The Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) landscape in England is bleak. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of pupils with SEND has increased. There is a shortage of places available in specialist SEND provision, and many pupils with SEND are being educated in alternative provision settings which arguably do not meet their needs.…

In a school district in the southwestern United States, the problem that this study explored was that too many students with intellectual disabilities (ID) are placed into separate classrooms at the middle school level rather than being mainstreamed into general education classrooms. The purpose of this basic qualitative project study was to…

Tensions exist between providing inclusive education in mainstream classrooms and market-driven neoliberal values such as academic success and school ranking. These values impinge on teachers' responsibilities to teach students with disabilities. Schools are ranked based on students' performance in national examinations and schools sometimes use…

Adopting the social constructionist approach, this study reports on Bhutanese teachers' views about the inclusion of students on the autism spectrum in regular schools. Following an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach, 16 teachers from seven inclusive schools in Bhutan were interviewed and the analysis of their responses guided the…

Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) requires all students, including those with disabilities, to be served in the least restrictive environment (LRE) or mainstream classroom. However, a gap exists between the LRE requirement and the practice of including students with disabilities, especially those with emotional behavior disability…

In this paper we discuss the connection between the lack of special education specific preparation for leaders and decades of evidence of racial inequities in special education. In doing so, we have a four-fold purpose. First, we outline the basic Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) legal requirements that educational leadership…

Turkey regulates the special education of students with disabilities and, particularly, those who have intellectual disabilities (ID) based on international and national legal texts. However, the gap between law and practice cannot be denied. The existence of obstacles to special education for students with disabilities or ID continues in Turkey.…

Ellen Brantlinger's research and activism created opportunities for scholars who seek to locate and interrupt the social processes that shape educational inequities. In this essay, we reflect on Ellen's contributions by identifying three key "signposts"--lessons from Ellen's work that guided our own journeys and shaped the…

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability promotes equal and full participation by children in education. Equity of educational access for all students, including students with disability, free from discrimination, is the first-stated national goal of Australian education. Australian federal disability discrimination law, the…

As someone charged with ensuring equality in the school environment, teachers have heard the term "inclusion"--the principle that students with special needs, skill sets, and abilities should be integrated in publicly supported activities to the same extent as their nondisabled peers. However, the word inclusion--in and of itself--does…

The UK coalition Government's call to end the "bias" towards inclusion represents a shift in "policy speak" as the new administration attempts to re-narrate special education by putting forward a "reasonable and sensible" solution to the "problem of inclusion". However, implicit in the call is the assumption…

In this article I explore insights gained from participating in an exploratory, small-scale study led by the Enabling Education Network (EENET) in 17 schools in northern Zambia and five schools in Tanzania. Facilitating South-based research, while based in a Northern university, raises complex ethical issues about voice and control which are…

This article presents research investigating the match of children's needs against provision in the context of the increasing use of non-VI designated and non-specialist forms of provision. The data suggest that despite a lack of access to training, either through award bearing or long courses, teachers' confidence and feelings of competence may…

Drawing on the insights of critical disability studies, this article addresses anxieties frequently articulated by academic staff around the implementation of the United Kingdom's Disability Discrimination Act: how to accommodate the needs of students with "hidden" impairments. Following the social model of disability, it argues that…

With an aim to investigate inclusion across borders, quantitative and qualitative data were examined that came from 18 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Finland, France, Iceland, India, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the USA. Four themes emerged in this study: (1) concerns…