Page 404 - RUICHSS 2023 Proceeding

University of Ruhuna ISSN: 2706-0063
Matara, Sri Lanka

(Jayawardena & Abeyawickrama, 2016). In 1996, Sri Lanka enforced the Protection of

Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act No. 28. This was a major initiation to address the
issues faced by persons with disabilities. Throughout the Drafted National Policy on

Inclusive Education in 2009, the Ministry of Education (MoE) expected to create equality

among students with and without disabilities by providing more attention to students with
SWDs (Ministry of Social Welfare, 2003). MoE launched the Framework of Action for

inclusive education in the same year it drafted the national policy on inclusive education.
Recently, Sri Lanka developed the Inclusive Education Plan for 2019–2030 to strengthen the

SWDs aligning with the SDGs (United Nations, 2022).

2. Research Problem

Though there are several implementations to strengthen and protect the equal rights of the

SWDs, some barriers still exist to overcome the issues related to the day-to-day activities of
those students at the college and university levels. However, we could find that more

research should be done at the university level to understand the barriers to inclusive

education since the government of Sri Lanka, particularly the Ministry of Education has yet
failed to adequately implement a proper mechanism to address the issues of SWDs.

Therefore, the present study focused on the ground-level objectives to be achieved as the
first stage of ongoing research. Accordingly, this study has investigated the barriers that

hinder educational inclusion for students with disabilities through understanding the

perceptions of peers.

3. Research Methodology

The study is a non-experimental, descriptive, and association design between variables using

multivariate statistical techniques. The population in the study is the undergraduates of the
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka excluding the

1000 level (first year) students since they lack experience as newcomers to the university.
The population consists of 1, 841 units representing 697 from the 2000 level (second year),

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