Abstract

The International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF) and its child and youth derivative the ICF-CY is meant to be a universal language for professionals working with functioning and health in children and adults. Use of the ICF-CY's codes in educational documents which refer to individual characteristics – such as individual education plans – could greatly enhance communication between support professionals. To date this has not been attempted. This paper proposes to use and adapt an established health and rehabilitation-based coding methodology (Cieza et al., 2005) to do this.

This project looks to validate and adapt the use of ICF coding rules on education documents. This project will also validate whether ICF-CY codes give a good description of a child and their learning environment, or whether the ICF-CY could be better used in another way to construct a tool to do this. This study also aims to establish whether the ICF-CY can be directly used to enhanced communication between differing education support professionals and between support professionals and parents.

Initially devised in 2002 (Cieza et al., 2002) with an update in 2005 (Cieza et al., 2005) there currently exists coding rules or guidelines for coding textual information to ICF values. This has so far only been applied in the health and rehabilitation field. We propose to use these in education by coding information specific to individuals (such as that found in individual education plans).