By Laxmi Luitel
Nepal’s education debate has largely run on two separate tracks. One track asks how to make mainstream schools inclusive of children with disabilities, out-of-school children, and marginalized learners. The other track, quieter and less examined, covers the growing range of alternative arrangements operating alongside mainstream schools: non-formal education centers, madrasas, gurukuls and Sanskrit ashrams, Montessori and other alternative pedagogy schools, and specialized settings for children with high support needs.
These two tracks rarely meet in Nepali policy discussion. Yet families make decisions across both simultaneously, as, for instance, a child with a disability who cannot access an accommodating classroom, a girl kept home to help with chores, a Muslim child whose family wants religious education alongside literacy: all end up navigating some combination of mainstream and alternative provision. Nepal does not yet have a shared framework for evaluating which alternative arrangements support inclusion and which ones, intentionally or not, become a permanent way of routing children away from it.
What counts as alternative education in Nepal
First there is non-formal education (NFE). These are catch-up and second-chance classes for children who are out of school, over age for their grade, or engaged in labor. Nepal’s School Education Sector Plan (2022 to 2032) formally recognizes NFE and lifelong learning as a distinct output area, and the earmarked NFE and lifelong learning budget rose from 0.5 percent to 0.8 percent of the total education budget in 2022. Programs such as the Girls’ Access to School (GATE) initiative in Mahottari district have used short, intensive non-formal classes to prepare out-of-school girls for entry into public school.
Second, there are religious and cultural schools. Madrasas, gumbas and vihars, and gurukuls and ashrams are registered with the government as religious educational institutions and are eligible for state funding when they disclose their curriculum and finances. The Ministry of Education recognized madrasa education in 2016. As of the most recent Ministry count, 907 madrasas were formally registered, though education officials and community sources estimate that several thousand more operate without registration, particularly across the Tarai.
Third, there is a paradigm of alternative pedagogy schools and homeschooling has no dedicated legal status in Nepal; families who choose it typically operate outside any formal recognition framework.
Finally, there are also specialized and segregated settings. Schools organized around a specific impairment, such as autism, deafness, or blindness, exist across Nepal, generally outside the mainstream system, often as the only available option in the absence of accommodating mainstream classrooms.
The inclusion criteria
Given the varieties of forms, let’s now examine each of them through the lens of inclusion, as set by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and its General Comment No. 4.
The CRPD General Comment No. 4 gives a precise, and for Nepal underused, vocabulary for evaluating any of these arrangements. It defines four distinct conditions: exclusion, where a child is denied access to education in any form; segregation, where a child’s education is provided in a separate environment designed for a particular impairment, in isolation from other students; integration, where a child is placed in a mainstream institution but expected to adjust to it unchanged; and inclusion, which requires the system itself to change so that it serves the full range of learners. The General Comment is explicit that placing a student in a mainstream classroom without structural change does not constitute inclusion, and that integration does not automatically lead to it.
This distinction gives Nepal three practical questions to ask of any alternative education arrangement. First, is it voluntary or the only available option? An arrangement chosen by a family from a genuine range of options is different from one accepted because no accommodating mainstream school exists nearby. Secondly, is it time-bound with a pathway back to mainstream settings, or open-ended? NFE catch-up classes are explicitly designed as a bridge. A specialized school with no transition plan is not? And thirdly, does it meet the same rights, safeguarding, and quality standards as mainstream provision? Registration status, curriculum disclosure, and safeguarding practices vary widely across madrasas, gurukuls, and specialized schools in Nepal, and this variation matters as much as the model itself.
An arrangement that is voluntary, time-bound, and rights-protecting functions as a bridge into a more inclusive system. An arrangement that is involuntary, permanent by default, and outside standard oversight functions as segregation, regardless of the intentions behind it.
Nepal’s models now
Applying this test across the four streams produces a mixed picture rather than a single verdict. Non-formal education (NFE) scores well on the first two criteria: it is explicitly time-bound and designed as a bridge, and the government’s own planning documents frame it this way. Its weakness is data. UNESCO’s review of Nepal’s Integrated Education Management Information System found that NFE data is still managed manually, which limits the ability to track whether children who enter NFE programs actually transition into mainstream schools as intended, rather than remaining indefinitely outside the formal count.
Religious and cultural schools present a more uneven picture. Where they are registered, disclose curriculum, and integrate into the formal system, as intended under the government’s religious school framework, they function closer to a genuine parallel pathway families choose voluntarily. Where they are unregistered, and researchers estimate this may be the majority of madrasas operating in Nepal, they fall outside any quality or safeguarding oversight, regardless of the intentions of the families using them.
Specialized settings for children with disabilities are the hardest case, and the one most relevant to the work done by some institutions such as Inclusive Education Nepal. In Nepal today, many children with autism, intellectual disabilities, or sensory impairments attend specialized schools not because their families evaluated it as the best pedagogical option, but because no accommodating mainstream classroom exists within reach. This is the condition CRPD General Comment No. 4 describes as segregation by default: a separate environment that persists not by informed choice but by the absence of an inclusive alternative. The honest conclusion is that specialized education currently functions as a necessary response to a system gap, not as a chosen complement to inclusion, and Nepal should not describe it as the latter until mainstream schools are genuinely equipped to be a real option.
Ways ahead
Nepal does not need to choose between mainstream inclusion and alternative education as competing philosophies. It needs a policy position that treats alternative education as legitimate only under specific conditions, and works deliberately to meet those conditions rather than assuming they already hold.
Three steps would move Nepal toward that position. First, we must extendthe registration and disclosure requirements already used for religious schools to all alternative education providers, including specialized schools, so that voluntary choice and quality oversight apply consistently. Second, we should also close the NFE data gap identified by UNESCO, so that non-formal education can be evaluated on whether it actually delivers children into mainstream schools, not just on enrollment numbers. Third, there should be more investments in making mainstream classrooms genuinely accommodating, through Universal Design for Learning and structural safeguarding reform, so that specialized education becomes one option among several rather than the only one available to a family with a disabled child.
In this way, alternative education, held to this standard, is not a retreat from inclusion. Used without it, it becomes a quiet, permanent workaround for a system that has not yet done the harder work of changing itself.
*Laxmi Luitel works at Inclusive Education Nepal