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…

Deficit ways of speaking about educationally displaced young people are a dominant feature in the language educators draw on to make sense of particular young people. This language can have debilitating effects on the lives of those young people it is applied to. Despite well over 20 years of critique, deficit truths have remained dominant.…

The purpose of this study was to compare the social skills of five groups of children: children with visual impairments attending inclusive education schools, children with visual impairments attending schools for the blind, children with intellectual impairments attending inclusive education schools, children with intellectual impairments…

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…

The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) claims that behaviour can be predicted by behavioural intention and perceived behavioural control, while behavioural intention is a function of attitude towards the behaviour, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control. This study aims at providing explanation and prediction of teachers' inclusive…

Children with profound hearing loss often do not have the same prelinguistic opportunities for social and communication interaction as peers with typical hearing and benefit from structured opportunities to learn these skills. This study examined the effect of two interventions to improve the communicative and social skills of four preschoolers…

As the rates of diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) increase and more students with ASD are enrolled in mainstream schools, educators face many challenges in teaching and managing social and behavioural development while ensuring academic success for all students. This descriptive, qualitative study, embedded within an inclusive…

It is arguable whether Singapore's mainstream schools are moving towards "inclusion" by providing support for students with mild to moderate disabilities through the provision of a newly created para-professional called the Allied Educators (Learning and Behavioural) [AED(LBS)]. Since 2005, the government has provided an incremental…

This study investigated how parents' views on important aspects of integration correlate with parents' actual experiences concerning the integration into mainstream education of their child with special education needs. It was assumed that the degree of discrepancy between perceived importance and corresponding actual experience…

Chronic illness often goes hand-in-hand with absence from school, and students miss out on learning opportunities at school for extended or accumulative periods of time. Many young people seek to continue their school studies nonetheless. The need to consider viable ways to support them academically arose in the context of a project called…

This paper reviews the history of the continuum of services in intellectual disability programmes. The emergence of public school special education in the USA in the first two decades of the twentieth century is used as a case study of this history by focusing on events and personalities connected to the St Louis Public Schools. Using Annual…

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…

To enhance the function and quality of built environments, designers should consider all possible users in their design projects. Therefore, it is essential to incorporate inclusive design in the education of the design student. This study focuses on the educational objectives of and related learning activities in a course where inclusive design…

This qualitative study explored teachers' perceptions of the inclusive education of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at the post-primary level, specifically those with Asperger syndrome. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight mainstream teachers in the Republic of Ireland. One of the main findings of the study was…