This week, we are celebrating International Day of Education which aims to showcase the most important transformations to realize everyone’s fundamental right to education and build a more sustainable, inclusive and peaceful future.

Inclusivity and digital transformation are currently key themes of Sabre’s work as we strive towards every child in Ghana having a quality play-based education. In Ghana, children with even mild to moderate disabilities are often denied access to education simply because of basic impairments. On top of this, many schools are simply not set up to provide adequate support to children with disabilities and special educational needs. This creates a sense of isolation and lack of motivation among these children, and diminishes their quality of life.

To help address the significant challenges that young children with disabilities and special educational needs in Ghana face, we’ve teamed up with Chance for Childhood, who have specialist expertise in working with children with disabilities and special educational needs, and their families with the aim of getting them back into school. Through the Chance for Childhood partnership, we are strengthening the focus on inclusion in our 2022 teacher training content.

As a result of this work, there will be an extra day added to our training which will be solely dedicated to inclusion, helping to ensure teachers are able to support all the learners in their classroom. This extra day will focus on critical issues such as inclusive education, Ghana’s policy on it, appropriate teaching strategies for children with disabilities and special educational needs and how to develop individual education plans for them.

Robert Quansah, Sabre’s Programme Technical Manager shared that “We are really pleased with the collaboration with Chance for Childhood. It is going to deepen the knowledge of teachers on our transformational teacher training programme in the provision of inclusive education. The content being offered will enable the teachers to undertake basic screening of learners, and adopt strategies to support children who may have some specific educational needs to learn”

This content will reach hundreds of teachers this year and we will be incorporating it into all our teacher training moving forward, reaching thousands more over the coming years.

In addition to this, we are busy digitising our teacher training so that teachers will be able to access a mix of face-to-face and online training, allowing it to reach an increased number of teachers whilst being more cost-effective. We’re really excited to keep you updated on these important pieces of work, as we look towards high-quality, inclusive early years education being rolled out across Ghana.