Attitudes of Principals Towards Students With Disruptive Behaviour: An Australian Perspective

Abstract

This paper reports on the attitudes of 340 government primary principals from New South Wales, Australia, towards the inclusion of students with disruptive behaviours in schools. Principals' attitudes were examined using the Principals and Behaviour Survey (PABS), a new composite measure built upon a foundation of existing validated surveys on attitudes towards the inclusion of students with disabilities. Principal component analysis identified 3 components that were used as variables for correlations with a range of demographic characteristics, such as age, qualifications, experience, school size and location. School size and the number of students with a diagnosed mental health condition in the school had a small relationship with principals' attitudes. From the analysis of data from the emotional response scale, it was found that principals' emotions about inclusion were less positive towards students with disruptive behaviour than towards students with sensory, physical or intellectual disabilities. Overall, principals appeared to hold dichotomous positions in regard to the benefits of inclusion, viewing it as beneficial for students with disruptive behaviour but not for their peers. However, principals who held more positive views were consistently more positive across all measures.

Transforming to Teach in an Inclusive Paradigm

“…Research has shown that teachers' perceptions of school inclusion vary by type of disability (de Boer et al, 2011;MacFarlane & Woolfson, 2013;Wood et al, 2014). Teachers find managing challenging behaviours one of the most difficult aspects of school inclusion (Eckstein et al, 2016;Leidig & Pössinger, 2017).…”

Integrated framework model for the leadership role of principals in inclusive education

“…To implement inclusive education, reviews stress the crucial role of strong, supportive, and distributed leadership practices that focus on developing shared visions and values (Ainscow, 2016; Ainscow et al., 2013; Billingsley et al., 2018; Cobb, 2015). Additionally, in international literature, there is extensive descriptive research on principals' subjective perspectives about inclusive education (Crockett et al., 2006; Graham & Spandagou, 2011; Irvine et al., 2010; Jahnukainen, 2015), attitudes towards inclusion (Boyle et al., 2013; Hadjikakou & Mnasonos, 2012; Porakari et al., 2015; Urton et al., 2014; Wood et al., 2014; Yan & Sin, 2015), and the relationship between leadership styles and attitudes towards inclusion (Al‐Mahdy & Emam, 2018; Hess & Zamir, 2016; Houser et al., 2011). Furthermore, findings from Hongkong (Poon‐McBrayer, 2017) show that school leaders struggled between benefits of inclusive education, autocratic decisions, and staff involvement.…”