Wherefore art thou, inclusion? Analysing the development of inclusive education in New South Wales, Alberta and Finland

Abstract

Over the last two decades, moves toward ‘inclusion’ have prompted change in the formation of education policies, schooling structures and pedagogical practice. Yet, exclusion through the categorisation and segregation of students with diverse abilities has grown, particularly for students with challenging behaviour. This paper considers what has happened to inclusive education by focusing on three educational jurisdictions known to be experiencing different rates of growth in the identification of special educational needs: New South Wales (Australia), Alberta (Canada) and Finland (Europe). In our analysis, we consider the effects of competing policy forces that appear to thwart the development of inclusive schools in two of our case study regions.

Keywords:

• comparative
• inclusion
• inclusion
• special education
• international comparative case study

Acknowledgements

This international collaboration was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (Award No. 410‐2008‐0236) and the Macquarie University Research Fellowships Scheme (MURF 2009‐12).

Notes

1. We draw here on Sally Tomlinson’s (1982) seminal work in the ‘sociology of special education’ to distinguish between normative and non‐normative categories of disability. Normative disabilities are those that few can or would argue with as requiring additional support or adapted instruction: severe intellectual impairment, cerebral palsy, classic autism and vision and hearing impairment. The non‐normative category of disability is not so clear‐cut. Many of these children could be described as ‘canaries in the coal mine’ for their ‘disability’ has been formed through negative and repeated ‘experiences of failure in their early encounters with the educational system’ (Farran and Shonkoff 1994, 148).

2. Government schools are funded by respective state governments, but the states do provide some base instructional funding to non‐government schools. For example in NSW, this amount has been set at 25% of base instructional funding for government school students on a per capita basis (e.g. if per student base funding for the government system is $10,000 then non‐government schools will receive $2500 from the NSW government for each student enrolled). This equation, however, fails to consider the additional costs associated with educating students with disability.

3. Although education is a state responsibility in Australia, the development of national legislative frameworks including the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Act in 1986, the Disability Discrimination Act in 1992 and the Disability Standards for Education in 2005 have contributed towards state compliance in the education of students with disabilities.

4. As a result of changes to the design of the original instrument, the high construct and face validity reported by the developers (Foreman et al. 2001) may no longer apply.

5. Kindergarten is not included in the annual statistics available from Alberta Education.

6. This ‘coalition’ was termed a ‘rainbow’ because it included members from the ‘red’ political parties on the left to the ‘blue’ conservative party on the political right.

7. First path consisted of six years of primary school and two years of further education. Another path consisted of four years of primary school and after that five years of academically oriented grammar school, which was the only way to upper secondary school and later to the university studies (see Tuunainen 1994).

8. There is no official statistics related K‐12 education in Finland. This percentage should be considered as a best estimate calculated by combining different educational statistics provided by Statistics Finland (2009).

9. At the time of this study, the Finnish special education funding model was based on the ‘bounty’ system, but this changed in early 2010. Now, only students with severe disabilities receive individually defined extra funding independent to the base education fund, which includes currently an estimate for organising the special needs education (often called census‐based funding). There are currently no observations available of the effects of this change. It should be noted that the recently proposed and strongly resisted NSW model also draws on a census‐based funding approach.