Education carries a considerable responsibility when it comes to improving global inequality, and while not everyone thinks this is as it should be (for example, see Muller, 2018), it must be acknowledged that education matters. Educational attainment has been shown to improve a broad range of life outcomes (OECD, 2022) and equitable access to education enhances ‘social equity’ (Harber 2014, p. 20). It is unsurprising therefore to find ‘Quality education’ (Goal 4) identified as one of 17 goals described within the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015). It has been argued that for education to be considered ‘quality’ it must be inclusive (Anderson & Boyle, 2020). If enacted successfully, inclusive education can reduce inequalities more broadly, including in the areas of physical and mental health, income and employment, and social connectivity. It is these wider benefits that position inclusive education as a construct of consequence within the global discourse, not just within the realm of education.

Inclusive education has been the prevailing philosophy globally for the education of students with a disability for more than quarter of a century, and in more contemporary times, for all students. In 2016 the committee responsible for the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) described inclusive education as follows:

a process of systemic reform embodying changes and modifications in content, teaching methods, approaches, structures and strategies in education to overcome barriers with a vision serving to provide all students of the relevant age range with an equitable and participatory learning experience and environment that best corresponds to their requirements and preferences (United Nations, 2016, para. 11).

Captured within these words is the scale of change required for inclusive education to prevail. The enormity of change may explain in some part both why inclusive education has struggled to gain traction in recent years and why the ‘substantial distance between the conceptualisation of inclusive education and its implementation’ has persisted (Artiles & Kozleski, 2016, p. 7). In many countries, such as Australia and England, there is evidence to suggest segregation and exclusion of some groups of students, particularly those from minority groups, is again on the rise (Anderson & Boyle, 2019; Norwich & Black, 2015). Reasons for this are varied and complex, yet one notion that requires further exploration is the role special education, and those working in the field, have played. While the notion of inclusive education has been lauded globally by many policy makers, researchers, and practitioners, it has faced unrelenting criticism and resistance (Artiles & Kozleski, 2016) with much of this coming from the field of special education (Slee, 2018).

Inclusive education emerged from within the special education debate, and much of the discourse around it still attaches itself to residual ideas from each of the exclusion, segregation, and integration eras (Mac Ruairc, 2020). Having grown out of the field of special education, inclusive education consistently gets entangled in the politics of disability and education. The challenges from special educators to protect what has traditionally been their educational space are real (Slee, 2018). Advocates of special education have fought to maintain separate provisions for students with disability in the form of segregated classes and special schools. The argument is based on the premise that segregation is needed - it's for their own good. Full inclusion has been positioned as the enemy of special education and the debate has become on centred on inclusive verses special education.

This study sought to understand the impact of the inclusive verse’s special education debate on those entrusted with providing an education to all children – principals of public primary schools.

A qualitative case-study design was employed to interrogate leadership for inclusive education within ten primary schools located in Queensland, Australia. Schools were all Government run, and purposefully selected on a number of criteria, including size, diversity of cohort, and their Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) rating (according to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) it is a scale which allows for ‘comparisons between schools based on the level of educational advantage or disadvantage that students bring to their academic studies’ (ACARA, 2016, p. 1)), to ensure a diverse mix of data were captured. Principals from each school participated in two in-depth semi-structured interviews, which were transcribed and then analysed using an inductive thematic analysis approach. Codes were established and themes developed following the guidelines proffered by Clarke and Braun (2017). It should be noted that principals were allocated an alphabetic identifier (PA, PB and so on) during transcription of the interview data, and these will be used in the presentation to ensure anonymity.

The research findings produced four clear themes. First, principals regarded inclusive education to be specifically about disability and characterised inclusive education as being for the students with a disability enrolled at their schools. Second, they regarded special education to be an inclusive practice, sitting at one end of the inclusive education continuum, with ‘full inclusion’ at the other. Third, principals described inclusive education as being the work of staff employed in special education roles. Finally, principals considered inclusive education to be something separate to ‘mainstream’ education and used language to describe it as being something ‘different’ or ‘other’. It could be argued that these findings are unsurprising, given Artiles and Kozleski’s (2016) assertion that the constructs of disability and inclusive education are often entangled in political discourse, and as a consequence, the term special education is often ‘misrepresented’ as inclusive education (D’Alessio et al., 2018). This notion is reflected in the work of researchers, universities, and education systems, a problematic reality for the global goal of quality and equitable education (United Nations, 2015). Why? Because it seems that while the inclusive verse’s special education debate persists, advocates of inclusion will have an uphill battle to position the construct as it was always meant to be positioned - as a way of doing education for everyone. Maybe it is time to let go of the term inclusive education and reimagine the possibilities of schools that support learning and wellbeing outcomes for everyone.

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