviously there are many gaps. There are no questions about that. One thing I found very alarming was a study by UNESCO in 2020, which said that to the extent that countries have adopted laws to allow for inclusive education, only 3% of those countries have made provisions for training teachers. It would seem to me that it's a very important and significant aspect of this.

I'll start off with Professor Paré.

Are there legal impediments getting in the way of allowing countries to include teacher training as part of their strategy to pave the way for inclusive education?

[Mona Paré]

I don't believe there are legal impediments. I could talk simply about what's happening in Ontario. We have, right now, close to a third of the students in classrooms, who have what we call individual education plans—a third of the students. However, nothing has changed in the classroom, so you still have one teacher with 30 students.

The teachers have growing obligations there to cater to the very individual needs of every student, but the training hasn't changed. The teachers don't feel they have the training to do that, which means a lot of children would then just fall through the cracks, even though they do have the plan. On paper it looks good, but in practice, it doesn't.

I believe the situation must be very similar in countries that do have legislation, because legislation, we have it, but then the practice is different, and the practice includes lack of training.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

For sure, absolutely.

Mr. Faruqui, I believe in your opening remarks you were talking about how you do work with teachers. How difficult is it to interface with teachers? Does your organization generally first interface with national authorities and then, through them, are you allowed to interface with teachers? How does that process work and how difficult has it proven to be?

[Naser Faruqui]

Actually, on a program that we're funding, which is called the knowledge and innovation exchange, we bring together stakeholders in countries, the ministries of education, teacher-training institutes, teacher unions and that sort of thing. We work with the important stakeholders, with the researchers and innovators to identify together what the problems are to ensure that whatever the solutions are, they're quickly taken up.

We're not actually finding it difficult in that sense. It's a formal approach.

Right now, I saw a statistic that there are 62 million teachers worldwide who don't have enough training. The challenge is not just training them; it's training them at scale in a way that's cost-effective and efficient. We have a program called teacher professional development at scale, which is using online systems, but also adapting them to the local context and then preparing open educational resources that are available to all.

We're finding that to be quite effective. However, as Mona said, the challenges are great because there's all this technology, so how do I teach tech? You can't just give one laptop per child if you don't teach the teachers how to teach it to the kids. How do you support kids with IEPs? That's another issue.

This is probably the single critical success factor for improving disability-inclusive education.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you.

This is open to any of the witnesses.

To the extent that we are talking about the need to scale expertise and train teachers, is there any particular jurisdiction around the world that sticks out for their ability to actually make the necessary investments and devote the resources to have teachers at the forefront of this? Is there any jurisdiction that sticks out in the opinion of any of you?

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Ms. Baboo, please.

[Nafisa Baboo]

Thank you.

I'm not sure what jurisdiction was meant by that, but what I do think is really vital is that teachers are the bedrock in disability-inclusive education. We really need to invest in, not just developing a teacher training curriculum that speaks to universal design for learning, but gets teachers to understand that you can teach all the children in the classroom and you have to prepare for that at the outset. I think that's really vital, that general education teachers get this training and that it's part of their continuous professional development, it's embedded into the pre-service training of teachers.

Often I find that teacher-training institutions are often still stuck in old ways of working and the question or the ask is often for some special needs department to now lead on disability-inclusive education. I think it's quite a big turn for them to take, from this belief that students should be treated in a special way, in special classes, to say they should be in an inclusive setting.

I think there really needs to be a—

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Can you please wrap it up? We have exceeded the time.

[Nafisa Baboo]

—lot of work and coaching and investment in teacher training trying to make it all-inclusive and also invest in specializations for teachers so specialized teachers can support other teachers, in particular in developing countries.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you.

Now I would like to invite Mr. Lake to take the floor for five minutes, please.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's a great conversation, but I find that the conversation today is similar to many conversations around disability-inclusive education. We get talking about intersectionality, which is really important, but intersectionality can't mean solving every problem in the world as we're trying to have a conversation around disability-inclusive education. When we start throwing in climate change and talking about the intersectionality around climate change, yes, fair enough, there's an impact there, but we can't wait to deal with disability-inclusive education until we solve climate change.

I want to get back to what we do now in a world where kids are not included in school, in many cases because of some of the issues we've talked about, for example, stigma and those kinds of issues. I take a look at that and say that there are things we can do right now to help deal with stigma.

The call to action on disability-inclusive education talks about supporting education systems to use the Washington Group child functioning module.

I know, Dorodi and Nafisa, that you are involved in conversations around the call to action. This is a functioning module that allows people, experts on the ground, to cost-effectively go out and assess disability. Once you've assessed disability and functioning, you can actually give families a neurodevelopmental explanation for what that disability is. You start to explain it, so you reduce stigma, because there's an explanation for the community. Now you can start to find ways to include...whether it's training teachers on inclusion methods for the kids who are affected, or whatever the case may be.

This is specifically for you, Dorodi and Nafisa, because I know you were intimately involved in the creation of the call to action. Can I just ask you about those first steps that we can take? If we really want to impatiently take action on disability inclusion in schools, maybe speak to what that call to action would point us to.

[Dorodi Sharma]

Thank you, Mr. Lake.

Thank you, also, for referring to the call to action. It was launched last year at the Transforming Education Summit.

Before I get into some of the actions we can take right now, I would really urge Canada to endorse this, and also parliamentarians in Canada to be champions for this call to action. It's truly a document that lays out a direction, a path, for advancing disability-inclusive education.

As you rightly pointed out, data has been an issue. We still don't have reliable and comparable data on disability and on disability disaggregation, which is why many of my interventions are often not adequate on the ground, because data informs those policies. To that point, I can speak to the international development context. Canada's development assistance on education must therefore include data, disaggregation and targets for reaching learners with disabilities through those programs that they support.

We would also really call on Canada to adopt a twin-track approach. This also speaks to the point that Mr. Lake made just now as he began his remarks. The twin-track approach really says that we not only need to invest in making the overall education system inclusive, but we also have to invest in specialized services that are required for learners with disabilities to be able to come to school and access education on an equal basis to others.

I think setting criteria, setting indicators and targets that are monitored and tracked over time and ensuring that reliable and comparable data is collected are two steps that Canada can definitely take in its international development assistance programs.

Additionally, I think there is also a need for awareness generation, and we need to talk more and more about disability in the transformation. We need champions, and we need Canada to be a leader on this.

Thank you very much.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you.

Nafisa, do you want to weigh in on that as well?

[Nafisa Baboo]

Thank you, Mike—

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Nafisa, please be quick. We only have 25 seconds.

[Nafisa Baboo]

It is really important to set a target and put that in a policy and a strategy. If the Government of Canada can continue that as a starting point and then track progress towards it with set goals, annual and biannual goals, I think we can really make a step change. I really challenge the Government of Canada to take that first bold step with the policy and the strategy and sit down and talk about disability inclusion based on the call to action.

Thank you.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you.