The education bureaucracy excludes at the meso level by failing to recognize the diversity of learners within its purview. The education bureaucracy excludes children when it fails to provide their teachers with the learning and professional status they need to be effectively competent, responsible and motivated. Children already at risk are made more vulnerable to exclusion when the system's testing procedures fail to reflect their individual learning characteristics and home backgrounds and to accommodate teaching to these. The education bureaucracy excludes children when it persists in creating inappropriate and irrelevant curriculum and materials of poor pedagogical quality. National government and education policy-making bodies exclude by not seriously or comprehensively identifying barriers to education for families and children at risk, or creating opportunities to enable their participation.
National systems exclude when they purposively segregate children with special learning needs.
Macro levels exclude by failing systematically to assess variations in learning achievement across the country. Macro policies exclude by insisting on centralized and inflexible control over standards, approaches and methods which are not relevant to vulnerable communities. How education systems exclude children potentially concerns all children, to some degree. The concern of this paper, and critical for the focus of global action in support of education during the next 15 years, however, are those children who are affected in a major way by these exclusionary forces. They are children who, whether on their own or through their families, are unlikely to be able to break the exclusionary downward cycle.