The context of Special Education is a privileged space to study participation. Most professionals and teachers have long assumed the participation and collaboration with families as a central tenet of their interventions. On the other hand, parents with children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) have also been described as being permanently…

The article compares the conditions and implementation of special education professionals' consulting task in Sweden and Finland. The article first describes the background of the consulting teacher role and special education in Sweden and in Finland. Two different perspectives in the continuum on consultation are presented, followed by a…

Active participation of parents in every step of their children with special needs' education is crucial, and it begins with the educational assessment of the children. The parents experience with the professionals who are responsible of assessing children's abilities might be crucial for the services that will be provided for the…

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) children reveal considerable difficulty in producing an organised and complete narrative. The current study conducted a three-month intervention to improve D/HH children's storytelling ability through training in arranging episodes of temporal scripts, and telling the stories they created. We examined 65 D/HH…

Abundant research exists on the transition from school to work of youth with disabilities. However, few studies investigate their subsequent long-term participation in working life. This study, drawing on a life course approach, aimed to examine how former students with special educational needs succeeded in finding full-time employment with…

During their secondary school years, a considerable number of students seriously consider choosing between learning and leaving. Leaving school early means that students do not complete their education. Early school leaving is the last step in a process in which students gradually lose interest and develop the intention to leave school. This study…

Inclusion and participation for students who fall behind are promoted internationally. These policies are challenged by neoliberal policies that aim to educate productive and self-capitalising subjects for the marketplace. The article shows immanent conflicts between these policies. A neoliberal curriculum distinguishes the abled from non-abled,…

The goal of the following study is to identify a pedagogic signature, according to LS Shulman, for working with students who have special educational needs. Special educational needs are defined as significant limitations in personal development and learning which require particular educational measures beyond regular education. The development of…

This study explored the knowledge, experience and confidence of student teachers from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in relation to disablist bullying. Adopting a mixed methodological approach of four focus groups (N = 18) and a pencil-and-paper questionnaire (N = 257), the study explored the students knowledge, experience and…

Teacher education for inclusive education is a key priority in the UK and internationally, with much research exploring how pre-service teachers can be prepared to educate pupils with Special Educational Needs (SEN). However, this has resulted in less consideration of how pre-service teachers can be prepared to work with the "parents" of…

Positive changes to pre-service teacher education programmes (PSTEPs), driven in part by changing worldwide policy frameworks around inclusion, are occurring, albeit slowly. After briefly reviewing international trends and key policy and legislation platforms in New Zealand and Australia, this paper explores some of the challenges in enhancing…

This paper reports on the development of a framework for the classification of local school ideologies in relation to inclusion that provides a tool for classifying the general educational direction as well as work with pupils in need of special support of individual schools. The framework defines different aspects of local school ideology in…

The cognitive growth of children with developmental disorders, like autism, can be seriously impaired due to the disorder. If so, in the Netherlands, these children can attend special schools where they are treated to ameliorate disorder symptoms and to stimulate cognitive growth. The aim of this paper was to identify teaching strategies that…

This project aimed to create a descriptive map of international research which explores the notion of the continuum of educational provision for children with special educational needs. It also aimed to determine and examine the nature of how the continuum of provision is conceptualised, operationalised and enacted in a sample of selected…

International studies have raised concerns about the academic and social implications of inclusive policies on school engagement and successful learning and, in particular, on the ways in which friendships are formed between students with SEN and other students. This article stems from research findings which show that Irish children with special…