Inclusive Education represents a crucial step of a society that moves towards social justice and participating citizenship. The Italian school system is a very interesting research field for this topic thanks to its inclusive oriented structure. School transitions, understood as the change experienced by students at the moment they enter or leave school or pass from one grade into the next, represent sensible phases in the school career,  in which more vulnerable groups of students seem to experience a higher risk of marginalisation. For what inclusion concerns, transitions represent sensible phases in the school career in which more vulnerable groups of students seem to experience a higher risk of marginalisation (Humphrey and Ainscow 2006). In using the term “marginalisation”, in relation to our definition of inclusive education, we refer to all sorts of loss of opportunities for participation and learning that students experience in the passage from one school grade to the next.

For instance, a critical stage for several countries is represented by the transition from a school grade in which all students attend one single school type for all (primary school in many countries) to one that introduces different types of schools. The choice of the type of school at that stage can be a moment in which more vulnerable groups experience marginalisation, in the sense that they enrol to a school which leads to underachievement or that in a still initial stage of their school career excludes high expectations for them (Barban and White 2011; Baumert and Schümer 2001; Romito 2014). In Italy, the transition from lower to upper secondary school is connected with the first differentiation in different schools. Data about students’ distribution in more academic-oriented and other more job-oriented school types suggested marginalisation processes at the stage of the choice for the school type. Statistic data clearly showed that students with lower results at lower secondary schools and students with disabilities were over-represented in some types of job-oriented schools (MIUR 2011; MIUR 2015). Data about students with special educational needs showed a preference towards vocational institutes (58.1%), and their distribution in upper secondary school depended also on the type of their disability. Around 40% of students with an intellectual disability were in lyceums, while around 60% of them were in technical and vocational institutes. People with visual disabilities preferred lyceums, such as gymnasium, scientific lyceum and psycho-pedagogic lyceum. Other disabilities were uniformly distributed (MIUR 2011).

Furthermore, another form of marginalisation can occur on a micro-level, on the level of the class. This means that there is an overall decrease in classroom participation from lower to upper classes and a congruent increase of time amount spent out of the class (Ianes, Demo and Zambotti 2013; Wendelborg and Tøssebro 2011). In fact, the transition from primary school to lower secondary school seems to be connected with an increase of pull-out and push-out for students with disabilities, situations in which some students enrolled to a class spend some weekly school hours outside of it (Ianes, Demo e Zambotti 2013)

On this background, the research project will contribute to the investigation of the topic by means of:

1.       a survey that aims to describe the way primary, lower secondary and upper secondary schools organize transitions,

2.       multiple case studies that focuses on the experience of students with an intellectual disability in the transition from lower to upper secondary school.

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