This blog was written by Steven Kaindaneh, Sightsavers. For the 2025 UKFIET conference, a record 37 individuals from 15 countries, including Steven, were provided with bursaries to assist them to participate and present at the conference. The researchers were asked to write a short piece about their research or experience of attending the conference.

In September 2025, I attended the UKFIET conference on the theme ‘mobilising knowledge, partnerships for sustainable development through education and training’ in Oxford. I was partly funded by UKFIET Trustees and Sightsavers to attend this conference. My aim for attending the conference was to share findings and lessons from a recently concluded study on school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) from the perspectives of children with disabilities in Sierra Leone, funded by the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI). My second objective was to learn from what other researchers and practitioners were doing to understand violence in schools and strategies for tackling it.

Among others, pre-conference preparations included preparing a PowerPoint presentation and co-authoring a blog on how maps are helping to make children with disabilities feel safer on the way to and from school. This blog discuses my personal reflections from the conference and will be done in two parts, learning from other papers and key issues from my own presentation.

Learning from others

Based on the objectives above, I was interested in attending sessions that address the following topics: children with disabilities in school, inclusive education, violence in school, learner safety and efforts by stakeholders to tackle violence in schools. Apart from my own presentation, the opening ceremony and plenaries, I attended eight sessions that I had previously selected from the conference agenda. Out of these, three were on school violence, two on gender, two on classroom practices and one on disability. Despite these diverse categories, I observed that most presentations share the following issues in common, some of which I found significant for my work in Sierra Leone.

  1. Protection and inclusion of learners – safety and protection for learners was addressed in most papers, exploring what stakeholders were doing to make the learning environment safe. Despite these efforts, most authors observed that the fear of violence was prevalent in schools, which could be due to poor safeguarding systems, including weak complaint and redress mechanisms. They further linked violence in schools with poor classroom practices, exclusion of marginalised learners, absenteeism and poor academic performance.
  2. Partnerships with stakeholders – Despite challenges like poverty, armed conflict and challenging geographical accessibility, education is gradually reaching children in remote locations. What emerged from some presentations is that institutions, both local and international, are increasingly partnering with governments to ensure the delivery of quality education. Partnership is the collaboration between stakeholders to improve education outcomes, thus benefiting all partners from learners to the school community and state institutions responsible for education. Improved education outcomes in turn contribute to human capital development and economic growth of concerned countries.
  • Policies and regulations governing education – Policies and regulations are formulated by states and schools respectively to govern the delivery of education for better learning outcomes in safe environments. Policies guide the interaction of stakeholders in the education sector, teachers and learners, and governments and donors. Education policy is essential for the growth of a country, especially in the areas of human capital, economic and social development.
  1. Professional development of teachers – It emerged from most papers that teachers are agents of transformation and are central to the safety and academic performance of learners. Professional development of teachers is therefore key in the achievement of educational aspirations for both learners and governments. Governments and their partners must therefore invest in the professional development of teachers to ensure that quality education is delivered in a safe and inclusive manner.
  2. Disability in education – Out of the eight sessions I attended, only one focused on disability, under the category inclusion and intersectionality, which is an indication that disability is still under-researched in the education sector. Considering the high number of children with disabilities in school globally, and the barriers they face in school and on the way to and from school, researchers and policymakers must invest more to understand the lived experiences of children with disabilities concerning their perspectives on how they cope with violence in schools.    

Sharing my own work

My paper was in the category, “safety and wellbeing in education: preventing violence in education.” There were four other papers in this category that focussed on school-related gender-based violence (Sierra Leone), safeguarding mechanisms in schools (Nigeria and Syria) and ending corporal punishment in schools (Pakistan). Although the background of these papers, including mine, were different, they had the following five themes in common.

  • Violence, especially corporal punishment and sexual harassment, were widespread in study schools.
  • SRGBV is under-reported, probably due to the fear of stigma and reprisals.
  • Cultural beliefs and teachers’ own experiences of violence in childhood were identified as key drivers of SRGBV.
  • Safeguarding and complaint mechanisms were weak.
  • Teachers require training to transform from perpetrators of violence to agents of safety and inclusion in classrooms.

While my paper examined SRGBV from the perspectives of children with disabilities, the others focused on the entire school population, generally analysing data generated from the community, including school authorities.

My paper, “safely at school: reducing the risks of school-related gender-based violence for children with disabilities in Sierra Leone,” was presented on 18 September 2025. The study was conducted in inclusive schools in Karene district, using focus group discussion, participatory mapping and photovoice to collect data. Key findings from the study included the following.

  • Erroneous cultural beliefs lead to disability stigma and discrimination which in turn prompt violence experienced by children with disabilities.
  • Geographical factors, including rurality and poor infrastructural development, increase the vulnerability of children with disabilities to violence on the way to and from school.
  • The main forms of violence experienced by children with disabilities in school included physical (bullying and corporal punishment), sexual harassment, psychological and neglect.
  • We observed that girls and boys experienced different forms of violence more than others. Girls with disabilities for instance experienced more sexual harassment compared to boys. Boys with disabilities on the other hand experienced more corporal punishment and discrimination in accessing motorcycles, locally referred to as Okada (popular mode of public transportation in the study area) compared to girls.
  • Mechanisms for reporting abuse in schools and communities were weak and children with disabilities are often afraid to report incidents of abuse to avoid stigma and reprisal.
  • School communities used findings presented to them to develop location-specific SRGBV response plans. Although community plans were different, they had the following approaches in common – raising public awareness on disability and violence, strengthening local bylaws and regulations in communities and schools respectively, strengthening abuse reporting mechanisms and improving conditions of roads used by children with disabilities to and from school.

Conclusion

The study focused on understanding SRGBV from the perspectives of children with disabilities. It therefore amplified the voices of children with disabilities on school violence, an issue that affects millions of children globally every year. Sharing findings of the study, including local SRGBV response initiatives, at UKFIET 2025 was professionally fulfilling. It was good to see so much work being done all over the world to understand violence in schools and efforts been made to make schools safer for learners. Despite these efforts, I was disappointed by the fact that the experiences of children with disabilities concerning school violence was not given more prominence at the conference. Future conferences organised by UFKEIT should encourage researchers and policymakers to highlight the experiences of children with disabilities in schools as much as possible.