Issues and Challenges in Inclusive Education

Abstract

Inclusive Education is the modern trend aimed towards providing quality education to the special needed children. Education of children with special needs has come a long way from integrated education to inclusive education (access to the mainstream). Despite the support of several policies and programmes from time to time to accelerate the pace of all the efforts made in this direction, the regular school with inclusive orientation face many barriers and challenges. The challenges are ‘the whole idea of inclusive education is defeated on the part of teachers, parents, community and classmates. Lack of trained teachers, large class size, lack of child-centered and relevant curriculum, limited appropriate teaching-learning materials, teachers lack competence and will modify methodology as per the need, lack of proper infrastructure, lack of access to mainstream and lack of participatory activities. There is a need to strengthen teachers’ competence skills in inclusive education and to reform teacher training in its form and content. The challenge of inequality and discrimination among students is based on socioeconomic, ethnic and cultural profiles (Example: the competencies and learning outcomes achieved). The greatest challenge for the state government is the achievement accessibility inclusion and empowerment of children with special needs. The government alone cannot accomplish this task of making the “Right Real”. It can be concluded that these types of gaps can only be fulfilled with the help of collaboration to all the stakeholders like University, teacher education institution, etc.