Keeping students close or afar? Whom, how and what for

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic posed great risks to some disabled students, not necessarily because of health-related conditions, but due to the pre-existing entrenched inequalities that might have led to widened disparities. Hence, our aim was to critically explore the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for disabled students, focusing on equal access to quality education. Data were gathered with semi-structured interviews with seven disabled students and eighteen parents of disabled students from Cyprus. Based on the participants’ narratives, it was found that during the school closure non-disabled students who were considered as eligible to learn were usually kept close; in contrast, some disabled students, who were considered as not eligible for equal opportunities in quality education, were eventually kept afar. Thus, the induced fear of the pandemic facilitated the legitimisation of exclusion, by rationalising isolation, on the basis of the ‘best interest’ of the assumed as impotent and sick children. Hence, in some cases, obligatory distance resulted to the perpetuation of the dominant power relations and the prevailing social hierarchy, in which less qualified disabled people are usually placed at the lowest level, often with limited chance to climb up compared to their non-disabled peers.