Affiliations: Flinders University

Poster title: Data Accessibility of Students with Disabilities: Challenges for Educational Research in Indonesia

Abstract: Indonesian disability statistics in relation to education on the national scale are almost non-existent. As the main data agency, the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) of Indonesia has difficulty in providing access to data on disability issues due to inadequate and underreporting data. These are caused by high levels of shame and stigma attached to students with disabilities and vague of the agreement regarding the definition of disability causing mislead in data collection and reporting. Parents resist acknowledging their children's impairments and tend to lock away that information. Schools, on the other hand, do not consider students with a disability when conducting the admission process and the following actions. These data gaps create a great challenge for the researcher to determine the real problems, analysis the data and produce the recommendations for stakeholders on disability policy. Bringing together information from multiple data sources is important to provide a comprehensive picture of disability in education.