The lack of skills, time, and other resources are usually presented as explanations for more negative teacher attitudes towards inclusive education (Avramidis, Bayliss, and Burden 2000; Center and Ward 1987; Coutsocostas and Alborz 2010; Horne and Timmons 2009; Scruggs and Mastropieri 1996 Stoiber, Gettinger, and Goetz 1998; Subban and Sharma 2006). It is argued, however, that they can, at best, be only a part of the story. In this study special educational placements are considered instances of internal selection typical of bureaucratic organizations. The division of labour creates opportunities to transfer responsibilities to someone else in the same organization. For customers, this tendency is revealed by overspecialization and results in being required to run from one desk to another in search of services.

           It is supposed that teachers and preservice teachers actually are reacting to their imagined workload increase when they reflect their readiness to accept a student with special educational needs (SEN) into their classroom. The observed strong association between the level of a student’s disability and his or her acceptability indirectly supports this hypothesis (Avramidis and Kalyva 2007; Bowman1986; Center and Ward 1987; Forlin, Douglas, and Hattie 1996; Moberg 2003; Scruggs and Mastropieri 1996). It is known that teachers really agree that inclusion causes additional work (Avramidis and Norwich 2002; Gunnþórsdóttir and Jóhannesson 2014). Unfortunately, this question has been typically studied only as part of a larger set of worries around inclusive education (Ahsan, Deppeler, and Sharma 2013; Engelbrecht, Savolainen, Nel, and Malinen 2013; Forlin et al. 2011; Yada and Savolainen 2017).

           The present study was designed to measure directly the association between preservice teachers’ workload expectations and their attitudes towards including a student with a specified SEN. If these variables are associated, then it would support the notion of special education as a means to minimize teachers’ workloads through student selection. It would also help to understand some other findings such as why teachers prefer to include students with milder forms of disabilities or why preservice teachers agree on the lack of resources without personal experience on them.

Participants in this study are preservice subject teachers enrolled in a Finnish university. They represent the first-year cohort of students in pedagogical studies. They are contacted during their university course on pedagogy at the department of teacher education. The questionnaire is delivered at the beginning of the lecture. It will be explained that participation is anonymous, voluntary, and does not influence their course evaluation. The short questionnaire is returned anonymously after the lecture. The questionnaire contains demographic items such as gender, year of birth, and major. The participants’ attitudes toward the inclusion of students with SEN in the regular classroom are ascertained by using a ten-item scale. Each item begins with the phrase: ‘I am ready to accept a student in my classroom even if he had the following special educational need’. This statement is given separately for ten types of SEN. For response alternatives, a five-point Likert scale from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’ is used. The participants are also asked to evaluate how much extra work a student with a specified SEN would cause to the teacher if the student were placed in the regular mainstream classroom for instruction. The items are responded by using a five-point Likert scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘very much’. The results are analyzed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 24 program. In addition to descriptive statistics, tests of statistical significance are performed.

Teachers’ lack of time, skills, training or material assistance is often presented as reasons why they do not want to include a student with disabilities. They are easy to accept as valid explanations in countries with limited economic resources. However, the same reasons also emerge in economically prosperous states, for example in Europe, where there should be no lack of funding (Gunnþórsdóttir and Jóhannesson 2014). In Finland, the reference to a lack of resources is difficult to understand. Why is there a lack of resources if the schools are supposed to have adequate means to fulfil their duties? When the sentiment of lacking resources is observed from the perspective of the sociology of work, alternative explanations emerge. In a complicated job, such as teaching, the lack of time can be a feature of the work itself. It could be understood through the famous Parkinson’s rule: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” (Parkinson 1955). This effect may produce the perception of a shortage of resources. Respondent bias may also play a role in these findings. The social acceptability of different reasons to reject a child differs. It is surely more respectable to refuse a student with SEN by referring to a lack of resources than to an increase in one’s own workload. The association between teachers’ concerns and their attitudes towards inclusion has not been very high in previous studies (Forlin et al. 2011; Savolainen et al. 2012; Yada and Savolainen 2017). The reason for this, however, may lie in the way the association between these variables was measured. The present study provides a more direct way to compare workload concerns with teacher attitudes towards inclusion. The results will be presented as correlation coefficients.

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