Education and Disability: Analysis of Data from 49 Countries

This paper presents the first in-depth analysis of available data for 49 countries and confirms that persons with disabilities are less likely to ever attend school, more likely to be out of school and that they tend to have fewer years of education than persons without disabilities. They are less likely to complete primary or secondary education and are less likely to possess basic literacy skills.

The paper also makes a series of recommendations to improve the quality of data on disability and education. Comparability of the data across countries is limited, for example because not all national surveys and censuses used the standard set of questions developed by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics (WG) and UNICEF to identify adults and children with disabilities.