Commissioner Lindiwe Mokate, addressing a workshop of stakeholders in Durban said: “The burden faced by black disabled children is disproportionately high. Children with disabilities have a raw deal.”

Mokate, who is the commissioner responsible for children and basic education, said that only about a quarter of disabled children that were enrolled in school were likely to finish their schooling.

Mokate said that where a child required special schooling there were too few schools in the country to cater for those with special needs.

She said societal attitudes towards children who were slightly disabled, pushed parents to enrol their children in dedicated special needs school, when in fact they could be catered for at normal schools, where only minor adjustments in terms of facilities and teaching were required.

She said very often in remote areas that transport was a major problem for disabled children.

“You should not have a mother pushing their disabled child in a wheelbarrow in a bid to get her child to school,” she said.

She said that there had been an improvement to the newer schools in giving children access to facilities.

She added education departments needed to get a better understanding of the needs and the numbers of disabled children that had to be catered to. She said that the Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal education departments had been unable to respond to a recent request by the SAHRC as to how many disabled school-going children there were.

Without such information, she said that the departments would not be in a position to timeously and properly cater for disabled children at the provinces’ schools.

“The situation that prevails, puts children with disabilities at a major disadvantage,” she said.

Africa News Agency