Rodrigo Mendes Institute

Brazilian teachers download DIVERSA lesson materials from the Rodrigo Mendes Institute so they can plan inclusive classes before the school day starts.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Create Accessible Content
• Builder-side Interventions → Design Accessible Experiences
• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Provision Resources for Accessibility

What it is

Instituto Rodrigo Mendes, founded in São Paulo in 1994, began as an arts school for people with disabilities and later shifted toward inclusive education.¹ DIVERSA entered public-school practice through a partnership with Brazil's Ministry of Education and still operates as a platform where educators and school managers share inclusive-education practices.²³

The institute now treats inclusive education as a public knowledge problem. BNDES describes IRM's Alavancas project as teacher and manager training plus a free digital platform for inclusive-education content, which provisions expertise, tooling, and training capacity that Brazilian municipalities rarely fund on their own, and IRM's 2025 annual report says the organization reached more than 115,800 educators from every Brazilian state and impacted about 2.3 million students in 2024 alone.⁴⁵⁶ UNICEF and the Barcelona Foundation partnered with IRM to launch "Open Doors to Inclusion" in 2012 as a teacher-training program for physical education, and the DIVERSA portal still works as a content library for teachers, principals, municipal secretariats, and families who need lesson plans, case studies, accessible pedagogical materials, and research on inclusive practice.³⁶

Why it matters

Brazil built inclusive education through law before it built enough classroom capacity to make the law ordinary. The 1988 Constitution named education as a right for all citizens, the 1996 Lei de Diretrizes e Bases routed students with disabilities preferentially into mainstream schools, and Lei 13.146/2015, the Lei Brasileira de Inclusão, obligated public and private schools to enroll disabled students and to make reasonable adjustments without passing the cost to families.⁷⁸ Those statutes moved the legal baseline well ahead of school-level capacity. IRM's own history page says DIVERSA emerged after the 2009 Cambridge seminar and the 2010 Ministry of Education partnership, which means the institute entered the sequence after the right to inclusion had already moved into policy but before most schools had the training to carry it out.¹² In 2020 the federal government issued Decree 10.502, which would have authorized municipal systems to send disabled students to separate schools or classrooms, and the Supreme Court suspended it after Human Rights Watch and Brazilian disability organizations filed amicus briefs, then Decree 11.370/2023 repealed it.⁹ That episode shows how quickly the inherited legal baseline can be pushed back toward segregation when federal policy changes hands. The gap remains large in 2026. Only 6.4% of regent teachers had ongoing special-education training in 2024, more than 20% of schools still lacked any recorded physical accessibility item, and 41.6% of special-education enrollment in EJA remained in separate classes.¹⁰

Teachers and families keep paying that gap in everyday school routines. Only 34% of Brazilian teachers in a 2025 study by Olga Maria Piazentin Rolim Rodrigues and colleagues agreed that their schools held sufficient resources for inclusion, compared to 80% of Portuguese teachers surveyed with the same instrument, and Brazilian teachers with less experience or those teaching autistic students perceived the fewest inclusive resources.¹¹ Teachers who lack training and materials still endure inaccessibility in the classroom, and they often depend on human-help from DIVERSA, course cohorts, or municipal specialists to turn a legal mandate into a workable lesson.³⁶¹⁰¹¹ The 2024 IRM training project "Alavancas" reached 160 municipal technicians across ten municipalities and asked them to draft local policy, placing the bottleneck in the institutional labor required to make inclusion operational rather than in teacher goodwill alone.⁶

Municipal secretariats, universities, and families fragment that labor across their budgets and schedules. The 1996 Lei de Diretrizes e Bases routes most basic-education responsibility to municipalities, and FUNDEB distributes federal and state funding by student count with a supplementary factor for special-education enrollments, but the federal share remains small relative to the mandate the LBI imposes, so teachers buy books, search the web, and attend private workshops to cover the gap.⁷⁸ When the federal executive tried in 2020 to redirect that funding logic through Decree 10.502 toward separate schools and classrooms, the affected expense would have shifted back onto segregated institutions rather than onto the inclusive classroom, which disability organizations and Human Rights Watch argued would have reproduced the very hierarchy the LBI was written to dismantle.⁹ DIVERSA converts some of that requirement-setting and design work into a public good that any teacher with internet access can use, while Alavancas pushes the same logic upward into municipal policy drafting.³⁶¹⁰ IRM's 6 million DIVERSA users and 115,800 educators indicate that a nonprofit can redistribute some of the adaptation tax, but the tax still exists because the public system still underwrites too little of the work.⁴⁵

Débora Diniz argues that disability names "the restriction of participation caused by social barriers" rather than the impairment itself, and that Brazil's ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires moving policy away from rehabilitation and toward accessibility and participation.¹² Anahí Guedes de Mello, writing from the Núcleo de Estudos sobre Deficiência at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, extends that argument by naming ableism (capacitismo) as an intersectional structure that concentrates violence and exclusion on disabled people whose race, class, or region already marks them as vulnerable.¹³ Romeu Kazumi Sassaki's long-running work on inclusion similarly insists that schools must change their systems, not the students who enter them.¹⁴ IRM's work sits inside that same arrangement. The children least likely to have trained teachers or adapted materials are also the children in poorer municipalities, the students in remote regions, and the families that can least absorb the cost of individual accommodations.¹⁰¹²¹³ Nirmala Erevelles makes a parallel point at a wider scale when she argues that disability in the Global South gets produced through the same material conditions that produce racial and class exclusion.¹⁵

Classmates who bully disabled students and schools that leave classrooms inaccessible drive harm before report cards register it. Vera Capellini and colleagues found in a 2024 Frontiers in Education study of Brazilian municipal schools that students and teachers read inclusive classrooms as beneficial when teachers knew how to plan for diversity, and Lilly Augustine, Ylva Bjereld, and Russell Turner's 2024 systematic review of longitudinal studies found that disability roughly doubles the risk of victimization and that victimization among disabled children predicts later depression and anxiety.¹⁶¹⁷ Brazilian national survey data confirms the same mechanism at population scale. Bullied students in Brazilian high schools report insomnia, depression, suicidal ideation, and reduced school performance at sharply higher rates than non-bullied peers, and bodily appearance, facial appearance, and color/race are the main reasons students report being bullied.¹⁷¹⁸ When disabled students sit in classrooms that nominally include them but do not give them accessible materials or trained teachers, they endure inaccessibility in a setting that should support development, and the school converts legal presence into chronic stress, sleep disruption, and a weaker sense of belonging that the literature connects to anxious and depressive embodiment.^10161718 That harm concentrates on disabled children in poorer municipalities where trained staff, adapted materials, and accessible buildings are scarcer, so the legal abandonment of implementation gets written into bodies that were already structurally exposed.

IRM's frontier now sits in scale and policy transfer. DIVERSA gives a teacher in a municipal school a usable lesson before class begins, and Alavancas gives municipal staff a way to write inclusive policy into local government, but the 2026 Panorama shows that most teachers still lack ongoing special-education formation and many schools still lack physical accessibility.³⁶¹⁰ The institute has moved the frontier from isolated specialist support toward a public knowledge infrastructure, yet the current limit remains the same systemwide shortage of trained adults, accessible buildings, and funded implementation.

Real-world examples

In the news

Publicação do IRM apresenta dados da Educação Especial no Brasil entre 2013 e 2024 (March 2026)
-- Instituto Rodrigo Mendes

• The newest Panorama says 6.4% of regent teachers had ongoing special-education training in 2024, that more than 20% of schools lacked recorded physical accessibility items, and that 41.6% of special-education enrollment in EJA remained in separate classes.¹⁰

In the news

Relatório anual destaca impactos de projetos do IRM em 2024 (March 2025)
-- Instituto Rodrigo Mendes

• IRM reports more than 115,800 educators reached, about 2.3 million students impacted, and a DIVERSA audience above 6 million users over the life of the platform.⁴⁵

• The 2024 "Alavancas" cycle trained 160 municipal cursists to draft local inclusive-education policy across ten municipalities, which shows how IRM moves from content toward requirement-setting.⁶
• IRM's 2015 work with Angola's Ministry of Education helped build a national inclusive-education policy that the Angolan president signed in 2017, which shows the model traveling where local policy capacity remains thin.¹⁹
• DIVERSA's current home page describes the portal as a knowledge network for inclusive practice, which means teachers can borrow tested material instead of inventing every adaptation from scratch.³

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the content and design stage means teachers and administrators treating inclusion as planning work:

• "We checked the lesson plan against DIVERSA before the unit started."
• "The municipal secretariat used Alavancas to write the inclusion policy before the school year opened."
• "Our PE class will include adapted activities for wheelchair users, blind students, and students with autism."
• "We added inclusive-education objectives to the municipal plan so schools can be held to them."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect means leaving inclusion to individual improvisation:

• "The law says we must enroll the student, but the classroom teacher can figure it out."
• "We do not have an accessibility line item in the budget."
• "If a school wants training, it can look online."
• "The specialist room handles those students, so the general classroom does not need to change."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the work families and students carry when schools do not build for inclusion:

• "I print DIVERSA lesson plans at home and leave them with the teacher."
• "I sit beside my son in class because the teacher has not been trained to adapt the activity."
• "We changed schools because the first one had no trained staff or accessible materials."
• "I keep reminding the principal what my daughter needs because the system never tracks it consistently."

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All observations occur within the context of inclusive public education in Brazil, where law requires inclusion but teacher formation, school accessibility, and municipal implementation still lag.

Footnotes

1. Mapa das OSC, "INSTITUTO RODRIGO MENDES," https://mapaosc.ipea.gov.br/detalhar/623308; Instituto Rodrigo Mendes. "Nos - Histórico." https://institutorodrigomendes.org.br/nos/ ↩ ↩²

2. Secretaria da Educação do Estado de São Paulo, "Projeto fomenta práticas de educação inclusiva entre educadores," https://www.educacao.sp.gov.br/conheca-o-projeto-diversa-plataforma-para-troca-de-experiencias-sobre-educacao-inclusiva/ ↩ ↩²

3. Instituto Rodrigo Mendes. "English Home." https://institutorodrigomendes.org.br/en/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. Instituto Rodrigo Mendes. "Relatório anual destaca impactos de projetos do IRM em 2024." https://institutorodrigomendes.org.br/relatorio-anual-irm-2024/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Instituto Rodrigo Mendes. "Home." https://institutorodrigomendes.org.br/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. BNDES, "BNDES Fundo Socioambiental - Projetos de Educação," https://www.bndes.gov.br/wps/portal/site/home/onde-atuamos/educacao/parcerias-editais/projetos-educacao-fsa/; Instituto Rodrigo Mendes. "Alavancas para a educacao inclusiva." https://institutorodrigomendes.org.br/programas/formacao/alavancas-para-a-educacao-inclusiva/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

7. Presidência da República. "Lei nº 13.146, de 6 de julho de 2015 (Lei Brasileira de Inclusão da Pessoa com Deficiência)." https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2015-2018/2015/lei/l13146.htm ↩ ↩²

8. Presidência da República. "Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil de 1988, Art. 205-208"; "Lei nº 9.394 de 1996 (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional), Art. 58-60." https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/l9394.htm ↩ ↩²

9. Human Rights Watch. "Brazil: Education Risk for Children With Disabilities" (10 December 2020). https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/10/brazil-education-risk-children-disabilities. Todos pela Educação, "Conheça o histórico da legislação sobre inclusão." https://todospelaeducacao.org.br/noticias/conheca-o-historico-da-legislacao-sobre-educacao-inclusiva/ ↩ ↩²

10. Instituto Rodrigo Mendes. "Publicacao do IRM apresenta dados da Educacao Especial no Brasil entre 2013 e 2024." https://institutorodrigomendes.org.br/panorama-educacao-especial-2024/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

11. Rodrigues, Olga Maria Piazentin Rolim, Camila Elidia Messias dos Santos, Susana Maria Veiga de Sousa Vieira, Catarina Grande, and Diana Alves. "Available resources and inclusive practices for students with special educational needs: perceptions of Brazilian and Portuguese teachers." Frontiers in Education 10 (2025). https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2025.1707006/full ↩ ↩²

12. Diniz, Débora, Lívia Barbosa, and Wederson Rufino dos Santos. "Disability, human rights and justice." Sur - International Journal on Human Rights 6, no. 11 (2009). https://www.scielo.br/j/sur/a/fPMZfn9hbJYM7SzN9bwzysb/?lang=en ↩ ↩²

13. Mello, Anahí Guedes de, and Adriano Henrique Nuernberg. "Gênero e deficiência: interseções e perspectivas." Revista Estudos Feministas 20, no. 3 (2012): 635-655. See also the interview "La Discapacidad en el Marco del Pensamiento Intelectual Latinoamericano," Anis Instituto de Bioética, 2022. https://anis.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Ladiscapacidadenelmarcodelpensamientointelectuallatinoamericano_entrevistacomAnahiGMello.pdf ↩ ↩²

14. Sassaki, Romeu Kazumi. Inclusão: Construindo uma Sociedade para Todos. Rio de Janeiro: WVA Editora, 1997. See also Instituto Rodrigo Mendes. "Principios." https://institutorodrigomendes.org.br/nos/principios/ ↩

15. Erevelles, Nirmala. Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ↩

16. Capellini, Vera, et al. "Students' perception of the strengths and weaknesses of the inclusive educational model of Brazilian municipal public schools." Frontiers in Education 9 (2024). https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2024.1435826/full ↩ ↩²

17. Augustine, Lilly, Ylva Bjereld, and Russell Turner. "The Role of Disability in the Relationship Between Mental Health and Bullying: A Focused, Systematic Review of Longitudinal Studies." PMC (2024). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11245418/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

18. Malta, Deborah Carvalho, Wanderlei Abadio de Oliveira, Elton Junio Sady Prates, Flávia Carvalho Malta de Mello, Cristiane dos Santos Moutinho, and Marta Angelica Iossi Silva. "Bullying among Brazilian adolescents: evidence from the National Survey of School Health, Brazil, 2015 and 2019." Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem 30, no. spe (2022). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9647961/ ↩ ↩²

19. Instituto Rodrigo Mendes. "Instituto colabora para a construcao de politicas educacionais inclusivas em Angola." https://institutorodrigomendes.org.br/instituto-colabora-para-a-construcao-de-politicas-educacionais-inclusivas-em-angola/ ↩