2026-08-19
Inclusive education within the Lithuanian education system still faces significant challenges, which prevent children with special educational needs (SEN) from receiving the support they require in a timely manner and from realising their potential. An audit carried out by the National Audit Office, entitled “Educational Support in Schools”, revealed that a child’s educational opportunities are limited by systemic gaps, a shortage of specialists and parental vetoes. Another key challenge is the inclusion of children with exceptional talents, whose education is currently left to chance and depends on their families’ financial circumstances.
“Every child – whether facing learning difficulties or possessing exceptional intellectual potential – must be recognised and receive an education that meets their needs. We are now facing a painful reality: due to inefficient processes, a lack of adapted tools and resistance from parents, support for children is delayed by months, and sometimes they never even make it to school. The Ministry of Education, Science and Sport and the Lithuanian Centre for Inclusive Education must develop standardised and adapted tools for specialists, and provide schools with clear guidelines on how to proceed when faced with deadlocks,” emphasises Auditor General Irena Segalovičienė.
Delayed support, parental vetoes and reliance on medical certificates
Although the country has an extensive network of Educational Psychology Services (EPS), support for children with special educational needs is often delayed. As many as 34 percent of these services report that children have to wait more than a month for a needs assessment. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the proportion of children with SEN varies by more than a factor of four across municipalities (from 5 percent to 24 percent), and lower rates of identification correlate directly with a shortage of specialists in schools. If there is no one at the school to provide support, the child’s needs often simply remain unidentified.
Upon receiving information about a pupil’s educational or other difficulties, the school’s Child Welfare Committee organises a meeting with the parents and decides to carry out an initial assessment to identify the pupil’s needs and plan the necessary support. However, not all parents agree to such an assessment being carried out. Although, under the current procedure, parents should merely be informed about the initial assessment at school, in practice, without the parents’ consent, this assessment and the subsequent referral to the EPS are usually not carried out.
According to the report, 35.8 percent of EPSs stated that they had received reports from schools which were unable to register a pupil for assessment due to parental refusal. Schools attempt to change parents’ attitudes through discussions, but this takes time, and parents are usually only warned verbally about the possibility of the Child Protection and Adoption Service being informed. In such cases, help for the child is delayed or never provided at all, and the educational conditions they need are not created.
Assistance is also delayed due to documentation issues. 85 percent of EPSs receive a child’s medical records directly from the parents, so the process is delayed or the quality of the conclusions suffers if the parents refuse to provide them. Furthermore, schools themselves are failing to fulfil their obligation to provide initial support without final EPS conclusions – as many as 21 percent of pupils assessed, for whom an initial assessment was carried out in the 2024–2025 academic year, received no support at school due to a shortage of human resources.
A lack of tools hinders the work of specialists
The smooth running of the child’s needs assessment process is hampered by a lack of adapted methodological tools. According to the audit findings, as many as 88–98 per cent of special needs teachers, speech and language therapists, social pedagogues and psychologists working in PPTs indicate that they lack adapted and standardised assessment tools. The assessment of pre-school-age children, pupils in higher year groups, those who speak a different language, or those with more complex developmental needs poses a particularly significant challenge.
School staff face an identical situation – as many as 73 per cent of educational support specialists working in schools report facing a shortage of tools, whilst around 40 per cent of them use tools they have prepared themselves for initial assessment. Although the specialists’ ability to adapt flexibly and find solutions demonstrates their professional competence, the lack of standardised methodological tools creates additional challenges. This results in both an additional administrative burden and a time cost for educational support specialists, whilst the identification of a child’s needs in the country becomes dependent on the personal capabilities and available resources of individual specialists.
Realising the potential of gifted children - an important task
Educational support is not just about helping with difficulties, but also about providing the right conditions for talent to flourish. The proportion of children with exceptional talents in society can range from 3 to 20 percent. Although the new regulations, which came into force on 1 September 2024, abolished the exemption that allowed the needs arising from exceptional talents to be disregarded, no legal clarification or identification algorithm has yet been established.
As a result, chaos prevails in practice: some EPSs do not assess the needs of gifted children, claiming that this is not their responsibility and that there are simply no methodologies for doing so. According to experts, there is simply no coherent system for identifying and educating gifted children in Lithuania – everything is done in a piecemeal fashion, depending on individual enthusiasts and the financial means of parents. In state schools, teachers face an enormous workload, leaving no time for gifted children, while school heads lack the funds for their additional education.
Constantly bored and lacking challenges commensurate with their abilities, children lose motivation and fail to realise their potential.
The National Audit Office’s recommendations to ensure change
With a view to ensuring the protection of children’s rights, an objective assessment of their needs and practical support for gifted pupils, the National Audit Office has made systematic recommendations to the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport and the Lithuanian Centre for Inclusive Education.
The Ministry of Education, Science and Sport is recommended, in order to guarantee a child’s right to education and educational support, to establish a clear sequence of actions for schools in cases where parents (guardians, carers) refuse to undergo an initial assessment, refuse to sign the conclusions of the initial or special educational needs assessment, fail to attend to review the documents, or simply do not respond to invitations from the school or the Educational Psychology Service. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the identification and nurturing of pupils’ exceptional talents, it is recommended that the Ministry establish measures for the identification and assessment of special educational needs arising from exceptional abilities, both at school and at the service, as well as measures for adapting education accordingly. Finally, in order to assess a pupil’s needs as objectively as possible and to formulate detailed recommendations for their education, it is proposed to supplement the assessment process by utilising the information provided in the pupil’s health certificate.
It is recommended that the Lithuanian Centre for Inclusive Education develop and implement a standard for the pedagogical and psychological assessment of children, and procure and prepare the necessary assessment tools, so that educational support specialists and educational psychology services across the country can assess pupils’ special educational needs in a consistent and high-quality manner.
Comments:
Gretė Maziliauskaitė,
External Communications Specialist, Department of Communications and International Relations
mobile: +370 627 21 287, [email protected]