The state pays a lot of attention to supporting families raising children with special needs and impairments. Our country has built a clear system of training, education and socialization of this category of students.

Children with speech, vision, hearing, musculoskeletal system functions, learning difficulties, autism spectrum disorders, intellectual impairments, and severe multiple impairments in physical and mental development receive special education or correctional pedagogical assistance in educational institutions.

Today, in the Institute of Inclusive Education of the BSPU, a visiting meeting of the National Commission on the Rights of the Child took place with the participation of the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Belarus Igor Petrishenko on the topic: “On the role of the Institute of Inclusive Education in the system of working with children with special educational needs.”

The commission includes deputies of the National Assembly, representatives of republican and local government bodies, judicial ones, and educational institutions.

The focus of the meeting participants was the role of the Institute of Inclusive Education in the system of working with children with special needs; approval of the work plan of the National Commission for the Rights of the Child for 2024 and approval of a set of measures to improve work with minors and provide them with appropriate psychological assistance for 2024 - 2025.

Before the start of the current event, an acquaintance with the activities of the Republican Center for the Development of Inclusive Education (RCRIO) took place. The participants visited the educational laboratory “Education Without Borders”, where they learned about its resources, scientific and methodological developments of the teaching staff of the Institute of Inclusive Education. Also, a touching photo exhibition “Prosto deti” was organized in the foyer of the multifunctional auditorium.

According to Deputy Prime Minister Igor Petrishenko, 99.9 percent of children with special needs receive education in Belarus, of which more than 70 percent receive inclusive education.

“Every year the number of such children increases: last year by one and a half thousand and today there are 181 thousand. Therefore, we must actively work with this category of children, especially to help parents adapt them,” emphasized Igor Petrishenko.

The Deputy Prime Minister also said that there are more than 50 early intervention centers and 141 correctional and developmental training and rehabilitation centers in Belarus: “Advanced methods developed by the Institute of Inclusive Education of the BSPU, which is the basic organization of the CIS member states for training, retraining and advanced training of teachers and specialists in the field of inclusive and special education. We have succeeded in these methods. People come to us for courses and learn. In the future, we intend to continue this work so that children receive an appropriate education, find their path in life, master working professions, and get higher education.”

During the on-site meeting, information was announced that over the past twenty years the number of special schools and boarding schools has been halved. At the same time, as the Minister of Education Andrei Ivanets outlined, their existence cannot be completely abandoned, since they educate children who need special conditions for education and upbringing. Along with organizing the educational process, their task today is to disseminate the accumulated experience of working with children with special needs, to provide methodological and advisory assistance to teaching staff of kindergartens and schools.

In recent years, much has been done to improve the quality of life of children with special educational and upbringing needs. Efforts were aimed at implementing one of the main principles of state policy in the field of education - the principle of inclusion. As a result, the coverage of children with special needs with special education and correctional pedagogical assistance is almost 100%. At the same time, according to the Minister, the difficulty lies in the fact that the range of developmental disorders is quite diverse and requires special approaches to personnel training and the creation of an educational environment.

It is also relevant today to build a system of assistance for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (according to operational data, more than 2 thousand children of preschool and school age).

Currently, more than 205 thousand teachers work in the education system, about 40 thousand of them implement the educational process in special education institutions and in the conditions of integrated training and education, provide correctional and pedagogical assistance to children with mild developmental impairments, while 11.9 thousand people of these are special education teachers who directly carry out the training and education of children with special needs.

The training of teachers-speech pathologists is carried out on the basis of 6 institutions of higher education, the main of which has been the Belarusian State Pedagogical University named after Maxim Tank for many years.

In 2017, the Republican Resource Center for Inclusive Education began its work. Its main activities are preparing teachers to work in conditions of inclusive education, promoting ideas of accessibility of education, and providing advisory support to all participants in the educational process.

The Ministry of Education has taken certain steps to ensure the readiness of an ordinary teacher to correctly and effectively solve the problems associated with teaching children with special needs, including autism spectrum disorders. Today the task has been set: every teacher must be able to work with children with special needs of psychophysical development.

Children with autism spectrum disorders must be accompanied. Since 2022, Minsk City Pedagogical College and Volkovysk College have organized training in the new specialty of secondary specialized education “Pedagogical support” (qualification “Educator”). Personal support as pedagogical assistance can also be provided to visually impaired children and children with impaired musculoskeletal system functions (by teacher's assistant).

The material and technical base of educational institutions and the provision of special teaching aids are also being improved. More than 80 percent of preschool, general secondary and special education institutions have elements of an accessible environment.

Such relevant issues as: forms of interaction with public associations of parents from the position of constructive and mutually beneficial cooperation were also specifically voiced; the problem of creating an inclusive culture; interdepartmental interaction.

The Ministry of Education considers the implementation of the principle of inclusion in education as a long-term strategy, in which the emphasis is on a systematic approach in organizing the activities of the education system in all areas. Improving staff training will make it possible to achieve the goal of improving the quality of education for every child.