Red alert for Children's Rights Day: Inclusion in the crisis!

Red alert for Children's Rights Day: Inclusion in the crisis!

On International Children's Rights Day on November 19, 2025, Mag.a Christine Steger, lawyer for equal treatment issues, warns of serious gaps in the care of children with disabilities. [OTS]. Despite compulsory school attendance, the necessary structures that would enable equal learning are often lacking. Responsibility for the structural failure in the education system is also increasingly being passed on to the affected families.

Families face a variety of challenges. Longer waiting times for therapy and a lack of school assistance are not the only problems. In addition, there is a lack of barrier-free classrooms and teaching materials. In many cases, support is refused, whether due to a lack of staff or funding gaps, often denying children access to education.

Systematic hurdles to inclusion

The effects of these deficiencies not only affect children, but also burden entire families, especially women and mothers. Siblings often take on the tasks of assistants, which leads to overwork. In addition, the bureaucratic effort involved in the necessary applications is an additional challenge for many families, which is made even more difficult by regional differences in processes. The exercise of children's rights often depends on the income, place of residence or stamina of the parents.

Mag.a Steger criticizes the fact that the state is increasingly withdrawing from responsibility and calls for a legal right to assistance and therapy. A nationwide uniform standard in the education sector and barrier-free schools with qualified staff are essential to guarantee the right to education for all children.

Inclusion as a social challenge

In Germany, social inclusion is a central term that describes equal access to education, the labor market and health for all people. Statista explains that social barriers are the most common causes of exclusion, not individual impairments. Since ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009, Germany has been actively committed to combating discrimination.

The challenges of inclusion are diverse. To date, there is no binding definition of inclusion, which, however, includes the equal participation of everyone in social life, as the Federal Agency for Civic Education emphasizes. Institutions must adapt to individual needs and break down spatial and social barriers. Examples such as the exclusion of people in care from voting until 2017 show how profound the need for action actually is.

Currently, around 84 million people in Germany take part in social life, including at least 13 million with an impairment or disability. The number of people receiving integration assistance has increased from 585,000 in 2005 to over 1 million in 2023. However, labor market participation among people with disabilities remains low, with an unemployment rate that remains above the general level, despite government support for professional inclusion.

In schools, parents of disabled children have the right to be educated at regular schools, but the figures show that while the number of integrated students is increasing, the exclusion rate is only slowly falling. Around 600,000 students currently receive special education support, which highlights the ongoing challenges in the education system.