STS is dedicated to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’ vision of inclusive education as a process of system-wide reform, recognizing that integration does not guarantee inclusive and quality education.

We believe in an integrated, contextualized twin-track approach to equitable and inclusive education. We work to ensure mainstream education—including teacher training, teaching and learning materials, assessment, and infrastructure—is designed and delivered for the benefit of all learners—and to provide targeted support to address the specific needs of children with disabilities. We work to address the structural, economic, cultural, and social barriers that keep marginalized learners from accessing a quality education across four dimensions: learner, teacher, school and community, and policy.

Four Dimensions of Work

• Learner: Our approach to ensuring learners receive equitable, inclusive, and quality education includes developing learning assessments that validly and reliably measure abilities, producing teaching and learning materials in languages and formats that can be understood, assessing the quality of the school environment, and ensuring learners are matched to accommodations that facilitate learning.
• Teachers: Our approach to empowering and preparing teachers includes partnering with local OPDs, teacher education institutions, experienced teachers, and local experts to co-develop classroom and training materials, including UDL and twin-tracking approaches, to respond to the needs in each classroom’s context.
• Schools and community: Our approach to supporting schools to build a culture of inclusivity includes working with administrators, parent associations, and local OPDs to improve the enrollment of learners with disabilities, tracking their progress as they move through the system, and following up with families. We provide support on how to enhance parental engagement opportunities and build trust.
• Systems and policy work: Our approach promotes using evidence in education systems to collect and analyze learner disability prevalence data to understand better the populations they serve. We advocate for a collaborative process that accounts for our partner governments’ context, needs, and capacities and the current state of education systems.