In June 1994, a World Congress on Special Needs Education was organised by the Government of Spain in collaboration with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). At this Congress, more than 300 participants representing 92 nations and 25 international organisations met in Salamanca, Spain. The aim was to strengthen ‘Education for All’ on an international scale by articulating the policy changes that were needed to further promote inclusive education – particularly for students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). The Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action  – or ‘Salamanca Statement’, for short (UNESCO, 1994) – has since been widely recognised as one of the most important documents supporting the notion of inclusive education (Aniscow and César, 2006), and, as such, it has been widely used as a basis for developing and inclusion policy (Magnùsson, 2019). Following the publication of the Salamanca Statement, it has been widely agreed that there has been a clear change mindset, and in expectations, about the requirement for including students with SEND in mainstream settings. Stating firmly that national governments ought to prioritize inclusive education for all, the Salamanca Statement generated a shift in educational discourse, which is now firmly grounded in the language of equality, diversity, and inclusion. 

Despite the development of a broad and ambitious discourse on inclusion following the publication of the Salamanca Statement (Aniscow et al., 2019), research suggest that the awareness and acceptance of such a discourse has still failed in part to translate into systematic educational reform (Graham et al., 2020). This failure is highly evident and widely recognised within the field of physical education (PE). Despite the fact that PE has been constantly reported as a key educational context for promoting the inclusion of children with disabilities in schools (Qi and Ha 2012; Rekaa et al. 2019; Tant and Watelain 2016; Wilhelmsen and Sørensen 2017) – and despite compelling research evidence that children with SEND enjoy being physically active (Coates and Vickerman, 2010; Leo and Mourton, 2020; Rekaa et al., 2019) – studies still consistently report that children with SEND profiles remain functionally excluded from PE classes (Makopoulou et al. 2019; Rimmer and Rowland, 2008).

Teachers’ attitudes are widely recognised as proximal factor influencing the inclusion of students with SEND profiles in PE (Rekaa et al. 2019; Hutzler et al. 2019). Existing reviews of the literature on attitudes towards inclusion among teachers reveal mixed outcomes, however. For example, early reviews concluded with the ‘disappointing, yet not surprising, finding’ (Block and Obrusnikova, 2007, p. 116) that teachers still often have unfavorable attitudes towards the inclusion. In a more recent systematic review, however, Rekaa et al. (2019, p. 52) concluded that, even though some ‘inclusive norms [are yet to be] realized as inclusive practices’, at a macro level, ‘change is taking place’ (ibid., p. 53).

This is a bold claim, and we believe that further, robust, evidence of such macro level change is still needed. Empirical research studies are needed that can provide evidence of attitudinal change between time periods where there has also been macro-level policy intervention and change, such as the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action. To that end, the aim of this paper is to estimate the differences in the direction and magnitude of PE teachers’ attitudes towards the inclusion of children with SEND profiles for studies conducted before and after the publication of the Salamanca Statement. Our initial guiding hypothesis was that studies conducted after the publication of the of the Salamanca Statement in 1994 would report more positive outcomes representing teachers’ attitudes towards the inclusion of children with SEND profile. 

This study used a systematic review and meta-analysis methodology and was conducted according to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis) guidelines (Liberati et al., 2009). Eight electronic databases (CINAHL Plus, SPORTDiscus, Medline, PsycINFO, Embase, PubMed, ERIC, and Web of Science) were searched in March 2019. The search strategy was based on seven concepts: (1) teachers; (2) inclusion; (3) physical education; (4) children; (5) special educational needs and disability; (6) schools; and (7) attitudes. The studies yielded by the search strategy were imported into RAYYAN (Ouzzani, Hammady, Fedorowicz, & Elmagarmid, 2016) for later independent screening. Only studies that used a validated questionnaire that reported the overall mean and SD for attitudes towards inclusion of SEND children and the study sample size were included in the meta-analysis. In some cases, studies reported means and standard deviations for sub-sections, or for each individual item, of a validated questionnaire. Therefore, where the overall mean and SD were not directly reported, two authors calculated them from statistical first principles. Studies for consideration in the meta-analysis also included attitudinal data reported on both 1 to 5 and 1 to 7 Likert scales. Following Hopkins’s approach to standardization for meta-analysis, the data from these measures were rescaled to reflect a range of possible values from 0 to 100 (Hopkins, 2018). This meant that a score of 50 would represent ‘neutral’ attitudes towards the inclusion of SEND children in physical education lessons. It also meant that differences between studies could be estimated as percentages. Once rescaled, data from individual studies were thereafter centred on a mean of zero to facilitate an estimate (against the null) of the extent to which studies showed positive or negative percentage attitudes towards inclusion of SEND children. This centring also had the added benefit of facilitating the production of a forest plot against which we could assess percentage differences in study means against a neutral value of 0.

Of 1,385 records yielded by the search, 25 studies met the initial eligibility criteria for inclusion in the systematic review. Fifteen of the 25 studies provided sufficient data for inclusion in the meta-analysis. The total number of the teachers surveyed was 2,555 (44% females; mean age, 39 ± 5 years). Studies from multiple school contexts were included: three studies investigated primary school teachers with PE responsibilities; five studies investigated secondary school PE teachers; four studies investigated both primary and secondary school teachers; and the remaining three studies did not report descriptive data about the sample. Studies were also conducted across numerous countries: seven samples from the USA; two samples from Greece; and one sample each from China, Serbia, Turkey, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and Cyprus. A statistically significant negative mean was found for studies conducted before the publication of the Salamanca Statement (-3.39, -6.30 to -0.49; meta-analysed mean, 95% confidence interval; p < .001). A statistically significant positive mean was found for studies conducted after the publication of the Salamanca Statement (13.10, 9.03 to 18.16; meta-analysed mean, 95% confidence interval; p < .001). A meta-regression conducted to estimate the mean difference between these groups of studies revealed a statistically significant difference (16.61, 8.48 to 24.73; difference in meta-analysed means, 95% confidence interval; p < .001), with the regression model indicating that 57% (R2 = 0.57) of the variance in mean attitudes between studies was explained by date of publication. This is the first study to show quantitatively that there are significant differences in teachers’ attitudes towards the inclusion of children with SEND profiles across a time span characterised by large scale policy change and enactment vis-a-vis inclusion. This analysis also provides some initial positive evidence of macro level differences in attitudes towards inclusion over the past three decades.

Haegele, J. A., and S. Sutherland. 2015. “Perspectives of students with disabilities toward physical education: A qualitative inquiry review.” Quest 67 (3): 255–273. Ainscow, M., & César, M. (2006). Inclusive education ten years after Salamanca: Setting the agenda. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 231-238. Ainscow, M. (2019). Ainscow, M. Slee, R. & Best, M. (2019) Editorial: the Salamanca Statement: 25 years on, International Journal of Inclusive Education. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23(7/8). Butler, J. I. (2006). Curriculum constructions of ability: enhancing learning through Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) as a curriculum model. Sport, Education and Society, 11(3), 243-258. Coates, J., & Vickerman, P. (2010). Empowering children with special educational needs to speak up: Experiences of inclusive physical education. Disability and Rehabilitation, 32(18), 1517–1526. Graham, L. J., Medhurst, M., Malaquias, C., Tancredi, H., De Bruin, C., Gillett-Swan, J., ... & Cologon, K. (2020). Beyond Salamanca: a citation analysis of the CRPD/GC4 relative to the Salamanca Statement in inclusive and special education research. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 1-23. Graham, L. (Ed.). (2020). Inclusive education for the 21st century: Theory, policy and practice. Routledge. Hernández-Torrano, D., Somerton, M., & Helmer, J. (2020). Mapping research on inclusive education since Salamanca Statement: a bibliometric review of the literature over 25 years. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 1-20. Hutzler, Y., Meier, S., Reuker, S., & Zitomer, M. (2019). Attitudes and self-efficacy of physical education teachers toward inclusion of children with disabilities: a narrative review of international literature. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 24(3), 249-266. Leo, J., & Mourton, N. (2020). According to the kids: research from the perspective of children with disabilities. In J. A. Haegele, S. R. Hodge, & D. Shapiro (Eds.), Routledge handbook of adapted physical education. London, United Kingdom. Magnússon, G. (2019). An amalgam of ideals–images of inclusion in the Salamanca Statement. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23(7-8), 677-690. Rekaa, H., Hanisch, H., & Ytterhus, B. (2019). Inclusion in physical education: Teacher attitudes and student experiences. A systematic review. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 66(1), 36-55. Rimmer, J. A., & Rowland, J. L. (2008). Physical activity for youth with disabilities: a critical need in an underserved population. Developmental Neurorehabilitation, 11(2), 141-148. Slee, R. 2018. Defining the Scope of Inclusive Education. [Commissioned paper]. UNESCO 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report: Inclusion and Education.