Successful Implementation of Inclusive Education. Belgrade, 2013.

1. Successful Implementation
of Inclusive Education
Péter Radó
Belgrade, 25.09.2013.

2. What are we talking about?

3. The problem to be solved
(a metaphor)
Big store: selling few items in large quantities
Online retail: selling a large number of items in small quantities
Chris Anderson: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

4. The problem to be solved
(how to serve the long tail of learning needs?)
The educational big store: serving great masses of „problem
free” children, disregarding diverse individual learning needs

5. Growing expectations towards
individual teachers
How much are these expectations realistic? Not at all:
• because of the extreme diversity of learning needs
• because of the inflations of too many expectations
• because they require overwriting all the old routines
Is it hopeless then? Not at all:
• Partial enrichment of teaching repertoires may lead to
revolutionary changes in the climate of the classroom
• What an individual teacher can’t do the whole school will
be able to do if teachers cooperate
• The longer recognized „learning long tail” generates bigger
demand for external professional services both for children
and teachers

6. Successful
implementation
the six engines of
inclusion
Equally strong focus
on the classroom and
on its institutional
and systemic
environment

7. Differentiation
A few key teacher competencies
• Awareness of learning profiles, effective learning
• Multilateral classroom communication
• Cooperative teaching
• Development of teaching materials, constructing content
from learning objects
• Diagnostic and formative pedagogical assessment, test
design
• Recognizing learning and behavioral difficulties, correction
methods
• Project method
• Instruction methods for promoting high order thinking

8. Flexible curriculum
And its implications: school autonomy

9. Self-
improving
schools
Self-evaluation
based school
improvement
cycles

10. Quality evaluation
Whole school inspection with special inclusion focus
• A quality evaluation system that balances the two
main aims: professional accountability and
supporting organizational learning
• Whole school external evaluation (inspection) based
on a limited number of quality criteria
• Supplementary instruments for external evaluation
of the inclusion capacity of schools (thematic
supplementary inspection) designed to inform self-
evaluation and school improvement

11. Support services
The principle of „high expectations, high support”
Inventory of missing or weak services:
• Diagnostic (e.g. logopedic) screening reaching out to all
children in pre-school age and early development services
• Specialist of habilitation/rehabilitation in different
categories of disabilities („travelling teachers” of special
schools or territorial support service centers) supporting
children and their teachers and parents at the same time
• Mainstream institutionalized educational support services
• A missing profession: „developmental teacher” (bridging
over the competence gap between mainstream and special
education teachers)

12. Vested financial interest
Incentives built into the system of financing
Incentives for full enrollment
• Per capita financing (money following the pupil)
Incentives for integration
• Supplementary financing for integration that are higher than
financing of education in any separated setting
Incentives for improvement
• Funding for the implementation of school improvement
plans (e.g. for generating demand for purchasing
professional support)
Financing of flexible and complex support services
• Financing of complex special and mainstrea professional
services (instead of financing service providers)

13. Successful implementation
Policy conditions
• Inclusion as sustained priority over a long period of time
• Mainstreaming the development of all pedagogical,
institutional and systemic conditions
• Simultaneous investment at all levels of conditions
• A professional implementing agency and the necessary
human resources
• The necessary financial resources incorporated to the
financing of schools and professional services
• Perpetual feedback (monitoring and evaluation) and open
communication
• Internationalization