Special Education Today in Iceland

Abstract

The purpose of the chapter is to give an overview of special education in Iceland, historically and with reference to modern use of terms, research, policy, legal trends and funding. Recent data is provided on demographic developments amongst children in Iceland and detailed account is given of practices in schools, including collaboration with parents and teacher education. Finally some issues and challenges are discussed that still remain to be solved with respect to meeting the special needs of students in school. One of the findings is that only 1.3% of students attend special schools and special classes and that the term special education has outlived its usefulness except perhaps in the context of the three segregated special schools that still remain in the country. Official papers have replaced it with the term special support. Despite a diversity of views and practices the main implication is that a new model of education is required, in line with that proposed by Slee (2011) where the needs of individuals are served in all schools and the binary thinking related to regular vs. special education is no longer necessary.

Inclusive education in the diversifying environments of Finland, Iceland and the Netherlands: A multilingual systematic review

“…Yet similar patterns of neighbourhood and school segregation that have been recently reported in the Netherlands (Boterman, 2018), are emerging on a smaller scale in Finland (Bernelius and Vaattovaara, 2016; Bernelius and Vilkama, 2019) and Iceland (Auðardóttir et al, 2020; Dovemark et al, 2018; Lundahl, 2016; Magnúsdóttir et al, 2020) despite egalitarian policies being in place for the past three decades (Marinósson and Bjarnason, 2014). In summary, although all three countries wrestle with questions of widening social inclusion and exclusion, their approach to inclusion appears as a spectrum of policy and outcomes (see Table 1), and the inclusive practices vary between all three case countries.…”

“…a regular school that makes room for all the students from a neighborhood, a school where teachers and other staff work together to give each and every student the best possible education’ (Bjarnason et al, 2016: 356). This evolution can also be seen as a response to recent policy changes (Marinósson and Bjarnason, 2014) in line with neoliberal educational imperatives.…”