Inclusive Education and Special Needs

Inclusion is usually taught as something you do to a lesson. This week treats it as something a professional is measured against — using the framework Europe’s own agency for inclusive education wrote for exactly that purpose. Four core values, ten areas of competence, and one honest self-assessment you complete twice: Monday morning, before anything is discussed, and Friday afternoon, after everything is.

• Monday you take apart what inclusion actually claims — presence, participation and achievement — and look at how you genuinely see learner difference, before anyone tells you how you should.
• Tuesday you work on the learning itself: academic, practical, social and emotional, and the teaching approaches you are probably already confident about.
• Wednesday goes to well-being and belonging — one of the two areas the framework’s authors added because the first version was missing it.
• Thursday is the three relationships inclusion actually runs through: the learner whose voice you may not be hearing, the family, and the colleague you share a classroom with.
• Friday turns the week on your own professional learning, and builds the plan.

You go home with a completed self-assessment across all ten areas — taken twice, so the change is visible rather than felt — three difficult conversations rehearsed with people who will push back, and a development plan split into what you can change alone, what needs one colleague, and what you will have to ask your school for. This is a week about your own practice, so it does not require your school’s permission to be useful.

Ask most teachers what inclusive education requires and the answer points somewhere else in the building — a coordinator, a support assistant, a diagnosis on file. There is a European framework that answers the question differently, and it was written by the body whose whole remit is this: the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, an independent, self-governing organisation co-funded by the education ministries of its member countries.

Its Profile for Inclusive Teacher Professional Learning, published in 2022, describes inclusion as a set of competences that belong to every education professional. Not only to teachers, either: the Profile is explicit that it covers pre-service and in-service teachers, mentoring and support teachers, school leaders, teacher educators, teaching assistants and specialists. If you work in a school, the framework has a page with your name on it.

It is built as four core values, each unfolding into areas of competence — ten in all. Valuing learner diversity. Supporting all learners. Working with others. Personal and collaborative professional development. Each area is then described three times over, because the authors treat a competence as three things that only work together: the attitudes and beliefs underneath it, the knowledge and understanding it requires, and the skills that put that knowledge into practice. None of the three, the Profile says, is sufficient on its own — which is why a week of technique alone never quite changes anything.

That structure is what this course runs on. Ten areas, five days, and the framework still in your hands on Friday afternoon. You work with the Agency’s own statements rather than a summary of them: reading what it says an inclusive professional believes, knows and can do, and marking honestly where you already stand and where you do not.

Two of the ten areas are newer than the rest, and they are the reason this course is not a repeat of the one you took five years ago. When the Agency revised its 2012 framework, it added exactly two areas of competence: supporting all learners’ well-being, and giving learners a true voice. Those additions were not decoration. They are an admission that a version of inclusion which gets a child through the door, and even gets them learning, can still fail them if nobody asks whether they belong there or ever lets them say. Wednesday and Thursday are built on those two.

The week also gives you a working test that comes from the Profile itself: inclusion as the presence, the participation and the achievement of every learner — access to education, quality of the learning experience, and the learning outcomes that follow. Three words that are easy to nod at and uncomfortable to apply to a specific lesson, which is exactly what you will do with them.

This week measures rather than builds, and the difference is worth knowing before you choose it. The Profile contains an area for effective teaching approaches and the flexible organisation of support; here you assess yourself against it, and if that turns out to be your gap, Every Child is Special is the week that builds the repertoire. Structured teaching for autistic pupils and pupils with ADHD belongs to Inclusive Classrooms: Educating Students with ASD and ADHD. Wednesday’s work concerns your professional responsibility for belonging rather than a social and emotional curriculum for students, which is Social and Emotional Learning for Inclusive Schools. And the output stays personal: a development plan for your own practice rather than a project for your institution.

Nothing is asked of you in advance. The classroom situations worked on during the week are supplied by the course, no session requires information about a real student, and the only material you are asked to bring is your own honesty about your own practice — which is, in the end, the thing the framework is actually measuring.