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The birth of a non-racial and democratic South Africa in 1994 created great anticipation that society and education operating under the Apartheid government would be transformed. Education policies and education guidelines based on the South African Constitution now acknowledge the rights of all students from diverse backgrounds and abilities to access quality regular education. Against the background of Goal 4 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, this chapter analyses initial and more recent policies and implementation guidelines to develop an equitable inclusive education system to identify barriers to inclusive education and possible levers for change.

Contemporary primary school populations in the Netherlands represent a wealth of languages, ethnicities, and cultures. In 1999, 14.7% of the total population of 1.54 million pupils were registered as minority pupils (Statistics Netherlands, 2001). Most of these are of Turkish (23.7%) and Moroccan (20.4%) origin, speaking Turkish, Arabic, and/or Berber at home apart from or instead of Dutch (Extra et al., 2001). As in many other Western European countries, a significant difference can be observed between the school achievements of pupils belonging to a cultural-linguistic minority and the pupils belonging to the majority group (Walraven & Broekhof, 1998). Turkish and Moroccan pupils, for instance, lag behind a bit less than half a learning year in arithmetic and more than two learning years in Dutch language proficiency by the end of primary school (Tesser & Iedema, 2001). Besides sociolinguistic background, socio-economic, cultural, and school factors account for the underachievement of language minority pupils.