Like many other countries in Europe, Austria has signed an ratified the UN-Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and also developed a National Action Plan. On the other hand, there is a strong and long-lasting tradition of segregation in the school system. Three designated "Inclusive Pilot Regions" with different contexts and very heterogenous rates of inclusion ranging from 42 to 80 % (official data from the National Education Report 2015) started transforming into an inclusive school system. Since 2015, this process is scientifically supported by a formative evaluation.Special focus in the implementation process is put on:

• Raising inclusive quality in mainstream schools
• Improving and enhancing teacher training for inclusive pedagogy (initial & in-service)
• Building up support structures in all school districts, transforming special schools
• Exploring alternative ways of allocating resources to schools
• Flexibility in applying mainstream curricula
• Exploring new ways of SEN-status

The overall goal of the evaluation is to support decision makers by observing, investigating experiences and expectations of key players, doing network analysis and providing data necessary and useful for steering the process and for organizing support. Furthermore, the implementation and transformation processes itself are subjects of the evaluation. In the medium term, results of the evaluation in the Pilot Regions will provide information about successful strategies for the nationwide expansion of inclusion in Austria having also a closer look at developments in other European coutries.

The evaluation follows Patton's (1997) Utilization Focused Evaluation (UFE) meaning that persons responsible for implementing inclusion and transforming the system are involved in the evaluation in terms of formulating research questions and making use of evidence provided by the evaluation.

Therefore, a closer look into the actions taken within the implementation process of inclusion in the pilot regions is part of the overall evaluation that is split up into subprojects for manageablility.

The presentation will give a short overviewe on the theoretical conception of the evaluation including the complex multilevel system of stakeholders relevant for the processes of transforming a segregation-oriented system into an inclusive one, methodology used and first results. Special focus will be on the implementation process itself and on specific actions and strategies for which evidence of success is available.

In a first subproject of the evaluation, a survey among key persons in the field of special education/inclusion was done about their attitudes, expectations and connotations about inclusion. Key persons were defined as stakeholders having decision making power inside and outside the school system. In concrete, school principals, school inspectors as well as local managers and co-ordinators of supporting institutions – mostly NGOs – were asked to complete an online questionnaire with Likert-type and open ended questions. In addition, a short version of a semantic differential was used and data for network analyses were collected.

A second subproject was conducted in cooperation with regional teacher training universities and consisted of qualitative case studies in the Inclusive Pilot Regions with the focus on processes and actions taken to put forward inclusion in the respective areas.

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