Assessing Children with Disabilities Fairly: The Accommodations Most Students Never Receive

By [Author name, credentials needed] · Reviewed for School of Educators

Key facts

• The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and examination board policies guarantee specific accommodations for students with disabilities.
• Most students entitled to these accommodations never actually receive them, a gap between legal entitlement and classroom practice.
• NEP 2020, NCF 2023, and the NIPUN Bharat foundational literacy mission all point toward inclusive assessment as a standard practice, not an exception requiring special justification.
• Free classroom resources: NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools (through your SCERT or DIET), NCERT teacher guides, Azim Premji Foundation’s open-access research, and DIKSHA platform content in 36 languages.
• Support for teachers: KIRAN mental health helpline (1800-599-0019), Tele-MANAS (14416), CHILDLINE (1098).

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and examination board policies guarantee specific accommodations for students with disabilities: extra time, scribes, alternative formats, and other adjustments a student is legally entitled to. Most students entitled to these accommodations never receive them, not usually because a teacher refuses, but because the process to secure them is unclear, undercommunicated, or assumed to be someone else’s responsibility.

What the research actually says

Indian teachers already sense that the research on assessing children with disabilities fairly is more specific and more useful than most professional development programmes suggest; it just rarely gets said aloud in a staffroom. The evidence here draws on ASER survey data, Azim Premji Foundation field studies, NCERT curriculum research, government programme evaluations, and peer-reviewed work conducted in inclusive classrooms. Where international evidence is used elsewhere in this field, it needs to be flagged explicitly and checked against Indian classroom conditions before it is applied here.

This is not an essay about education in Singapore or Finland, translated awkwardly into an Indian setting. It is written specifically for teachers working in special education and assessment roles, because the specific legal and procedural knowledge this essay covers, what the RPWD Act actually entitles a student to, and how a school actually secures it, is different from general inclusive-teaching guidance.

A teacher who genuinely cares can still make a problem worse by misunderstanding its mechanism. Understanding the mechanism is what turns sincere care into effective care.

Good intentions are not sufficient on their own. A teacher who genuinely wants to support a student with a disability but doesn’t know the specific accommodation she’s entitled to, or assumes the school’s administration is already handling it, can leave that student sitting an exam without the scribe or extra time the law guarantees her. The gap is rarely a gap in care. It is a gap in specific procedural knowledge about what to request and how. That gap is where the practical work below sits.

Five principles for assessing children with disabilities fairly

Five principles recur across the research on inclusive assessment in Indian classrooms, and they hold up across disability types and school settings.

1. Diagnose before you prescribe. The most common reason a student misses an accommodation she’s entitled to is that nobody diagnosed, specifically and in writing, which accommodation applies to her particular disability and assessment format. A student with a visual impairment needs a different accommodation than a student with a learning disability affecting written expression, and naming the specific entitlement, not just “she needs support,” comes before requesting it.

2. Build the relationship before you build the instruction. Across reading development, behaviour management, and academic achievement, the quality of the teacher-student relationship is consistently reported as a major factor in how well any given approach performs. A student is far more likely to tell a trusted teacher that an accommodation isn’t actually working for her in practice, extra time that doesn’t account for fatigue, for example, than to struggle silently through an exam format that technically meets the letter of the entitlement but not its purpose.

3. Trust evidence over intuition, especially your own. Teachers develop strong, often accurate instincts about their students. But those instincts run into predictable blind spots on this topic: assuming a student hasn’t requested an accommodation because she doesn’t need one, rather than because the request process is unclear to her or her family, underestimating how much individual variation in what “fair” assessment looks like exists even within one disability category, and mistaking documentation on file for accommodations actually being applied in the exam room. A direct check with the student and her family about what’s actually happening at assessment time corrects these blind spots faster than assuming the paperwork settled it.

4. Treat the community as a resource, not a constraint. Indian schools often position the individual teacher as solely responsible for knowing every legal entitlement, and everything else, the school’s special educator, the family, disability rights organisations, examination board liaison staff, as separate processes to navigate alone. Flip that: the teacher’s role is to know enough to ask the right questions and coordinate with the people whose job it actually is to process these entitlements, not to be the sole expert on RPWD Act procedures herself.

5. Design for sustainable practice. A system where accommodations only happen because one teacher personally chases the paperwork for one student is not a sustainable practice, and it leaves every other entitled student dependent on similar individual effort. Whatever you take from this piece, a standing checklist for what to verify at the start of each term, a known contact for accommodation requests, should be small enough to still be running in March, for every entitled student, not just the one whose case happened to get individual attention.

Where this fits Indian education policy

NEP 2020, NCF 2023, and the NIPUN Bharat mission all point in the direction the RPWD Act already establishes as law: inclusive assessment as a standard entitlement, not an exception that requires a teacher to personally advocate her way through each individual case. The gap between that legal entitlement and what actually happens on exam day, a student sitting the same paper under the same conditions as everyone else despite qualifying for accommodations, is the space this piece is trying to close. It is not an argument for a new policy. It is guidance for the teacher who is already responsible for a student’s assessment, making sure the entitlement that already exists actually reaches her.

Frequently asked questions

What kinds of accommodations does the RPWD Act typically guarantee for assessments? Common accommodations include extra time, a scribe or reader, alternative formats such as large print or Braille, and separate seating arrangements, though the specific entitlement depends on the individual disability and the examination board’s own policy, so checking the current, specific policy for a student’s board and disability is essential rather than assuming a general list applies uniformly.

Why do so many entitled students not receive their accommodations? Research and field observation both point toward procedural gaps rather than refusal: unclear request processes, undercommunicated deadlines, and assumptions that another staff member or the family is already handling it, more often than a teacher or school actively denying a known entitlement.

Whose responsibility is it to initiate an accommodation request? This varies by school and board, which is exactly why a clear, known process matters: a teacher who knows who to ask, and by when, prevents a student from falling through a gap where everyone assumed someone else was managing it.

Where can a teacher find state-specific material on this? Start with your SCERT or DIET for NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools, NCERT’s teacher guides, Azim Premji Foundation’s open-access publications, and DIKSHA, which carries content in 36 languages. For accommodation policies specifically, the relevant examination board’s current guidelines are the primary source to check.

What to do:

• Name one child in your class who is most affected by how accommodations are currently handled, and write down one specific thing you will verify or request for that child this week. Not a general improvement: a named action for a named child.
• Search DIKSHA or ask your Block Resource Coordinator for any resource specific to this topic in your state’s context. If nothing exists, note that and report it. The gap in resources is itself useful information.
• Spend five minutes this week just observing one aspect of your classroom related to this, not teaching, just watching and noting. What you notice while only watching is different from what you notice while teaching.
• Tell one colleague one specific finding from this piece this week. Explaining it will sharpen your own understanding, and it may start a conversation that helps more than any single action.
• At the end of the week, ask yourself what you will do differently next week because of this, and what you will look for to know whether it worked.

Support resources for teachers: NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools (via your SCERT or DIET), NCERT teacher guides, Azim Premji Foundation open-access research, DIKSHA (36 languages), KIRAN mental health helpline (1800-599-0019), Tele-MANAS (14416), CHILDLINE (1098).