Responding to Thrupp's [2003. "The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism." "School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation" 23 (2): 169] call for writers on school leadership to offer "analyses which provide more critical messages about social…

Inclusive education has become a practice that has been adopted by many schools across the globe and most usually in first-world countries. As a whole-school system, it occurs less frequently in developing countries including South Africa which unlike many developing countries has a sound infrastructure and many excellent schools in both the state…

Debates about the meanings of inclusive education are long-lasting, and the imperative to include disabled students in mainstream schools is currently under threat by the UK government's educational policies. This paper draws on critiques from inclusive education and critical pedagogy literature, as well as on findings from field research in…

Standards-based accountability approaches in education are increasingly being adopted in many industrialised countries. This tends to involve the scrutiny of student performance in national academic tests and then holding schools accountable for subsequent progress. International assessments such as Programme for International Student Assessment…

This study details the results of a review of the academic and public sector literature on measuring inclusive education in large systems. It highlights some outcomes drawn from the international literature on inclusion that might be indicative of the presence and quality of inclusive education in an effort to develop a set of outcomes for…

This study responds to a call for research into existing teacher-education programmes and their impact on teacher candidates' attitudes. An inclusive education course that examined the difference between "soft inclusion" (inclusion which addresses the issue of place rather than substance of learning) and genuine inclusion was used…

This article draws on an important distinction between abstract and concrete forms of utopia advanced by the Marxist philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, to examine participation and disability in education. Bloch's view of concrete hope, attuned to reason, engaged with social reality and inseparable from human responsibility, is drawn upon to…

This article presents a collection of personal perspectives of three academics and one ministry official from various countries in the Asia-Pacific region, namely, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand, on the importance of inclusive education. These perspectives offer an insider's understanding of the universal and country-specific…

Case studies of successful place-based education that involve international partnerships are rare. This article reports on an inclusive educational collaboration between pre-service teachers at an Australian university and primary and secondary school-aged children in a slum area of Delhi, India. Encouraged to undertake teaching that affirmed and…

As a worldwide movement, some forms or stages of inclusive education have been experimented and/or mandated in various countries since the mid-1970s. Integration was piloted in Hong Kong in 1997 and remains the official rhetoric and policy. Three developmental phases of inclusive education, namely, integration, integration in transition to…

Malaysia's move towards inclusion was given impetus by its participation in workshops and conferences set up under the auspices of the United Nations (UNESCO 1990; UN 1993; UNESCO 1994). Inclusive education was introduced in the Education Act 1996 as part of the continuum of services available for children with special needs. The purpose of…

In 2008, Thailand passed legislation on the educational provisions for students with disabilities to mandate the implementation of inclusive education. This article provides a historical overview of special education in Thailand and the emergence of inclusive education as it moves from policy to practice. To further identify the challenges faced…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current implementation of inclusive education in South Korea and discuss its challenges. The history of special education is first described followed by an introduction to policies relevant to special and inclusive education. Next, a critical discussion of the state of inclusive education follows built…

Inclusive education has become a global trend in the provision of services for students with disabilities. In Zambia and other developing nations, international initiatives from UNESCO and other nongovernmental organisations have contributed to the consensus that all children have a right to a free and appropriate education and that all students…

This hermeneutic paper interprets a recent series of reforms to inclusive education policy undertaken by the ministry of education in the province of Alberta, Canada. A 2007 Alberta Education review of the 16,000 student files in the province that school boards had claimed met the criteria for severe disability codification status -- the level of…