Access and barriers to educational services for Canadian children with disabilities

There have been a number of educational reforms for children and youth with disabilities since the early 1980's. In this report we start by describing changes in American as well as Canadian policy (national and provincial) to set up the context for an examination of the issues related to access and barriers to educational services for Canadian children. We then proceed to describe trends for a nationally representative sample of children with disabilities using data from the 2001 Child component of the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS; Ministry of Industry, 2003). Our analytic strategy consists of two parts. The first is a descriptive analysis examining national and provincial trends and examining if the location of residence makes a difference for access to educational services for children with disabilities. We examine national and provincial patterns as well as urban, rural, and a comparison of residence in different sized urban areas. The second part of the empirical study uses regression analyses to examine the associations of a) the type of condition and b) the "complexity" of the conditions, a marker for severity, on educational access and barriers. In these analyses we control for a host of factors including family socio-demographic factors and province of residence to examine these relationships.