The Australian Coalition for Inclusive Education (ACIE) has made a Submission to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People With Disability (Disability Royal Commission) in relation to its ‘Overview of responses to the first Education and Learning Issues Paper’ published on 28 July 2020.

ACIE’s submission addresses a range of issues including:

• Bias of vested interests: the ‘inevitable’ bias of governmental and private organisations and professional associations with vested interests in maintaining, or limiting progression from, the ‘education status quo’ for people with disability and the fact that such organisations and associations are ‘conflicted’ in representing, and advocating for the human rights of, people with disability;

• Evidentiary onus: that against the starting human rights premise of the equality of humanity and the fact that over 40 years of research overwhelmingly supports the benefits of Inclusive Education, the onus of demonstrating an objective and sound evidential basis for continuing to segregate students with disability in ‘special’ schools, units and classrooms lies with those that seek to maintain, or limit progression from, the ‘status quo’; and

• Use of ‘segregated’: that the segregation of students with disability in ‘special’ schools, units and classrooms is, as a human rights and moral matter, properly described as ‘segregation’ – rather than ‘sanitised’, ‘euphemised’ or ‘neutralised’ as ‘separate’ or ‘special’/’specialised’ education.”

We note that while commenting upon aspects of particular submissions published by the Disability Royal Commission, we have redacted text naming or identifying the private individuals and entities who made those submissions.

To read ACIE’s Submission in full click on the image below:

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ACIE is an initiative bringing together organisations that share a commitment to advance inclusive education in Australia and across state and territory education
systems, including government and non-government schools.

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Please email info@cyda.org.au or hello@allmeansall.org.au with any feedback you have on this document or if you would like to be provided with a Word version.