The European Association for Service Providers for Persons with Disabilities coordinates a European project connecting experts from Spain, Bulgaria, Portugal, Belgium and Greece. This Erasmus project aims to built a modular course for Policy Makers in order to support them in developing policy frameworks concerning inclusive education.

The project has a typical EU-project structure with different work packages. Ghent University (Geert Van Hove & Elisabeth De Schauwer) is responsible for the first Work Package collecting the main information about each partner country as a basis to built the course modules. In this abstract proposal we will report about this Work Package.

Collecting the most important information about each country is organized by making use of a set of questions. These questions were destilled from two perspectives: a small European bottom-up project (Erasmus + Project Evidence Based Education + Job Shadowing) for teachers and principles visiting each other throughout Europe at one hand using a not published set of questions and and a large scale regional project as organized by a consortium of 14 Pacific Island Education Ministeries: the Pacific indicators for Disability-Inclusive Education Project (Sharma et .al., 2018)

Each partner offered extensive answers on this set of 18 questions touching information about e.g. legislation, specific (regional)  educational policies, availability of statistics, the legal implementation of inclusive education, available educational budgets, diagnostical processes to identify students with special needs, the relationship between regular and special education, the organization of teacher training programmes, the organization of early intervention services, legislation about accessibility, quality evaluation procedures, reasonable accomodations, availability of support teachers, knwoledge:resource centers, parent participation.

The collected desk research material (most partners worked closely together with experts of national/regional ministeries) was analyzed using a thematic analysis scheme consisting of a vertical analysis first (country per country) and a horizontal analysis process (connecting themes from different countries). (Nowell et.al. 2017)

The results of this analyses show that a comparative study can learn a lot about ‘shared challenges’ concerning e.g. : medical model impact – attitudes of teachers – discriminatory practices – limited budgets – twin track approaches building barriers – difficult cooperation with families/parents – lack of teacher training initiatives – gaps between existing legislation ‘on paper’ and the implementation of this paper work… In addition to this analysis a modular course format will be presented in an attempt to cover a lot of the themes within a training and working process with policy makers all over Europe.

Nowell, L. S., Norris, J. M., White, D. E., & Moules, N. J. (2017). Thematic Analysis: Striving to Meet the Trustworthiness Criteria. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917733847 Umesh Sharma, Filipe Jitoko, Setareki S. Macanawai & Chris Forlin (2018) How Do we Measure Implementation of Inclusive Education in the Pacific Islands? A Process for Developing and Validating Disability-Inclusive Indicators,International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 65:6, 614-630, DOI: 10.1080/1034912X.2018.1430751