Gender-equal and inclusive education starts with research that centres children's voices
In Nepal’s hill communities, children navigate school environments shaped by deep and overlapping inequalities. Every single day, gender, caste, ethnicity and geography play into who gets called on in class, who feels safe walking to school, whose language and culture is reflected in the curriculum and whose is not.
Children are the most direct witnesses to what inclusion, safety and dignity look like in practice. They know what makes school work for them – and what makes it fail. Yet education research and policy more often speak about children than with them. Children’s perspectives rarely inform the tools used to evaluate or improve their schools.
Research conducted by the Learning, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange (LIKE) Lab at Kathmandu University School of Arts set out to change that. With support from the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) through the KIX program, the project aimed to develop a better diagnostic tool to assess how well schools are serving children.
It started from a straightforward premise: children are not passive subjects of education, but knowers, agents and active participants in their own development. The researchers asked children in the hill communities of Bhojpur, Nepal, what they needed in order to flourish in school.
By grounding institutional evaluation in what children value, the new Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) Diagnostic Tool transforms school assessment from a top-down compliance exercise into an actionable blueprint for child-centered change. The research process that created it affirms that knowledge produced with children, rather than simply about them, is more ethical, accurate and responsive to children’s diverse contexts – and, as a result, more useful to policymakers and practitioners working to make schools serve children better.
Measuring what matters for children’s well-being
The standard measures of educational progress – like enrollment rates, learning assessments and completion data – tell us important things, but they do not provide a complete picture of how children are faring. Nor do measures of the resources children and their schools have access to.
A child can be enrolled in school, yet feel unsafe. He can pass his exams and still be excluded from meaningful participation. She can be present every day and still be invisible to the adults around her. A family’s income, a school’s physical infrastructure or a government’s per pupil spending cannot tell us whether a child feels respected, whether she has space to play and imagine, or whether he can participate in class without fear of ridicule or discrimination.
The gaps between what the numbers show and what children experience are where inclusion fails in practice, and where the LIKE team’s research began.
To gain a richer understanding of well-being, the project adopted the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen and expanded by Martha Nussbaum. Rather than measuring the resources children have access to, this approach asks what they are able to do and become.
Nussbaum proposed 10 central human capabilities: life, bodily integrity, bodily health, sense, imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, care for animals and plants, and play and control over one’s environment. A capability list like this one offers a multidimensional basis for evaluating whether children are flourishing, rather than simply existing. Applied to education, this means asking not just whether children are in school, but whether school enables them to develop their identities, exercise their voices, build meaningful relationships and engage with learning on their own terms.
Recognizing education as a foundational capability
Education is itself a foundational capability. As Lorella Terzi argues, being denied the opportunity to be educated diminishes a person’s capacity to develop and exercise virtually every other capability. Sen identified education as among the most important dimensions of human well-being, noting its role in shaping how individuals participate in society, empowering people to make informed choices, and redistributing opportunities in contexts marked by structural inequality.
For children already facing the compounding disadvantages of poverty, gender discrimination and social inequality, educational deprivation is not a single harm, but a multiplier of harms. A girl who cannot access quality education does not simply miss out on learning. She is less able to advocate for herself, less likely to access economic activities, and more vulnerable to risks that come with marginalization.
A school that fails to nurture children’s capabilities, their autonomy, sense of belonging, safety, imagination and participation is not only underperforming on a metric, but also narrowing the futures available to children. This is why the LIKE team put the capability to be educated at the centre of its GESI work.
Engaging children as active agents and partners in research
The LIKE team developed a participatory research methodology, marking a significant departure from traditional education research that treats children as passive subjects. In a typical study, children answer questions on adult-led surveys or standardized questionnaires, often couched in abstract language that can be alienating. Researchers then extract data, focusing on adult-defined metrics that capture aspects like physical infrastructure, policies, enrollment or test scores.
Instead, the LIKE team used group-based narrative tools to create a space grounded in local realities, and asked children to articulate their own priorities, bringing forward dimensions like love, care and shelter. The process affirmed that children are capable of conceptualizing, prioritizing and evaluating their own well-being and the institutional dynamics that affect it.
The research engaged 234 students across 13 community schools in Bhojpur through interactive focus group discussions and participatory workshops. Using visual cards, storytelling and interactive capability-mapping exercises, the children evaluated a list of 21 domains of well-being along two axes: how well they understood each concept, and how much they valued it for their own flourishing.
Next, the researchers worked with the children to refine the initial 21 domains down to 16 core capabilities. Together, they established a capability list grounded in the children’s lived understanding of what a meaningful, flourishing school life looks like for them. This list formed the conceptual foundation of the GESI Diagnostic Tool, designed to evaluate schools not just by what they provide on paper, but by what they enable students to do and be in practice.
Children identified dimensions that mattered deeply to them but were frequently overlooked in formal evaluations, like the freedom to play, the experience of being respected by teachers and peers, the ability to express emotions safely, and the sense of belonging to a community that values them for who they are. The final list included love, care and respect, education, autonomy, aspiration, nutritional and mental well-being, physical health, religion and identity, imagination, participation, bodily integrity, shelter and environment, freedom from economic and non-economic exploitation, and social relations.
The research exposed nuances that traditional methods routinely miss. While children demonstrated deep comprehension of daily emotional realities like love and care, abstract policy terms like mental well-being or the GESI curriculum showed much lower initial understanding.
The process revealed that children’s understanding of their own well-being is deeply contextual and shaped by gendered power dynamics. While girls valued social relations and education highly, societal norms led them to deprioritize their own personal autonomy and mobility compared to boys. What flourishing means for a girl from a marginalized community in a hill district of Nepal may look noticeably different from what it means for a child in an urban school.
Any diagnostic tool worth using must reflect that diversity and make visible the impacts of hidden social inequities. This is why centering children’s voices, rather than imposing standardized frameworks, is so important.
Putting the GESI Diagnostic Tool into practice
The LIKE team translated the 16 core child-valued capabilities into a practical, school-level GESI Diagnostic Tool that captures students’ multi-dimensional reality, in order to inform institutional action.
Rather than checking off aspects of physical infrastructure or standard enrollment rates, the tool evaluates a school by measuring students’ well-being and agency, and by identifying “conversion barriers” – hidden friction points where available resources fail to translate into real flourishing for every child. In practice, school leaders and designated GESI focal teachers (typically social studies teachers) use the tool to uncover issues that standard inspections routinely ignore, such as unaddressed bullying, emotional insecurity, restricted mobility for girls or classroom dynamics that exclude some children.
Alongside the tool, the team introduced a GESI Institutionalization Tracker, which evaluates the school as an organization. It assesses institutional readiness across operational dimensions like leadership, inclusive practices, resource allocation and monitoring systems. When combined, insights from the tool and the tracker provide a complete picture of both child well-being and organizational capacity within a given school.
Based on these findings, schools establish student-driven LIKE Clubs – the project’s primary intervention. Guided by GESI focal teachers and a structured activity book, these clubs give children a formal platform to lead peer activities, build skills, advocate for their rights and address their well-being priorities directly, within school governance.
Local education authorities can draw on diagnostic baseline scores across schools to target support, funding and teacher training to the schools where capability deficits, rather than just resource shortages, are most severe.
Implementation is already underway in Bhojpur. Following the initial research, which co-created the capability indicators with children and established baseline metrics, the GESI Diagnostic Tool and Institutionalization Tracker were piloted across the 13 pilot community schools. Since then, the student-led LIKE Clubs have marked a full year of operation.
Adapting the model for successful scaling
A mid-term evaluation of the project, which examined six months of activity record books and documentation by GESI focal teachers, yielded early insights into how child-centered interventions operate and scale in real-world school environments.
First, effective expansion across schools requires horizontal scaling and adaptive replication. In the case of the LIKE Clubs, the core framework was adopted across the 13 schools without forcing rigid uniformity. Students replicated foundational activities such as quiz competitions; school cleanliness drives; discussions on care, respect and social relationships; and morning assembly speeches, whereby students in grades 4-12 speak for 5-15 minutes to build public speaking confidence. Aligning club activities with existing school routines, such as morning assemblies, has proven to be one of the most effective ways to sustain student participation without overburdening school schedules.
Second, activities need to be tailored to students. Schools adapted activities to match students’ grade levels, daily schedules, resources and interests. While morning speeches and quizzes spanned all age groups, activities addressing complex topics like nutritional well-being (for instance, through junk food prohibition drives) or awareness of child labor were thoughtfully targeted toward older students, in grades 7-8. Schools tailored their activities to local student interests through creative arts, dance contests and football matches.
Third, the clubs are having positive impacts on children’s agency. GESI focal teacher records show remarkable growth in student confidence, teamwork and curiosity. Children are taking increasing ownership of their club spaces, proving that student-led platforms foster genuine agency and personal development.
Rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all model, successful scaling requires guided adaptation. This key lesson will inform the next phase of the project, which involves expanding the LIKE Club framework to all remaining basic and primary schools in the municipality. As the tools and clubs are scaled and institutionalized, the demand-side insights gleaned from their implementation will be integrated into municipal education planning and teacher training modules.
Beyond its immediate potential to improve schools across Nepal’s hill communities, the LIKE team’s research provides a compelling, replicable model for the broader GPE KIX network.
Across countries striving to meet ambitious equity and inclusion commitments, education systems must understand what inclusion feels like from a child’s perspective. By proving that child-centered capability diagnostics and student-led clubs can successfully move from pilot research into active school governance, the project offers a tested roadmap for education systems seeking to honor every child’s right to an education – and a life they have reason to value.
Acknowledgements
This blog is an output of the project Promoting Gender Equality and Social Inclusion in Schools: Building on What Children Value and Aspire to Do and Be, implemented by the Kathmandu University School of Arts, Nepal, in partnership with Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service (RDRS), Bangladesh, and Samtse College of Education, Royal University of Bhutan. The project is supported by the Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange, a joint endeavour with the International Development Research Centre, Canada.
