One of the most important goals of inclusive education is to significantly support everybody’s participation in society. It is assumed that students with special educational needs (SEN), who attend a regular school in their neighborhood, have more and better contacts with their typically developing peers (Koster et al., 2009). The transition from primary to secondary school, however, has often been highlighted as phase of concern (Bossaert et al., 2015). Furthermore, this transition coincides with early adolescence in which social interactions with peers are getting increasingly important (Rubin et al., 2006). Nevertheless, little is known about how students with SEN actually experience peer contacts in their daily life. The aim of this paper is to investigate the well-being of students with and without SEN in everyday life in general and when relating to peers in particular: (1) How do they experience everyday school life vs. leisure-time? (2) How much time per week do they spend with peers outside school? (3) How do they experience those peer contacts? The data comprise 102 grade 9 students (62% male) with a mean age of 15.8 years (SD = 0.72 years). Before transition from primary to secondary education, 34 of these students were considered to have SEN (learning or behavior). To gain a better understanding of their emotional experiences, students were asked to report their momentary affective states on about 31 randomly selected occasions during one week, with a total of 901 ‘emotional snapshots’ of everyday school life, 1847 of leisure time and 416 of duties. Data were collected with online questionnaires using the experience sampling method (Hektner et al., 2007; Venetz & Zurbriggen, 2015). Momentary affective states were measured by the PANA short-scales (Schallberger, 2005). Analyses were performed with multilevel structural equation modeling. The findings show, first, that adolescents experience leisure activities more positive than instruction. There seem to be no difference for students with and without SEN. Second, adolescents, those with and without SEN, spend on average 28% of their leisure-time with peers. Third, interacting with peers is more enjoyable for adolescents than being alone or with the family. However, the frequency of peer contacts has no effect on well-being in leisure-time. To conclude, as no significant differences were found, the results seem to suggest that inclusive education has medium-term positive effects on well-being and on peer contacts of students with SEN. Implications for inclusive schooling are discussed.

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