How do French teachers understand inclusive education and its implementation?

ABSTRACT

While inclusive education is widely promoted around the world, the meaning assigned to it remains ambiguous. Regarding that different interpretations have implications for teachers’ attitudes and behaviours, those interpretations could possibly exert influence on the inclusive school implementation by teachers. The present study sought to identify how French teachers define inclusive education, as well as the reasons they perceive as justifying its implementation. To this purpose, 251 teachers completed an online questionnaire. The results show that teachers’ harbour wide-ranging definitions, with a significant proportion viewing inclusive education as being rooted in an integrative approach (i.e. school viewed as the welcoming place of Special Educational Needs (SEN) students before being the place of their education). Moreover, teachers’ perceived reasons, while mainly based on universalist concerns, also often cite non-student-centred aspects like political strategies or material aspects such as funding. The results of this study may help to understand why difficulties persist in the implementation of inclusive education in France and likely abroad as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive education
• French teachers
• perception
• funding

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. While, as detailed below, this study is conducted within the French context, we do not think that the results only apply to this country and think that the question asked here as well as the obtained results are relevant to a broader audience.

2. As indicated in the pre-registration form, two other hypotheses were formulated, but since data collection on these items was fragmented, many participants did not respond to these questions. For clarity of discussion, they are not presented in this paper.

3. It should be noted that choice of definition did not differ according to participants’ gender, $\mathit{\chi }$² (6, N = 251) = 8.55, p = .20, teaching level,$\mathit{\chi }$² (12, N = 251) = 8.22, p = .76, status, $\mathit{\chi }$² (3, N = 251) = 3.97, p = .26, or type of position, $\mathit{\chi }$² (6, N = 251) = 2.57, p = .86). Similarly, none of the other variables tested (education level, career stage) had a statistically significant relationship with choice of definition (all ps >.05).

4. For the sake of transparency and reproducibility all segments and their codes are available in French on OSF.

Additional information

Funding

The present study was funded by Caisse des Dépôts within the framework of the project Programme d’Investissement d’Avenir (PIA3) “100% IDT: Inclusion, un Défi, un Territoire” (France).