Making assessments more accessible for children with disabilities

Together with partners, we’ve adapted a key evaluation tool to support young children with disabilities.

The International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) tool, created by Save the Children in 2011, measures children’s early learning and development. Its play-based tasks help evaluate motor development, emergent literacy, emergent numeracy and social-emotional development. The tool is designed to assess children from three to six years old and has been used in 78 countries.

IDELA has already been adapted for use with children who have mild to moderate learning difficulties. Since 2021, in a project under the Inclusive Futures initiative in Kenya, we have further adapted the tool to make it more accessible for children with disabilities. We used it to measure children’s baseline developmental outcomes and we will re-administer it at endline to measure progress.

This use of IDELA is part of a larger innovation project aiming to identify affordable, contextually-appropriate inclusive early childhood development education approaches for children with disabilities. The project is implemented by a consortium of international NGOs including Humanity and Inclusion, Sense International, IDS and government stakeholders such as national and county ministries of education, local and national organisations of people with disabilities, including United Disabled Persons of Kenya, as well as relevant semi-autonomous government agencies working in education. The project is being implemented in three different settings in Kenya: two in Homa Bay and the third in settlements around Kakuma refugee camp.

The project has a monitoring, evaluation and learning framework and a focus on measuring intervention impact. Data is being collected from across the project on an ongoing basis. We have conducted qualitative participatory research with children with disabilities, their parents, teachers and other stakeholders, as well as carrying out a cluster non-randomised control trial to measure the impact of other project interventions.

Over the 2021-22 project period, we developed adaptations and used them with 253 children with disabilities in nine project schools and nine ‘control’ schools.

What we learned

Here’s what we learned from the research and project implementation:

• There is value in using the adaptations for children with disabilities: Assessors applied the adaptations for children with a wide range of difficulties. Most children enjoyed the assessments, particularly when demonstrations and real objects were used.
• Assessors need additional guidance about child development and working with children with disabilities: We developed additional training and guidance on how to use the adaptations, but at times the processes were misunderstood, or inappropriate adaptations were used. This highlights a need for additional training time, enhanced training materials and more opportunities for practice before data collection begins.
• We need to understand the context and culture: The IDELA training is careful to emphasise the need to recognise and adapt to different contexts and cultures. The diversity of languages in the refugee setting was a particular challenge and this was exacerbated for children with functional difficulties, adding complexity to the data collection.