Icelandic education policy has a strong focus on inclusive education (Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, 2012), and the Icelandic education system is officially considered as highly inclusive with few segregated resources for students. 

Nevertheless, a recent external audit of the Icelandic education system (European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, 2017) reveals that while the national policy on inclusive education is clear, there is little consensus among policy makers at the municipality level and practitioners alike, what the policy means in practice, how it might be implemented, what practices constitute inclusive education, and how inclusive practices in schools might be supported. Hence, the implementation is varied, and even contradictory, and inclusive education faces challenges connected to disparities between ideals and action (Bjarnason & Marinósson, 2014; Gunnþórsdóttir, 2014). 

Furthermore, there are obvious tensions within the system: On the one hand, there is a clinical approach characterised by focus on diagnosis and provisions to address the “problems” of individual students, and the allocation of resources to support diagnosis and special provisions for individual students. On the other hand, there are arguments that view that approach as counterproductive to inclusion as it directs the flow of resources to provisions for few students at the cost of developing inclusive practices that serve all learners in a school community alike (European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, 2017; Harðardóttir & Júlíusdóttir, 2019). 

To analyse the disparity between the two approaches, and suggest system-wide solutions to advance inclusive practices, it is helpful to depict the education system as an ecosystem consisting of subsystems, each of which representing policy and administration on the one hand, and the pedagogy of inclusive education on the other (Anderson, Boyle & Deppeler, 2014; Florian & Black-Hawkins, 2011; Florian & Spratt, 2013). The student is placed at the innermost layer of the system surrounded by four outer layers: Next to the student, there is the learning space in which his education takes place. Then there is the school as an organisation, surrounded by the municipality subsystem responsible for the making and implementation of educational policy, and farthest out is the national system responsible for the system as a whole. 

In this paper the spotlight is on the roles and responsibilities of schools and municipalities. In particular the emphasis on clinical approaches and school-based consultation (Gutkin & Curtis, 1990; Sigþórsson, 2013) in policy and practice is scrutinised. The paper argues – in line with research of professional development (Guskey, 2014; Fullan and Hargreaves, 2016), learning communities and schools as learning organisations (Hall & Hord, 2015) – that the school is the venue of professional learning and school-wide change, and what takes (or does not take) place within schools is the main determinant of policy implementation. However, schools are not islands; they need support that is the shared responsibility of the entire education system, but first and foremost of the municipalities, which have an obligation by law to provide schools and their staff, students and parents with such support. 

The aim of this paper is to investigate how principals of pre-primary and compulsory schools, and superintendents or municipality officials fulfilling a similar function, interpret the nature of the support service for schools provided by the municipalities as regards: 1) the clarity of policies regarding the provision of support, and their emphasis on clinical and school-based consultation, 2) the actual practice of the support service as regards clinical approaches to the needs of students, and the support for professional development, development of schools as learning organisations, and advise to teachers regarding the interplay of learning outcomes and practices within students’ learning spaces. 

Data, analysed in this paper, was obtained with an online survey submitted to respondents representing the municipality school support service, preschool principals and compulsory school principals (N = 444) in all municipalities (N = 72) in Iceland in the period of January to March 2019. The overall response rate was 62%. Permission was acquired by email from the appropriate local authorities. The organisation of the support service within Icelandic municipalities is varied. Some operate their own service, whilst others buy certain elements from freelance consultants or from a neighbouring municipality or organise their service in collaboration with neighbouring municipalities. This made the location of respondents on behalf of the support service complicated, but finally the survey was sent to 50 directors of support services (superintendents and municipal officials, response rate 74%). At the school level the survey was submitted to preschool principals (N = 224, response rate 58%) and compulsory school principals (N = 170, response rate 61%).   The survey contained 23 questions on the policy and practice of the support service. Of those, ten were open, and five of the remaining thirteen contained multiple items with answering options on a Likert scale. Additional eight were background questions. One of them was used in this analysis to distinguish between the three relevant sub-groups of respondents: pre-primary principals, compulsory principals and directors of school support service. For the analysis of this paper, questions were selected relating to the aims stated at the end of the “general description” section. To generate the findings of this paper a sourcebook was prepared for researchers, showing the answers of all participants to each question, the total number of valid answers and the number of missing answers, and the distribution of answers of the respondents as a whole is shown on a graph. Furthermore the answers to each question are analysed according to two types of analytical variables (background factors). Firstly, the job titles of the respondents: compulsory school principals, pre-school principals and representatives of school services, and secondly, the form of organization of the school service, where seven variations were possible. This analysis depicts the distribution of answers by the relevant subgroups. A chi-square test was used for significance analysis, based on 95% confidence limit.

A big majority of the respondent group as a whole regarded the policies of the municipalities regarding the support service as clear. However, further analysis revealed a difference in opinions between the principals on the one hand and the directors of school support service on the other, where the latter group regarded to policy, under which they worked, less clear than the former group. A big majority of the respondent group as a whole rated high emphasis on both clinical and school-based support. However, it was noteworthy that directors of school support service were less likely to report high emphasis on the clinical diagnosis of the “problems” of individual students, while the compulsory school principals rated the emphasis on consultation to teachers and schools to enhance appropriate teaching approaches lower than the other two groups. When it comes to the actual practice of the support service, the findings indicate a highly clinical practice, with high priority of all sorts of psychological and special education diagnosis, and the quest for special provisions for individual students. Correspondingly, the findings indicate low priority on the initiative, leadership and support for professional development, development of schools as learning organisations, and advice to teachers regarding the interplay of learning outcomes and practices within students’ learning spaces. It seems therefore that the system-wide disparity between clinical approaches and support for professional and school development indicated in the audit of the European agency and various studies referenced in the general section above is apparent within the municipalities’ support service, with arguably counterproductive effects for the advancement of inclusive education in Icelandic schools. We conclude that municipalities in Iceland need to take a more active role in enacting inclusive educational policy, not least by strengthening their support services for teachers, principals and schools as learning organizations.

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