Introduction

Recently an increasing number of countries have established educational policies that allocate extra resources to students who cannot access school curricula as easily as their peers and who have come to be categorised as having disabilities, learning difficulties and disadvantages. Policies geared towards these students demonstrate positive discrimination and operate on the premise that some students require more resources than others in order to achieve equal access to schools and curricula. The goal of this study is then to identify the students and resources involved, develop an internationally comparable framework and link these results to outcome data in order to impact policies in participating economies.