The European Agency for Special Educational Needs and Inclusive Education, which has been monitoring the development of inclusive education policies systematically in Europe for the past decades, describes a general trend from narrow policies that focus on pupils with disabilities towards broader policies aiming at the development of quality education for all learners (Meijer & Watkinson, 2016). At the same time, the Agency shows that in many countries, these broader inclusion policies have grown out of previous and narrow ones, producing confusing and sometimes even contradictory norms and legislation that mix different understandings of inclusive education (European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education, 2010).

The normative ambivalence has particularly been observed in policies regarding the organization of support for inclusive education and its funding (Ebersold et al., 2019). In this field, also most of the countries with policies that explicitly define inclusion in terms of a development towards a more equal and democratic school for all still allocate specific resources to students that are identified as having special educational needs. The results are that, if on one side funding for general education is shrinking, on the other side resources for special education support is constantly increasing (Ebersold et al., 2019) and, in the light of the ambivalent policies, such growth might indicate at the same time an ‘inadequate general education system as well as increasing diversity among children in today’s schools’ (Florian and McLaughlin, 2008).

On this background, Individual Education Plans (IEPs) play a central role. In their review, Mitchell, Murton and Hornby (2010) write that “IEPs are ubiquitous” as they are used in most of the Western Countries, even though with different wordings and functions in the various school systems. What they have in common is that they are formal plans for special provisions, designed, implemented and evaluated in schools, and assumed as necessary only for some pupils, in many countries those identified as having SEN (Alves, 2018).

From a conceptual point of view, IEPs challenge the broad idea of inclusion because they foster a way of thinking about students’ diversity which implies that some pupils need something additional to or different from what is provided in general education to their peers (Alves, 2018). At the same time, not having IEPs poses the risk of flattening differences and not making education accessible to all, as the “dilemma of difference” has shown (Norwich, 2013). Dealing with this complex tension in practice requires high professional teaching competencies to find a way out of the dilemma that balances the two forces.

In this symposium, we aim at deepening the understanding of the dilemma connected with the use of IEPs in inclusive education. A first contribution will offer an overview of the existing literature and highlight the different forms the described tensions assume. The three subsequent contributions will instead provide empirical data from different countries to give insights into 1) how the dilemma is constructed in different contexts and 2) how teachers deal with it in practice.  

Alves, I. F. (2018). The transnational phenomenon of individual planning in response to pupil diversity: A paradox in educational reform. In E. Hultqvist, S. Lindblad, & T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.), Critical Analyses of Educational Reforms in an Era of Transnational Governance (pp. 151–168). Springer. European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education (2010). Inclusive Education in Action: Project Framework and Rationale. https://www.sess.ie/sites/default/files/inclusive%20education%20framework%202011.pdf Ebersold, S., Watkins, A., Óskardóttir, E., & Meijer, C. W. J. (2019). Financing inclusive education to reduce disparity in education: Trends, issues and drivers. In M. J. Schuelka, C. J. Johnstone, G. Thomas, & A. J. Artiles (Eds.), The Sage handbook of inclusion and diversity in education (pp. 232–248). SAGE. Meijer, C. J. W., & Watkins, A. (2016). Changing Conceptions of Inclusion Underpinning Education Policy. In A. Watkins & C. J. W. Meijer (Eds.), Implementing Inclusive Education: Issues in Bridging the Policy-Practice Gap (pp. 1–16). Emerald. Mitchell, D., Morton, M., & Hornby, G. (2010). Review of the literature on individual education plans: Report to the New Zealand Ministry of Education. New Zealand Ministry of Education. https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/102216/Literature-Review-Use-of-the-IEP.pdf Norwich, B. (2013). Addressing tensions and dilemmas in inclusive education: Living with uncertainty. Routledge.