In Armenia, historically, children with disabilities and special educational needs were often excluded from mainstream education. Negative attitudes towards disability, combined with feelings of shame, led large numbers of children to be sent to special boarding schools, particularly in rural areas. In 2014, the government passed a Law on Mainstream Education providing a legal and financial obligation for all children with disabilities to be accepted in mainstream schools by 2025. Since 2015, all secondary schools in the country have become fully inclusive of children with disabilities. The regional edition of the GEM Report on inclusion and education in Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, which was released this week in Russian, and with an executive summary version available in almost 30 regional languages, details how the country is now working towards achieving inclusion in all primary and tertiary institutions.

In a new video about the change, a parent describes the impact of this change on Gor, her son, who was born with a disability. ‘School was just the first big step for his future life. To achieve that goal, the teacher had to work with all children and parents so that they could explain to their own children that Gor is a child just like them. His classmates started acting like adults, helping to get his backpack ready, to take a chair, to enter the classroom to walk and go to the dining room. These were big achievements for Gor, for his classmates and for me as a parent’.

Bridge of Hope, an organisation founded in 1996 by parents with children with different needs and abilities who wanted their children to attend mainstream school but were met with resistance, has been a driving force for inclusive education. In strategic partnership with the Ministry of Education and Science, its program is now being implemented throughout Armenia, and students with and without special needs are being instructed together in all schools at all levels.

That said, reforms do not change societies overnight, as the country profile created for Armenia to feed into our regional report makes clear. While the 2014 law created solid foundations for the realization of the right to education for children with disabilities, inclusive education reforms are predominantly focused on the deinstitutionalization of children with disabilities and their placement in mainstream public schools rather than creating an education environment where the diverse needs of every child are visible and addressed. The criteria for learning disabilities are vague and ambiguous resulting in no specific service provision for many children in need, including those from linguistic minorities. Inclusive schools prefer to admit those children who bring additional funding but, at the same time, do not cause them too much additional work.

Much, therefore, remains to be done. Armenia has not yet adopted a comprehensive legislative act that would reflect main provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, for instance.  But it would be wrong to overlook the enormous progress made since the start of the century. If the same rate of progress keeps up from now until 2030, it will end up a model for other countries to follow.

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