Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, subcommittee members. Thank you for inviting The Washington Group on Disability Statistics to today's meeting.
I'm going to provide some background information about the Washington Group and the tools that have been developed to collect the information on disability, particularly for children.
The Washington Group is a United Nations city group. City groups are formed by the UN Statistical Commission to address specific statistical or methodological issues of broad concern to countries.
The Washington Group was founded in 2001. Its membership currently stands at some 168 national statistical offices, including Statistics Canada.
We also collaborate with organizations for persons with disabilities, non-governmental organizations, development agencies and umbrella disability organizations, some of which you have heard from or are represented here today.
The primary goal of the Washington Group is to improve the state of disability statistics internationally and to develop question sets that produce high-quality, cross-culturally comparable data and statistics, which can then be used to monitor programs and the commitments that countries have made through their conventions and the 2030 SDGs.
In the last two decades, the Washington Group has developed a number of tools, which are all widely tested and translated, and are now included in data collections around the world.
Many of you are familiar with the short set on functioning, which was developed and formally adopted in 2006. It is a set of six questions to be included in censuses and provides internationally comparable disability data. Currently, some 130 countries report including the short set in at least one of its national data collections.
Following this, longer question sets have been developed and endorsed. These are typically included in national living standards and health surveys, including stand-alone disability surveys.
The case for collecting high-quality data on children is clear. Children are less visible in our data collection agendas. General household surveys and censuses often inadequately identify children with disabilities, especially those with developmental and intellectual disabilities.
For collecting data on children, the Washington Group and UNICEF have collaborated on the development of three question sets.
The first is the child functioning module, which was developed through vigorous international testing and evaluation and adopted in 2016. There are two modules. One is for children aged two to four and one is for school-aged children of five to 17 years. Both are meant for inclusion in surveys and the targeted respondent is the child's parent—most often the mother—or primary caregiver.
The child functioning module is included in some 70 multiple indicator cluster surveys and also country data collections.
There is a version of the child functioning module under development now for use in educational settings. This teacher version of the child functioning module is expected to be finalized by mid-2024. Unlike the other Washington Group tools, it is designed to be administered in school settings including EMIS.
Interest in the child functioning module-teacher version has been great. Participating in evaluations of the tool are USAID, Save the Children, Humanity & Inclusion, Sightsavers, Education Cannot Wait and others.
Finally, as the subcommittee knows, there is also great interest in not only collecting data on disability, but also identifying the barriers and the facilitators to inclusive education. The inclusive education module is an extended set of questions that has undergone both cognitive and field testing in multiple countries. It is also expected to be finalized in mid-2024.
The IEM focuses on formal education and is designed to be used in conjunction with the child functioning module. It aims to identify the barriers children with disabilities may experience in school attendance. It includes an out-of-school component to ensure data are collected on this vulnerable subpopulation.
Thank you for letting me talk today about some of the Washington Group tools that can ensure we collect critical information on children with disabilities to improve attendance and participation in school.
Thank you.