The overall aim of this study is to analyze the barriers and the challenges of the support teacher in regular classrooms in secondary schools. Round, Subban, and Sharma (2015) consider that the traditional paradigm inherent to secondary education means that the barriers to the inclusion process of the support teacher are directly related to the curriculum, teacher training and the conception of the support provided. The importance given purely to the academic curriculum, as opposed to a curriculum that advocates the integral development of students (Bhatnagar and Das 2014) hinders the processes of flexibility and adaptation of the academic curriculum. In the European context, teachers are more concerned with the teaching-learning process in the classroom than with the individual needs of students. Based on a model of dependency (Lehane, 2016), teacher training aims to cover the educational needs of students from the perspective of the deficit model, which is more reactive than proactive as regards the performance of teachers. Support should be conceived more as support for learning, rather than support for participation (Morningstar et al., 2015). Support teachers experience a sense of loneliness in their work (Moliner et al., 2011); they perceive a lack of support from the management team and their colleagues (De Vroey et al., 2016); often there is little time to establish ways of collaboration with colleagues. The research in the current study is oriented towards an in-depth understanding of the educational and social phenomena related to the inclusion process of support teachers. Four secondary schools participated in this study. In total, 12 support teachers participated in seven focus group. The results show that it is necessary to be aware of inclusion to all teachers and management team in each secondary school. The most important barriers are regarding to curricular assessment and implementation of inclusion into regular classrooms. In addition, discriminatory attitudes persist that do not respond to the principle of equity which ultimately affects the expectations that students have. According to the teachers themselves it is the lack of time that hinders the establishment of real collaboration since the communication established between teachers is short; this does not allow for joint planning or the development of classes through shared teaching. Another factor that may contribute to poor collaboration is the lack of teacher training on topics related to inclusion.

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