Following the results of recent research, there is evidence that students diagnosed as having special educational needs (SEN) are more likely to experience social exclusion in the context of educational settings than their peers without SEN (e.g. Bossaert et al., 2013; Hassani et al., 2020; Schwab, 2018). Further studies show that with regards to students with SEN there is also a relation between a lack of social participation and lower perceptions in terms of well-being (e.g., McCoy & Banks, 2017). Subsequently, research shows, that low self-esteem, low levels of happiness, and negative outcomes on emotional and psychological levels can be a consequence of perceived low levels of personal social inclusion and well-being (Allen et al., 2018). Against this background, ensuring participatory access and inclusion of students with SEN in the context of educational school life and learning situations seems to potentially have positive effects on different levels for students’ perception of education. Therefore, the presentation deals with promoting factors for social participation and inclusion focusing on students with SEN. In order to give a voice to as many stakeholders involved as possible, different perspectives are included into the study and thus a clear picture of conducive factors is drawn. The underlying data encompasses semi-structured interviews with 12 students with SEN, 12 students without SEN, six regular teachers, six special needs teachers, six parents (mother or father) of students without SEN and six parents (mother or father) of students with SEN. The current study follows a multiple-case study approach, which provides the opportunity to shed light to different perspectives by carefully choosing cases that are predicted to contain similar as well as contrasting results depending on the participants role in inclusive education of students with SEN (Yin, 2013). As analytical approach, the thematic analysis (Froschauer & Lueger, 2020) was chosen. Regarding the results, promoting factors for the inclusion of students with SEN will be summarized on three levels: educational, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels. Throughout all samples, factors on every level could be investigated in the course of preliminary analysis. In-depth results are currently being analyzed and will be available by the time of the conference.

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