There is substantial heterogeneity across countries in the schooling deficit associated with disability. Part of this variation might be due to differences in the definition of disability. That is, in a survey with a more “stringent” definition of disability one would likely observe a larger deficit since this survey would identify individuals who would have to overcome bigger obstacles in order to access education. The fact that the two surveys from Cambodia yield schooling deficits among youth with disabilities that are 15 to 20 percentage points apart suggests that this is likely a part of the story.

Another part of this variation likely relates to overall enrollment. It would not be surprising to observe larger deficits in countries where enrollment among children without a disability is high: in these countries there would be more scope to observe a bigger deficit. The schooling deficit does tend to be smaller in the countries with the lowest overall enrollment (Burundi and Mozambique) and is larger in countries with higher enrollment (Romania and Indonesia). The relationship is not perfect, however: Jamaica has the highest overall enrollment, but the deficit associated with disability is about average for the surveys reviewed here.

Last, a part of the variation is likely related to differences in the social and policy environment. Countries where there is greater stigma towards a person with a disability, or where less effort has been made to ensure equal access to schooling, will undoubtedly have a larger deficit associated with schooling. But this is only a part of the cause for crosscountry variation. It would therefore be beyond the reach of these data to attribute differences across countries in Table 6 entirely to differences in policies towards people with disabilities.

# _Patterns of school participation_

The last two columns of Table 6 show analogous results for the percentage of children who have ever attended school. The pattern of results is similar to the current school participation results, and the deficit is of a similar order of magnitude suggesting that a large part of the schooling deficit among children with disabilities comes from the fact that they never attended school at all.

Figure 2 illustrates this issue by showing the grade “survival” profile of the cohort of 10 to 17 year olds. Each line shows the percentage of children of this cohort who have completed each grade—allowing for the fact that some of the cohort are still in school—as derived by the Kaplan-Meier survivor function.<sup>13</sup> There are clearly large differences in the patterns of attainment between youth with and without disabilities. In all countries the

> 13 A similar approach which doesn’t adjust for right-censoring was used in Filmer and Pritchett (1999). This model allows all children to be “at risk,” i.e. even those who have never attended school. Because of the computations of the survival estimation, children who have never attended school enter into the calculation of the probability at grade 1, and implicitly assumes that they will not attend school in the future. The lower age bound of 10 allows for late starting. Results for Jamaica 2000 and Myanmar are not available because sample sizes are too small.

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