This Global Thematic Review on Education examines the under-researched relationship between education and institutional care.

It uses a rights-based lens rooted in the principle that all fundamental rights are universal, inalienable, interdependent and indivisible. Specifically, it is based on the premise that children’s fundamental rights to both education and family life should and can coexist, but that that indivisibility is currently, at times, compromised.

Children have the right to grow up in a family and to have a good quality education that meets their needs. But Lumos’s programmatic work has highlighted that access to one of these rights can come at the expense of the other, for example when children with disabilities are separated from their families and placed in residential special schools due to a lack of inclusive community-based schools. We have also seen that innovative practical and policy-based interventions can enable all children to fully enjoy both rights.

For more information, read our latest in the series of Global Thematic Reviews, examining the well-acknowledged but under-researched relationship between education and institutional care.