Three years ago the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office produced a briefing paper on the state of inclusive education in South Africa. We argued then that while the Department of Basic Education (DBE) had mounted a gallant effort to realise the implementation of White Paper 6, progress was at a snail’s pace. In August 2015, the CPLO hosted a roundtable discussion with speakers from the DBE and Inclusive Education South Africa (IESA) in order to ascertain what progress has been made more recently.

This briefing paper will focus on the DBE’s Report on the Implementation of Education White Paper 6 on Inclusive Education (hereafter referred to as the EWP6 Report), juxtaposed with the experiences of Inclusive Education South Africa and the comments of participants at the roundtable. The briefing paper will also make reference to the Human Rights Watch report “Complicit in Exclusion” - South Africa’s Failure to Guarantee an Inclusive Education for Children with Disabilities that was released a few days after the roundtable.