Since the 1990s, Inclusive Education has become an important topic of discussion and an international aim, lately established in UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (art. 24, UN, 2006).

Initially, Inclusive Education movement distanced itself from Special Education tradition, criticizing its categorization system because of the influence played by the medical model of disability. The movement promoted a change - in policy, organization and teaching practices – applying a social model to reinterpret any form of discrimination and exclusion from school education, substituting medical categories with a new concept of human variability and difference (Booth, Ainscow, 1998; Booth, Ainscow, 2000, 2002, 2011).

The movement was expected to have a strong impact on the field of Special Education, slowly weakening it and probably making it disappear (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1995; Vislie, 2003). The tendency of the last two decades was instead opposite: while many countries worldwide tried to educate more and more pupils in mainstream school contexts, Special Education strengthened its role and was seen as an instrument for the individualization of teaching and learning (Powell, 2011a; Tomlinson, 2012).

This unexpected process is although correlated with the introduction of neoliberal values within school systems, which strove for international competition between countries regarding students’ assessments (e.g. Rouse, Florian, 1997).

This paper focuses specifically on systemic factors, such as the existence of a support system for inclusive education, external to schools but directly or indirectly involved in school practices, offering specialists' support, counseling or supervising services. It uses two examples, the German City Municipality of Bremen and Trentino Region in Italian context as they both represent attempts to create a new organizational system to respond to the needs of all pupils in an inclusive school environment (Law 517/1977; Framework Law 104/1992; Ministro dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, 2012; Bremisches Schulgesetz 17. June 2009; Gesetzblatt der Freien Hansestadt Bremen n°72 18. May 2015). Moreover, the multi-sited research metodology offers the opportunity to discuss, through a critical approach, the role of Special Education in the new educational organization, as it involves two countries where the tradition in the field differs significantly. In German context, where the existence of special schools and their practices are still legitimated (Powell, 2011b), Bremen constitutes an exception as it attempted to create an integrative school system already in the 1980s (Jürgens-Pieper & Pieper, 2011; Helbig, Nikolai, 2015). On the other side, in Italian context, where special schools and classes were predominantly dismissed in the 1970s, there is a need to improve and innovate the school system in order to make it more inclusive and more able to respond effectively to pupils’ needs, especially to those of pupils with disabilities, and the role of Special Education practices is currently reconsidered and revalued (Ianes, Tomasi, 2015). 

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