How the existence of special schools affects the placement of students with special needs in inclusive primary schools

Abstract

Although inclusion is the declared goal, the transition from a system based on special schools to an inclusive school system has only been progressing very slowly in individual countries. In an evolving school system, the existing special schools keep struggling to justify their existence. This study investigates the regional distribution effects based on official school data and shows the influence of a pull effect on special schools as a distance effect of special schools affecting the placement of students. For this purpose, official school statistics including all students at special and regular schools in the years 2010, 2015 and 2020 (N = 11 280 040) are evaluated in a spatiotemporal comparison using Educational Data Mining. In a hierarchical regression model on school placement in inclusive schools, the distance between primary and special schools has the highest influence (β = 0.48) on the inclusion rate (i.e., the proportion of students with special needs who are educated in regular schools in relation to all students with disabilities), along with the size (β = −0.14) and the density of special schools in a district (β = −0.12). The effects differ according to the population density of the region and are stronger in large cities. When the proportion of students with and without SEN in regular schools is considered (support rate), the density of special schools has the greatest impact on school placement (ß = 43.44). Self‐preservation of schools, traditional funding systems and regional differences between urban and rural areas are discussed as possible reasons.

Classroom effects are as large as grade‐level effects on curriculum‐based measurement maze reading scores of secondary school students with and without special educational needs

“…Considering context and individual student variables together is particularly important for countries with varying school conditions such as Germany. German students with SEN can attend a special school focusing on one or more different types of SEN or inclusive classrooms (Ebenbeck et al, 2022). How schooling is realised under these circumstances is highly different, as each state has its own federal education system comprising both special schools and inclusive education.…”

“…Of these, 30 classrooms in seven schools were segregated special schools. Seven types of special schools with different focuses on SEN still exist in the German school system in addition to inclusive schools (Ebenbeck et al, 2022). The participants' teachers provided information about students' age ( M = 13;1 years), gender (41.7% were female), immigration background (47.19%) and SEN (36.77%).…”

“…This item design controls sentence complexity and strengthens syntactic skills at sentence level as it is critical both for making meaning from text and for the instruction by teachers in line with MacKay et al (2021). This provides teachers with detailed information about which sentence-related comprehension processes are currently causing students the most difficulty, in addition to the sum score (Jungjohann, 2022). For instruction, this additional information is valuable because it can be easily applied to targeted exercises for understanding complex subordinate clauses, drawing inferences and coherence.…”

“…Empirical findings suggest that students with SEN achieve higher outcomes in inclusive schools (Lindsay, 2007; Myklebust, 2002). Special schools that are attended only by students with an official diagnosis of their current school support needs still exist in some countries such as Germany (Ebenbeck et al, 2022). They were established assuming that they would provide students with SEN with an optimal learning environment.…”

Beneath the surface of compliant pupil behaviour: On how individuals in heterogeneous classes position themselves towards lessons’ content-based requirements

“…Like "moderate learning difficulties" (Norwich, Ylonen, Gwernan-Jones, 2014), SEN-L is an imprecise label. For Germany, it can be summarised that there are not only differences between the federal states' guidelines regarding diagnostics (Koßmann, 2020) but also associations between the probability of SEN-L being identified and contextual factors, such as the average achievement of the attended school classes or the proximity of the attended school to the next special education one (e.g., Kölm, Mahler, & Gresch, 2020;Ebenbeck, Rieser, Jungjohann, Gebhardt, 2022). These have so far been ignored in all local official diagnostic guidelines.…”