What makes a good school? Perspectives of students at inclusive secondary schools in Germany

ABSTRACT

Despite a vast body of research on inclusive education, students’ perspectives and experiences of inclusive secondary schools have garnered little attention. Yet their perspectives and experiences are central to the development of inclusive schools. To investigate this, we conducted seven group discussions with ninth-year students at German inclusive secondary schools, asking them what makes a school a place where all students can learn well. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we developed three themes (community, justice, and school as a place to live), three cross-thematic areas (limits, teachers, and belonging), and two overarching central discourses (othering and submission to a meritocratic, non-participative school logic). In light of our findings, we argue that inclusive secondary schools still face major challenges vis-a-vis the continuing non-inclusiveness of societies and that students’ views can provide valuable insights into key success factors for inclusive secondary education.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive education
• secondary schools
• students’ perspectives
• sense of justice
• belonging
• school as a place to live

1. Introduction

In the more than 10 years since the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations 2006) and the 25 plus years since the Salamanca Statement, a vast body of academic literature on inclusive education (IE) has grown (Hernández-Torrano et al. 2020). Despite the well-established legal right to IE, the debate on what actually constitutes IE remains unresolved. This makes it necessary to continually clarify what we as researchers mean by ‘inclusive education’ (Göransson and Nilholm 2014). Underpinning this paper is a ‘broad’ understanding of inclusive education (Thomas 2013), which ‘involves a process of systemic reform embodying changes and modifications in content, teaching methods, approaches, structures and strategies in education to overcome barriers with a vision serving to provide all students of the relevant age range with an equitable and participatory learning experience and environment that best corresponds to their requirements and preferences’ (UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2016; emphasis by the authors). Given this right of all students to attend a regular classroom in a suitable non-segregated mainstream school, we understand IE as a transformative movement and ‘call to action’ (Slee 2019, 911) that challenges mainstream schools to cater to diverse learners (DeVroey et al. 2016). This is especially true for students from poor, migrant and/disabled backgrounds which mainstream schools have historically failed (Ainscow 2007; Lindmeier and Lütje-Klose 2015; UNESCO 2008). Taking this broad understanding of IE as a starting point, we find that most of the existing studies on IE: (a) focus on the views of adults (Hernández-Torrano et al. 2020); (b) focus on particular groups of students (Messiou 2017); (c) are centred on primary schools as setting (De Vroey et al. 2016); and (d) focus on attitudes towards IE (Hernández-Torrano et al. 2020; Van Mieghem et al. 2020).

1.1. What about the experience of students in inclusive schools?

IE requires an ‘understanding [of] the experiences of education from the perspectives of those who directly encounter it, which in the case of schooling, means children and young people’ (Messiou and Hope 2015, 1009). Simply asking adults about children’s views is no substitute for the input of children themselves (Greig et al. 2012). Thankfully, recent studies have increasingly focused on the students’ voice (Cook-Sather 2018). In IE research, student-centred research is often limited in their scope on particular groups of students (Messiou 2017), concentrating for example on typically-developing students (e.g. Bates et al. 2015) or disabled students (e.g. Broer et al. 2005; Connor and Cavendish 2020; Humphrey and Lewis 2008) in inclusive contexts. Clearly, this is important research but it does not address the experience of all students there. However, if the idea of inclusive schools as ‘schools for all’ is to be taken seriously, IE research must expand its research scope to reflect the reality of inclusive schooling and move beyond the simplistic binary of dis/abled. Selecting certain students as research participants merely because they belong to an ascribed category risks (a) making unjustified assumptions about their experience of schooling and (b) excluding students that may also face marginalisation (Messiou 2017).

IE in secondary schools – especially in the highly stratified, competitive German school system (Powell 2011) from which this research stems, faces particular challenges. Structurally, secondary schools are asked to marry ‘equity and excellence’ (De Vroey et al. 2016, 111). Since secondary education has been slow to implement inclusive practices compared to primary education, currently there are relatively few studies on inclusive education at the secondary level (De Vroey et al. 2016; Pearce et al. 2010).

1.2. Experiences, not attitudes

While a few landmark studies have asked students, what constitutes a ‘good’ (secondary) school (e. g. Burke and Grosvenor 2005; Lahelma 2002), this question is yet to be addressed for inclusive secondary schools. With a predominant focus on attitudinal research (Hernández-Torrano et al. 2020; Van Mieghem et al. 2020), the existing scholarship on IE in secondary contexts does little to further our understanding of students’ overall experience. The question thus arises: How do students at inclusive secondary schools experience school? Over the past three decades, a handful of studies addressing specific aspects of the student experience focus on two main themes.

A first group of studies addresses how students in inclusive classrooms describe ‘good’ instruction. Sub-themes here relate to fair assessment practices (e. g. Gabryszczak 2015; Klingner and Vaughn 1999), the different learning speeds of students in the same classroom and their effect on academically strong students (e. g. Dare and Nowicki 2018; Hüls and Schneider 2015; Klingner and Vaughn 1999), the qualities seen by students as essential to teachers of inclusive secondary education (e. g. Cefai and Cooper 2010; Connor and Cavendish 2020), and how the bustling inclusive secondary environment can serve as a learning barrier for students with specific needs (e.g. Humphrey and Lewis 2008). A second group of studies has mainly explored the student perceptions of disabled pupils’ social exclusion in inclusive classrooms (e. g. Bates et al. 2015; Buchner 2018; Cefai and Cooper 2010; Hüls and Schneider 2015) and the social support systems that can foster social inclusion (e. g. O’Rourke and Houghton 2008).

We were motivated to conduct this study by the dearth of research on inclusive secondary education in general, and on students’ own perceptions (Rose and Shevlin 2017, 67) of their experience of inclusive schooling in particular. Following Dyson and Millward’s (2000) ‘organizational paradigm’ (Ainscow 2007), our inquiry focusses on institutional conditions that enable learning and participation by all students – instead of investigating individual characteristics of students that enable or hinder it. We thus wanted to know what students at inclusive schools think is necessary to support the effective participation of all students. One caveat here is that extant research shows that students who are asked about their views on IE, often have no concept of IE as educational policy (e.g. in the UK, see Bates et al. 2015) – a finding our research also confirmed. This necessitates a slight shift of question: For students at inclusive secondary schools, what makes a good school where all students can learn well?

2. Methods

2.1. Methodological framework

In this paper, we ask what students at inclusive secondary schools – as an under-researched key stake holder group – think makes a school where every student can learn well. To investigate this question, we employed a qualitative methods framework as this (a) is especially helpful to elucidate the perspectives of under-researched groups and research areas and (b) it allows insight into the meaning making processes of students and how, in turn, they draw on relevant social discourses to do so. Our data generation method of choice, group discussions, allow participants to express themselves more freely and among peers compared to other forms of qualitative enquiry, e. g. in interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2022) was then applied as analytic procedure that allows recognising patterns of meaning running through the material.

2.2. Participants

To investigate this question, in the spring of 2019 we conducted a total of seven group discussions with 41 ninth-year students (aged 14-17) from four secondary schools (cf. Table 1). Scattered across one state in eastern Germany, the schools were selected based on their previous application for the ‘Jakob Muth Prize for Inclusive Schools’ (awarded by the German UNESCO Commission, the Bertelsmann Foundation and the Federal Government Commissioner for Matters relating to Persons with Disabilities). This selection criterion helped us answer the tricky methodological problem of defining what exactly an ‘inclusive school’ is in the German context – for that legally, all mainstream schools are deemed ‘inclusive’ given that every student has the legal right to attend a mainstream school (Biermann 2022; Niemeyer 2014). Which, how and to what extend a specific mainstream school actually has inclusive cultures, structures and practices in place is not clear unless one conducts extensive preliminary research at each school one wants to later interview students at. Schools that apply for such an award and describe themselves as inclusive, we assumed, will have inclusive concepts and objectives that shape the structures and actions of stakeholders, thus creating a more inclusive school culture.

Table 1. Participants by school type and gender.

School	Available income level^3	Type of secondary school	Discussion	Number and gender of participants
A	Average	A level option	GD1	8 participants: 2 female, 6 male
B	Low	No A-level option	GD2	5 participants: 2 female, 3 male
		No A-level option	GD7	7 participants: 2 female, 7 male
C	Below average	No A-level option	GD3	6 participants: 1 female, 5 male
			GD6	5 participants: 3 female, 2 male
D	Low	A-level option	GD4	5 participants: 3 female, 2 male
		A-level option	GD5	5 participants: 3 female, 2 male

As a federal republic, Germany consists of 16 federal states (Bundesländer). Education is devolved to the states meaning each state has its own system of organising public education within the boundaries set by the German constitution. The highly ability-stratified German secondary school system presents a major challenge to the implementation of inclusive education as education for all (Powell 2011; Powell, Edelstein and Blanck 2016). Apart from a separate special education system still providing segregated education for the majority of students labelled as having ‘special educational needs’ (Kultusministerkonferenz 2020; for a comprehensive analysis of the German special education system see Powell 2015), two basic types of secondary schools can be distinguished in Germany broadly and in the state this research was conducted at: (1) selective secondary schools award school certificates allowing university entrance by studying up to year 12/13 (Abitur, comparable to ‘A levels’ in British terminology). They recruit their students based on their primary level grades. (2) In non-selective secondary schools, the achievable secondary education degrees allow students admittance to apprenticeships programmes but not university education. While today nearly 50% of a given cohort leave secondary education with A-level equivalent certificates (BMBF 2021), the ability-stratification of the German secondary education system has meant a de facto delegation of the implementation of inclusive education to secondary schools not awarding A-level-equivalents (Rabenstein, Stubbe and Horn 2020). It was thus crucial that our sample included students from all mainstream school types – without sampling from special schools.

All the schools included in the sample implemented inclusive education as students with mixed-abilities learning in the same classroom and formally belonging to the same class group. An important exception in this regard was the school at which group discussion (GD) 2 and 3 where conducted: while the school also generally implemented mixed-ability classrooms, for this year 9 cohort, the school had created a separate special education class that shared some but not all of the general education classes.

As required per state legislation, parents’ consent was sought for all participants. Students were selected from each class group for the group discussions based on (a) filled-in parental consent forms (b) the students’ willingness and interest in taking part in a group discussion that day and (c) the class group leader’s recommendation for students to talk to after we told them that we wanted to talk to a heterogenous group of students.

Of the total 41 students, 61 percent of the participants were male, and 39 percent were female; 25 percent considered themselves to be disabled, and 10 percent declared a migration background. Students transition to secondary schools in seventh grade in the federal state where the schools were located. We chose to talk to ninth graders because (a) students at that grade level have at least two years’ experience of IE, even if they attended a non-inclusive primary school (maximizing exposure to IE) and (b) few of them leave school before ninth-grade, since all German students must attend school for at least nine years (minimizing the likelihood of excluding students with low school attainment from the sample, who may leave school after the mandatory schooling period). In every school sampled, the student groups were each drawn from a single class group, ensuring that students in each group knew each other already. All of the students participated voluntarily and received no incentive or reward in exchange for their participation. Ethics approval was granted by the state’s Ministry of Education (WU 76-E-2018).

2.3. Generating data: group discussions

Group discussions are an ideal way to gain insight into the views, perspectives, and ideas of young people, as they can create a safe-space for expressing one’s opinions and help to reduce the power imbalances between researchers and participants (Adler, Salanterä, and Zumstein-Shaha 2019). Furthermore, we associate the term group discussion with the possibility of exploring the knowledge and meaning-making processes within the group (Bohnsack and Przyborsky 2007; Przyborsky and Riegler 2010). Each discussion was audio-recorded for later transcription and began with an informed consent procedure. Given our interest in the students’ views on what makes a good school, we always opened our discussions with the same question: What makes a good school where every young person can learn well? Following a loose interview schedule, students were then asked (a) what needed to be in place for equitable learning in school, (b) whether their school allowed all students to learn well and if not, what barriers they saw in that regard, (c) what a school needs in order to enable equitable learning of (dis/)abled young people / students from non-German speaking families / families from low socioeconomic backgrounds and (d) what ‘inclusive education’ or ‘integrative education’¹ meant to them. Each discussion was conducted at the students’ school and lasted between 45 and 120 min. To analyse our data, we used Braun and Clarke’s (2013) reflexive thematic analysis. In contrast to other content analysis procedures that aim on the reduction of the data, reflexives thematic analysis focusses on the construction of themes. These are understood as recurring patterns of meanings relating to the research question across the whole material: ‘Pattern-based analysis rests on the presumption that ideas which recur across a dataset capture something psychologically or socially meaningful’ (Braun and Clarke, 2013, 223). Reflexive thematic analysis involves six steps: 1. transcribing the verbal data, 2. generating initial codes, 3. generating initial themes, 4. developing and reviewing themes, 5. refining, defining and naming themes, and 6. writing the report (Braun and Clark, 2022). First, during the review of the individual transcripts of the group discussions, significant topics were named, discussed amongst the authors and transferred into initial codes. These codes were then used to examine all the material using MAXQDA. The codes were then reviewed and suggestions for meaningful themes were developed. Taking into account the explicit (semantic) as well as implicit (latent) level of meaning, three cross-code themes were constructed, which represent recurring patterns of meaning (Braun and Clarke, 2022).

3. A place of belonging, justice, and wellbeing – an inclusive school from the students’ point of view

Conducting group discussions, we investigated what students at German inclusive secondary schools said makes a good school where all students can learn well. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we developed three themes including multiple sub-themes. We will unfold this interpretation of the data in the following section, anchoring themes by way of direct quotes from the group discussions.

3.1. Theme A: finding belonging in a community with (no) limits

In our group discussions, students framed being part of a school-community as a prerequisite to learning and to their own sense of belonging. In two sub-themes, we tried to capture opposing aspects: First, belonging to a school community creates a sense that one is ‘normal’. Second, the school community itself sets limits on normalcy that not everyone can overcome.

3.1.1. A1: a sense of community as precondition for belonging, learning and ‘feeling normal’

Students identified the class group as key for their sense of community and belonging at school. As the place where they spend most of their time at school, the class group was described as an important arena for finding, forging and maintaining friendships:

And I can also learn quite well here at school and I also like being here, simply because I have my friends, I know I can also come here, I can talk to people, I simply always have someone around me and I don't get any stupid ideas now. (GD5_A204²)

Yet the students also recognized that a class group may also marginalise some students and that school activities across class groups are crucial:

But I think it's also quite good for some individuals, when people who maybe don't have the best standing, that they then [when students from different class groups come together] maybe flourish a little bit anew. Personally, I think it's a good way to meet new people and make new friends. (GD4_A65)

School activities involving students from different class groups (e. g. school projects and trips) were described as especially important for these marginalised individuals. Such events can connect students to others in the same cohort, or even to others from different years, enable them to find friendships outside of their class group, and allow them to develop a sense of belonging at school.

Students distinguished between feeling a sense of social belonging and having a good working relationship with each other. While they described working together with friends as more conducive to learning, they also acknowledged the importance of working together with others:

Well, there was also a girl in our class who was a bit in conflict [with other students]. I wouldn’t have had anything do with her outside of school, I’ll be honest, but I did group work with her at school and got along with her and I think that’s actually important in a class, in a community, that you rise above it a bit, even if you’ve been arguing with the other person, but then you’re assigned to group work, that it still doesn’t escalate into a fight and you have to work by yourself because of that. (GD5_A205)

To us, this seemed a very adult idea: here, students talk about seeing beyond their personal history with another student when being asked to work collaboratively, construing the ability to do so as a central characteristic of a good school community.

Finally, the students seemed to identify with an overall school ethos which aims to create a community of belonging, where differences between students fade to the background:

Maybe that at our school it is so important that all humans are equal. Whether they have a disability, some weakness, some illness, whatever, that they are just as (.) valuable or just as valued as we are as normal people. But they are also normal, right? (GD1_A122)

Acknowledging that no student is perfect, this affirmative talk about school community supports the idea of mutual understanding between students as unique individuals with individual strengths and weaknesses, yet of equal standing. The idea of ‘being normal’ is central here, but in different variations: some students rejected the idea of normal altogether through normalising human difference (‘So, there is actually no person who is really normal. Everyone has quirks and weaknesses.’, GD6_A443). Others, however, explicitly normalise certain students (‘But they are also normal, right?’, GD1_A122) that were just before implicitly described as different to ‘normal people’. Both understandings of normalcy share the same aim: framing all students as equally belonging to the class group and the school at large.

3.1.2. A2: the limits of community – ‘the others’ belong here, but are not part of ‘us’

When asked about integrative and inclusive education, it struck us that none of the students seemed to regard inclusive education as a meaningful term – even though the term is well established in popular discourse (Althoff 2021; Lüte et al. 2014), schools and educational policy in Germany (Hinz 2017). Instead, the schools they described seemed to be places where every student was formally welcome as part of the school (see A1), but where some groups of students were construed as not belonging to ‘us’: ‘So, we throw something in that doesn't belong and try to make it belong.’ (GD3_A808)

Here, IE is largely understood as them adapting to us, based on an implicit distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘not-so-normal’ pupils. In this quote – speaking very distanced and yet in everyday language – the objectified ‘they’ is understood to be a task for ‘us’: ‘we’ have to make ‘them’ fit within the existing system. In constructing this ‘other’, the students spoke about different groups of pupils: (1) disabled children, (2) ‘problem children’ who fail to conform to (un-) official behavioural rules (confounded with children from poor families or children living with youth services), and (3) non-German speaking students. Thus, ‘us’ usually implied non-disabled, rule-following, German-speaking students:

Interviewer: And why do you think that is? That your classmates have learned German so well and have arrived here so well. Do you have any ideas?

Boy1: Because they were really integrated, I thought. So, that they were properly accepted and that they got help. The support workers were there for him in the first year and when he was able to speak relatively well, he was on his own. But he gets a lot of help.

Boy2: Yes, I also think that we are very open. We are very open as students, that is whether we know him or not, we still approach him and try to be kind somehow. Try to include him. (GD1_A254-257)

Here, it becomes clear that from the students’ point of view, successful IE requires a tripartite effort: (1) ‘The others’ have to be willing to integrate themselves (‘Yes, [they] need to get involved for once.’ GD7_A873); (2) students who already belong to the class group must acknowledge their responsibility in welcoming incoming pupils; (3) finally, teachers must provide the practical support that ‘others’ required, e. g. assistance throughout the school day for disabled students, or additional language classes for non-German speaking students.

3.1.3. Conclusion theme A

When thinking about how the students talked about the kind(s) of belonging a good inclusive school offers, we were struck by the ambivalence of their comments. Like two sides of a coin, two themes emerged that speak to, yet trouble ideas of schools aiming to be inclusive as offering communities of belonging. On the one hand, the students stressed that at their schools, generally all students – whatever their background – had a place, thus enabling formal belonging for all (cf. Slee 2019; Vandenbussche and De Schauwer 2018). On the other hand, the language used by students in talking about these issues reflected binary us-versus-them thinking. This logic implicitly separates those who have a legitimate place in the school community from those who must earn this place through a process of assimilation (cf. Baak 2019 for an Australian example of the same dynamic; Slee 2001). During that process, newcomers must adapt to the dominant ideologies of the ‘normal pupil’ (Baglieri et al. 2011; Ratner 2016), albeit with the support of ‘normal’ students and teachers alike (cf. Van Mieghem et al. 2020, 683).

3.2. Theme B: justice for all – but especially for me

When talking about ‘a school where everyone can learn well’, the students frequently brought up issues of justice and fairness as basic principles of an equitable school. This theme mainly emerged from references to situations in everyday school life which they considered to be unfair. Here, justice was not construed as a universal norm of human coexistence or as something to which everyone at the school was entitled, but as a specific right of students. For both assessment situations and teaching practices, the students described their experience in terms of a tension between universal standards of fairness and individual, needs-based standards of justice. From this, we developed the sub-themes Justice and performance (B1) and Teachers as ‘guardians of justice’ (B2) connected to a third sub-theme: Justice versus equality (B3).

3.2.1. B1: justice and performance

In our data, the students’ idea of justice was closely connected to a performance-oriented notion of learning and rule-following. They described appropriate student behaviour –being attentive during class, doing one’s homework, preparing for tests – as a necessary prerequisite for good marks:

If nobody sits down and studies, then it's not anyone's fault. It's not the teachers’ fault that the grades are like that, it's just the student's own fault because they don't [participate] in class and they don't study at home. (GD2_A104)

Here, students become architects of their own fate: appropriate learning behaviour will bring about good results. Conversely, bad marks are seen as justified if they result from a student’s laziness or indifference. Bad grades were considered unfair, however, if the affected student had tried hard. In this case, the failure was attributed to external circumstances such as unrealistic expectations or bad teaching.

Justice also meant the necessity for setting, following, and strictly enforcing clear rules at school: ‘I think it's good that there are rules. Of course, they are sometimes broken, but I also think it's important that there is a firm hand.’ (GD4_A129)

Students seemed to understand school rules not as a framework fundamental to the school’s functioning as an institution or to create a positive learning environment. Rather, they framed (school) rules as a standard in its own right. Rule-following as a behaviour, in this view, can and should be evaluated using the same individualising competitive logic students are familiar with from questions of school achievement. Those who follow the rules win this ‘competition’ – but only if the rule-breakers are punished. If rule breaking remains unpunished, students think it is unfair to all those who comply.

3.2.2. B2: teachers as ‘guardians of justice’

From the students’ point of view, justice and its enforcement are above all the domain of teachers, who, as a kind of ‘guardians of justice’, are required to always act fairly and according to their own standards:

That the teachers don't favour anyone. Or, in general, [it’s bad when] someone is favoured, because I think it's always pretty mean, or others think it's pretty nasty when you just know, ah yes, that they're the teacher's favourite anyway, they will be picked to answer the question or chosen anyway. (GD1_A212)

Here, students emphasise that teachers should treat every student the same, irrespective of the teacher’s sympathies or the student’s abilities. They also discuss the teacher’s role as a guardian of justice in various contexts, such as test preparation (e. g., teachers should adequately prepare students for tests), lesson cancellation (e. g., each class should get the same share of cancelled lessons), or the monitoring of students (e. g., even when absent from a specific lesson, teachers should monitor the behaviour of all students equally).

Furthermore, the students felt that teachers should hold themselves to the very standards they teach:

Student A: Or when we are debating something, she [the teacher] tells us we are arguing. Even though that's what she taught us to do. Student B: Yes, she herself taught us in German class that if we have an opinion, we should substantiate it. When we do that [she says]: ‘stop arguing’. (GD3_A525)

Here, students experience themselves as subordinate to the teacher; rules always apply to them – but not necessarily to the teachers. Consequently, the students retreat into a passive position: justice is something they expect but cannot help creating. Although the students criticise some rules (e. g., that they have to spend the break outside even in rainy weather), they do not demand an active role in making or changing them.

3.2.3. B3: justice vs. equality

When discussing performance-oriented justice and teacher fairness, students grapple with the fact that justice and equality are not necessarily identical. To resolve this dilemma, they either (a) distinguish their group from another which is perceived as receiving preferential treatment, then framing the other group as unfairly privileged or (b) frame different standards of assessment for the same task as unfair, yet – paradoxically – support individualised assessment-standards for their own performance.

Demanding ability-based justice for oneself frequently requires that one distinguishes oneself from other student groups with regard to race, disability or gender (cf. theme A2):

And I also have the feeling that people like that are not properly dealt with. For example, he's always late and has no manners and then they just say and don't crack down on him, but with a German student, for example, with us, if he is late or something, then they do crack down on him. (GD5_575)

Here, it becomes visible that the idea of racial differences also structure how students talk about each other. Students saw members of ‘othered’ groups as privileged when performance or (mis)behaviour was being evaluated – e.g. when students from migrant families are given preference in the allocation of school places.

Some participants defended the idea of equal rights for students with learning difficulties, arguing that achievement should be assessed based on each student’s aptitude, rather than a universal standard defined for a fictitious ‘average’ student. Others, however, described their experience very differently:

We normal students, I'll just say it, have to fight to get into tenth grade, so that we can make it to tenth grade. Or ninth. And the students with learning disabilities still keep going forward. Despite those grades. Ok they get a different degree, but still, that's unfair to us. I find it unfair in general. I have to fight to get into tenth, the students with learning disabilities don't. They can get sixes, fives [ = E or F; comment by the authors]. They still get ahead. (GD2_A153)

This student talks about the fight to get the good grades needed to advance to the next class, while students with special needs (SEN) seemingly enjoy an easy, pressure-free life. For the speaker, this injustice is not remedied by the fact that a student with learning difficulties’ school-leaving certificate holds less value in the German labour market than that of other students. Here again, the school community is construed as fragmented into different groups (cf. theme A), each of which seeks fair treatment and equality.

3.2.4. Conclusion theme B

The students’ perceptions of various aspects of justice reflects not only the issue’s central role in school, but also the fact that justice in general is characterized by a tension between equalising and differentiating principles (Flitner 1985). Neither schools nor teachers can escape this tension between egalitarian and needs-based distributive justice, i. e. offering everybody the same opportunities and at same time giving everyone what they need according to their abilities and circumstances (Flitner 1985). However, IE can be characterised as fundamentally principled on needs-based justice (Kobs, Knigge and Kliegel 2021). The incompatibility of individual adaptation and standardized educational goals reflects this dilemma (Speck 2019). For Prengel (2012), this is a central paradox of IE itself, because differentiated learning objectives can bar some students’ access to qualifications, thereby putting educational justice at risk: SEN students may reach their final year thanks to adapted curricula and individualised support but, for example, then fail to pass standardised final examinations.

Against this backdrop, the students’ ambivalent struggle for justice appears hardly surprising: Students framed needs-based justice as crucial for their own learning at school. When individualised rules, standards or support are targeted at other students, however, they position this needs-based differential treatment as unjustified given that it violates the principles of egalitarian justice. This is highly problematic for IE given that we know that experiencing school as just has a positive impact on a student’s sense of belonging, stress levels, success in school, and social behaviour (Dalbert 2013) – while at the same time equal access to participation opportunities and thus teachers being responsive to students’ individual needs can be seen as a central criterion for school quality (Reich 2008). A high degree of transparency as to which principles of justice are applied to whom, when and why, and an open discussion about them among all students could help to avoid irritation and increase a sense of injustice – as well as making these principles themselves the subject of joint discussion.

3.3. Theme C: school as place for living and learning

This theme looks at the features of school as a place where teenagers spend significant amounts of their time. Here, two topics stand out in our data, that point to significant impact factors for student wellbeing: (1) the school as built environment and (2) teachers’ personality, behaviour and actions.

3.3.1. C1: OUR school building? (No) space(s) for us

In terms of school as a built environment, the students describe a good school as one that serves all students by offering them general cleanliness, functioning basic facilities (like toilets), spacious, friendly and well-lit rooms with adaptable furniture and comfortable chairs, and a variety of locations for breaks and eating. In describing these features, students implicitly point to the fact that they are human beings, not just pupils:

I don't like the chairs here at all, for example, because I can't sit there at all, because I always get back pain. So, a certain level of cosiness, so that you don't have to squeeze in there, that's actually quite pleasant. So that you feel comfortable in the place of learning. (GD4_A117)

The worst thing in the gyms are always the bathrooms, no one wants to go to the toilet there, because it's really dirty. (GD6_A156)

Spending many hours per day in school, for them the school environment is not just a learning space, but also and more broadly a living space that contributes to their wellbeing. They especially stressed the significance of common areas in their schools: ‘We are barely able to sit down, because it's crowded everywhere.’ (GD3_A433).

Students framed the experiences brought on by a shortage of space – feeling cramped, lacking sufficient space during breaks, or having to rush to get a seat to eat lunch – as stressful and detrimental to their wellbeing. The students saw school as a complex environment that must serve a range of student needs not met by merely enlarging existing common areas. Rather, they wanted schools to provide various specific spaces for specific needs, e.g. bright classrooms, a cafeteria with a sufficient number of seats, places to hang out with their peers or informal areas to use computers/the internet – spaces that would also give students a sense of ownership of their own school. In comparison to this vision of a desirable school environment, students often considered their schools to be inadequate – for example, in terms of accessibility:

We have a wheelchair ramp downstairs, […] but if there are lessons on the second floor, how is the child supposed to get up there in a wheelchair? That's just – really the elevator would be a good thing, but it is about money. (GD6_A570)

Here, the students frame a lack of funding as the main obstacle preventing schools from offering a good and well-functioning school environment for all. Schools do not give facilities the amount of thought or the priority needed to create an inclusive environment. In sum, students describe an inclusive school as one that caters to their needs and provides a variety of spaces specifically dedicated to them as human beings – not mere teaching facilities.

3.3.2. C2: teachers who care

For the students, the ideal teacher appears to be fundamentally an attachment figure who shows genuine interest in their students, behaves and communicates in a nice and student-focused way, and uses these qualities to create an atmosphere of wellbeing and support for students. Instead of being ‘robots […] [who] just want to get done with their content of the curriculum, [and] don’t even smile.’ (GD7_A650 - 652), good teachers are construed as affable, authentic people, who can see eye- to-eye with students and are interested in building real relationships with them:

I think it's also very important that the teachers respond to the students and cover their fields of interest and […] when they are able to learn well in a certain working atmosphere, the teachers should continue to provide that atmosphere. (GD4_39)

In this view, the teacher is constructed as a kind of ‘service provider’ responsible for sensing students’ needs and interests, creating an environment that will support their wellbeing and learning. To us, this depiction contrasts sharply with the notion of good teachers as strict taskmasters that underpinned theme B (justice).

3.3.3. Conclusion theme C

From the students’ point of view, school has to be understood as a place of learning and living. Students stressed that the school environment, and the teacher’s ability to create a comfortable learning atmosphere at school, affected their wellbeing at school. Like others have shown, how teachers interact and engage with students clearly impacts their achievement (Connor and Cavendish 2020; Powell et al. 2018). Structural conditions that are clean and appealing are equally important to the creation of a positive, effective learning environment in school (Ramelow and Gugglberger 2014). Furthermore, student wellbeing can be seen as a basic indicator of school inclusiveness (Külker et al. 2017). However, it seems that the students we talked to must adapt to non-inclusive school conditions, while their schools (cl)aim for inclusiveness.

4. The ethos of inclusive education and its tensions

4.1. Cross-thematic areas: teachers, limits, and belonging

In comparing the three themes developed from our data, we noticed three cross-thematic areas – teachers, limits, and belonging (Figure 1):

Figure 1. Cross-thematic areas.

Experiencing community in school (theme A) and the students’ sense of justice (theme B) were interconnected in being construed as limited as opposed to limitless. While our participants described the school community as one that secured the formal belonging of all students, their comments also revealed limits to their social acceptance of differences in ability or race. Time and again, the school community emerged as splintered into sub-communities. The same ambivalent fault lines fractured the students’ construction of fairness. Here, needs-based distributive justice was framed as desirable for oneself, but as unfairly privileging when applied to other groups. This resonates with the well-established finding that ableist and racist exclusionary practices persist in contexts that claim inclusivity (e. g. Bates et al. 2015; Berryman and Eley 2019; Cefai and Cooper 2010; Humphrey and Lewis 2008) and point to IE being an ongoing transformative process that promotes belonging (Slee 2019) while working hard to reduce exclusion.

Teachers played a central role at the intersection between schools as places to live (theme C) and students’ sense of fairness (theme B). Like a thread running through our data, the students construed teachers as responsible and able to (a) enact teaching practices that would ensure fairness in all areas of school and (b) implement student-friendly interaction patterns and c) create the right spatial conditions to ensure student wellbeing. Thus, teachers are seen as moral leaders offering authentic relationships, not as mere instructors. This jells with quantitative studies showing the significance of teachers for good schools in general (Hattie 2008) and for good IE in particular (e. g. Schwinger et al. 2020 for inclusive primary education). It also connects with students’ perspectives on the ideal characteristics of inclusive teachers (e. g. Connor and Cavendish 2020; Klingner and Vaughn 1999) and their role in ensuring fairness (e. g. Gorard 2012).

Belonging emerged as key to understanding the intersection between the themes of experiencing school as a community (theme A) and school as a place to live (theme C). In our data, a sense of belonging arose on the one hand from a sense of community and was crucial for learning and relates to notions ‘being normal’. On the other hand, belonging is lacking where school – its processes as well as its structural conditions – is not adapted to the needs of the students (cf. Vandenbussche and De Schauwer 2018). The need to feel like you belong is a fundamental human motive (Deci and Ryan 2000; Leary and Baumeister 1995) and points back to the fact that school is not (only) a place of education, but also an arena of socialization and psycho-social development where friendships, belonging and being recognized as a member of a community are crucial (Fend 2005). A sense of beloning is also strongly connected to student’s wellbeing (Roffey 2013). Given the continuing exclusion in wider society, achieving belonging in the context of IE is essential, but challenging (Slee 2019).

4.2. Overarching discourses: othering and submission to a meritocratic, non-participative logic of schooling

Abstracting a bit further, we observed two dominant discourses running through our analysis: Othering and submission to a meritocratic, non-participative logic of school.

4.2.1. Othering

In our analysis, we were struck by a recurring undercurrent of othering, which was most prominent in the students’ construal of community and justice. Theoretically, othering can be understood through social-dominance theory as a mechanism that creates and upholds hierarchical relations between social groups (in school) based on psychological, institutional and societal factors (Sidanius and Pratto 2012). In talking about equitable schools, the students we spoke to differentiate certain groups of students from themselves in order to protect their own sense of normalcy (cf. Boxall 2016; Brehme 2017). Normalcy is a highly fraught and dangerous concept as it defines the only legitimate way of existing (Titchkosky and Michalko 2009). In modern western school systems like the German education system, normalcy plays a key role until today (Buchner and Kremsner 2019; Hacking 2009) enabling the management of human variation in the student population through standardisation (Kelle and Mierendorff 2013) by teaching to the fiction that is the ‘normal student’ (Annamma et al. 2013; Baglieri et al. 2011). Schools (re-)produce social inequality based on the notion of ab/normalcy: students who are construed as too far away from the ‘average student’ face deficit-based labels, stigma and finally, segregation in ‘special schools’ as legitimised forms of marginalisation and exclusion. Categories such as ‘special educational needs’ produce life-long disadvantage for those stigmatised by it (Pfahl and Powell 2011). IE scholars of various persuasions have argued against normalcy: At the more moderate end, some argue for the critical questioning of notions of normalcy that educational policy, education systems, schools and teachers are reproducing (e. g. Hirschberg and Köbsell 2021; Ratner 2016). Others have powerfully argued for the rejection of any notion of normalcy in the context of inclusive education (e.g. Köbsell 2012; Mallett, Ogden, and Slater 2016) in favour of transnormalistic understandings of learning (Lingenauber 2013; Schildmann 2019) that understand human variation as an unshakable starting point rather than a problem to be solved (cf. Davis 2014). Yet, normalcy also bears protective potential: all those who can claim normalcy can find protection from the ‘penalties of difference’ (Boxall 2016, 277), e. g. economic or social disadvantage and discrimination. Normalcy can be a powerful tool demand adequate support, rights and anti-discrimination measures that enable those facing discrimination to fully participate in their school like those construed to be ‘normal’ (Boger 2015).

We read the students’ ambivalent talk about ‘others’ as an attempt to navigate this tension between more equitable ways of speaking about a heterogeneous student body while maintaining the exclusionary boundaries of normalcy (Hall and Link 2004). In following the well-trodden paths of ability and race, manifestations of ‘ableist normativity’ (Campbell 2009, 1; see also Wolbring 2008) shine through that serve as a legitimising hierarchy-enhancing myth: ways of thinking, speaking and acting that promote or ‘justify the establishment and maintenance of group-based social inequality’ (Sidanius and Pratto 2012: 419). These ableist undercurrents can also be witnessed in the continuing primacy of meritocratic understandings of student achievement in inclusive schools found by us and others (e.g. Merl 2021). Like an empirical thorn in the theoretical flesh of IE, the patterns of othering running through our data are at odds with (broad) understandings of IE as schools that strive to be less exclusionary (Ainscow 2007; Thomas 2013) – for that othering serves to uphold this very exclusionary logic. What remains surprising to us, at the end of all this, is that for the students we talked to, formal belonging of each and every student to the school community appeared nevertheless to be uncontested, and incontestable.

4.2.2. Submission to a meritocratic, non-participative logic of schooling

Across all themes and cross-thematic areas, students’ perspectives on school seemed to be undergirded by a traditional logic of school. This logic a) is based on the meritocratic principles of individualised effort, achievement, and efficiency to which the students continually refer and b) implicitly views students as subordinate to teaching staff – a position from which they cannot or should not participate meaningfully in the running of school (e. g. have a say in the organisation of school), let alone emancipate themselves (e. g., contesting and changing the hierarchies at play in school to shape a school that meets their needs). In our group discussions, the students’ subordinate standing vis-a-vis the teachers might explain that students were often complaining about or making demands on schools, and especially teachers (at least in part, though, our main interview question, which asked students to think about how an inclusive school should be may have contributed to this focus). Thus, students retreat to a passive and ultimately defensive position, from which their own potential contributions and participation remain invisible. On the one hand, this stance may reflect the students’ apparent lack of experience in shaping their school in a democratic and participatory way for that students’ perspectives are grounded in their experiences of school (Buchner 2018): Being active co-creators of school seems to be unthinkable for the students we spoke to. On the other hand, this passive position also seems comfortable: it frees them from responsibility (e. g. for creating or maintaining school as a place to live) and allows them to focus on ‘surviving’ school. Although understandable, this is ultimately against their own interests in making school a place of learning and living that is focused on the needs of learners (Holzkamp 1995, 2013). Participation for all – taking the needs and interests of all students seriously based on democratic principles – remains a blank space at the inclusive schools we surveyed, standing in sharp contrast to the idea of IE as participatory education (Cummings, Dyson and Millward 2003; Danforth and Naraian 2015; Portelli and Koneey 2018). Although fostering student participation in school might be structurally difficult (Jones and Bubb 2020), our data points to its great significance for students’ sense of belonging, justice and wellbeing.

4.3. Researching student voice on inclusive education: limitations and further research avenues

While we believe our paper can offer valuable insights into students’ perspectives on secondary schools that strive to be inclusive in the German context, the underlying theoretical and methodological framework necessarily implies certain limitation and point at fruitful avenues for further research. We purposefully conducted group discussions without the reliance on recruiting students based on a label or (ascribed) membership to a collective identity (cf. Messiou 2017). To offer a more nuanced analysis, future IE research could investigate and contrast the perspectives of students from various backgrounds, e.g. those labelled as having ‘special educational needs’, students facing economic hardship or students with a history of (forced) migration. Such research would ideally employ an intersectional lens (Bešić 2020; Liasidou 2012) which has the power to elucidate how the multifaceted nature of student identity (e. g. being a disabled young man or a young woman from a poor family) shapes their perspectives on inclusive education. Regarding the generation of data, while the students we spoke to talked about their schools as places to live, further research employing a more open question about students’ overall school experience may provide a more holistic picture, for example by shedding more light on the role of friends and peers for inclusive education. Finally, ethnographic enquiries into the student’s lives at inclusive secondary schools could further our understanding of the situated function and role in everyday school life of the themes developed in this paper. Participant observation would thus allow following the themes generated here and investigate questions such as what is the functioning of the undercurrent of othering in student talk about IE or how are the students claiming school as their space?

5. Conclusion

From the students’ point of view, inclusive secondary schools (or those who describe themselves as such) face the same challenges as other schools. In addition to providing knowledge that leads to good performance and school-leaving certificates, they must also take into account students’ needs for community, justice and school wellbeing. This may be more challenging at inclusive schools because of their heterogeneous student body and its diverse needs. Nevertheless, our data point to the same obstacles that have been always present in schools: a dilemma between equal treatment and responsive support, high pressure to adapt for all students, and a lack of student participation. Furthermore, traditional ingroup vs. outgroup processes persist, and are often performed along well-trodden categories of social exclusion.

As students of secondary schools describing themselves as inclusive, the participants in our group discussions explicitly asserted that all students are entitled to a place in their (school) community. At the same time, they described exclusionary practices based on a broadened but not abandoned understanding of normalcy. Pessimistically interpreted, students in inclusive secondary schools simply learn to ‘talk the talk’, that is, to discuss human difference in socially-desirable ways. Instead, we take the more optimistic view that this ambivalence points to an ongoing shift in the way students think about what it means to be human that may ultimately lead students to reject notions of normalcy altogether. Our analysis shows the potential of listening to students’ experiences when investigating the reality of IE and the challenges it faces. The students pointed us towards the significance of belonging, community, fairness and participation as key success factors for inclusive schools – which, in turn, all can only be achieved with the active involvement of students.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful for the in-depth comments and helpful suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers and to Laura Cunniff and Lene Geißler for their assistance with the copy editing of this manuscript. We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Kleeberg-Niepage

Andrea Kleeberg-Niepage is a psychologist and professor for developmental and educational psychology at Europa Universität Flensburg. She is interested in children's and young people’s perspectives on their life-world and their processes of self- and identity construction, as well as the significance of the social and cultural context for understanding childhood and human development. Current research projects focus on young people’s perspectives on inclusive education, children’s and young people’s use of digital media, and the significance of mobile online dating for the life and relationship formation of young adults.

David Brehme

David Brehme is a psychologist and ethnographer currently working as a doctoral researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is interested in how normalcy is constructed and inclusive education from the students’ perspective. He works at the intersection of inclusive education, disability studies and social psychology.

Lena-Marie Bendfeldt

Lena-Marie Bendfeldt is a teacher. Her master's thesis, written together with Kathrin Jansen at Europa-Universität Flensburg based on some of the group discussions presented here, explored adolescent students perspectives on inclusion in school.

Kathrin Jansen

Kathrin Jansen is a teacher. Her master's thesis, written together with Lena-Marie Bendfeldt at Europa-Universität Flensburg based on some of the group discussions presented here, explored adolescent students perspectives on inclusion in school.

Notes

1 In the German context, ‘integrative education’ and ‘inclusive education’ are often still used interchangeably. Interestingly, the German scholarly movement of integrative education originally shared many theoretical positions with today’s broad understanding of inclusive education. In the course of the 1980-2000s, though, integrative education was often implemented as an individualistic support for disabled students in otherwise unchanged mainstream classrooms (Hinz, 2002; Powell, Edelstein and Blanck 2016)

2 All citations from the group discussion have been translated by the authors from the German original. Numbers in brackets refer to the location of the excerpt in the transcripts

3 Available household income in the school’s county compared to national German reference level (based on Deutschlandatlas 2022). Income statistics are not available for each individual school but for each county (Kreis) the school recruits its students from. NB: School D is a private school with income-dependent school fees, starting from zero fees for children from low-income families.