Best Practice

Home Based Education - Facilitating inclusion of children with severe and profound disabilities into mainstream schools

Home based education (HBE) simply means providing educational support to children with severe and profound disabilities within their homes. LCD supported Cheshire programme in Coorg (CHIC) is working in remote areas of Coorg district (India) to ensure inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream schools. Till date, the programme has helped retain 273 disabled children in mainstream schools due to its interventions.

Under the programme, CHIC has also identified many children with severe and profound disabilities who cannot immediately join a mainstream school. They need additional educational/behavioural inputs before they can join a mainstream school. To cater to the needs of such children, CHIC has collaborated with the government education department to implement the HBE project.

HBE is one of the key components of the government Universal Primary Education Programme. Due to lack of resources, the education department was struggling to implement the programme effectively. At this time, staff from CHIC who have been working with disabled children for many years, approached the government and took up the responsibility to implement the HBE project.

The first step under the programme was identification of home-based education volunteers. Family members of persons with disabilities and qualified youth were selected as volunteers under the HBE project. The local volunteers were trained for seven days on various topics like the concept of home based education, orientation to different disabilities, identification of children with disabilities, teaching a disabled child, facilitating therapy services and aids/appliances from different organisations, developing an individualised education plan, involving caregivers in HBE, etc.

Following the training, each volunteer was given the responsibility to teach three disabled children. Under the HBE project, the government pays a sum of Rs.250/month (£3) per child to the volunteer. The volunteer should make home visits twice a week and teach each child basic concepts like alphabets, colours, counting money, etc. The HBE is also supposed to involve the child's parents/caregivers in the teaching process. Once the child has attained a level of sufficiency, s/he is enrolled into a mainstream school to continue further education.

Every month the volunteer's progress is checked and reviewed. CHIC staff played a key role in identification, training, mentoring and monitoring the volunteer progress. Till date, under the HBE programme, 96 children with disabilities have been trained by 44 volunteers.

The HBE volunteers have also facilitated children with disabilities access to therapy, aids/appliances, scholarships, disability pensions etc. from CHIC, other NGOs and government departments.

As per the government rule, disabled children under the HBE project can be enrolled in a mainstream school and receive benefits like uniform, ration (rice), disability pension, disability identify card, aids/appliances and teaching aids. Many disabled children are today receiving these benefits due to the HBE project although they cannot attend a school.

Regularly, refresher training programmes are conducted for the volunteers on disability-specific topics like educating children with intellectual disabilities, visual impairments, speech impairments etc. They are also provided with teaching aids to facilitate the learning process.

Appreciating the good efforts put by CHIC in implementing the HBE project, they have been invited to be on the district and sub-district implementation committees of the education department.

Parents of children with severe and profound disabilities have also greatly appreciated the HBE project. They have expressed that today their children's confidence levels have increased, they are able to perform activities of daily living (like brushing, combing, toileting etc.) on their own. The children are now also able to participate in events like sports and cultural shows and showcase their talents.

The runaway success of the programme was due to the unique collaboration between CHIC and the local education department. Through such effective government-NGO partnerships many schemes in our country can be implemented with good results.

Gita Chengappa
Hon. Secretary
Cheshire Homes India Coorg
India