The exclusion of children is in itself a broad-brush phenomenon. They are further encumbered with corollary burdens of disease and disability, sexual exploitation, indentured and injurious labour, or forced involvement in civil and military conflict. The exclusion of these children from education is simply one more manifestation of this web of rights violations. But it is a particularly tragic one. Without access to good quality education, children are denied the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, capacities and self-confidence necessary, as children and later as adults, to act on their own behalf in changing the circumstances which are excluding them.
Exclusion is interactive and comprehensive.
It touches all aspects of the lives of affected children, resulting either in their having no access to education or in their being poorly served when they are enroled. In consequence, they repeat, drop-out or graduate without actually learning. Rather, exclusion from education involves a pattern of personal, socio-cultural, economic and institutional factors which together act to keep a child from participating in effective and organized learning experiences . International agencies are also influential in each of these, of course. Schools exclude when they do not reach out proactively to the families of children who are most vulnerable.