For special and inclusive education policies and practice in most of the Western Countries, Individual Education Plans (IEPs) play a crucial role at the point that Mitchell, Murton and Hornby (2010) in their review write that “IEPs are ubiquitous”. Interestingly, IEPs exist both in countries with special schools or special classes and in more inclusive school systems like Norway, Italy or Portugal. They are called with different names and take different forms in different countries and school systems, but they all have in common the aim to define formal plans for special provisions in schools understood as necessary not for all, but for some pupils, in many countries those identified as having SEN (Alves, 2018).

Previous literature that reflects the use of IEPs within the framework of the development of inclusive education shows that the tool is connected with several challenges.  Some of them are related to difficulties in its implementation, like for example accessibility of IEPs in terms of language and communication, the lacking professionals’, parents’ and/or students’ participation in the IEP-elaboration,  or the perception of the IEP as an administrative rather than pedagogical tool (Alves, 2018; Andreasson & Carlsson, 2013; Blackwell & Rossetti, 2014; Cioè-Peña, 2020; Elder, Rood & Damiani, 2018; Müller, Venetz & Keiser, 2017; Breitenbach, 2019).

Others, and this are those we focus on in this work, relate to the essence of the IEP structure in being a tool for special provisions for somehow identified “special” student. On one side, IEPs mark pupils that for some reasons are identified not to fit the norm, with special educational needs for which it is assumed that general provision is not responding, on the other side, the simple abolishment of IEPs risks of flattening differences and making educational offer insensitive to individual differences (Alves, 2018; Ianes and Demo, 2021).

Moreover, IEPs can, on one side, design ways to reconnect so called special needs with the learning paths of a class that also implies the risk of a “normalizing” pressure. On the other side, IEPs can design separate curriculum and instructional strategies distinct from those for the whole class, with the risk of segregation (Andreasson, Asp-Onsjö and Isaksson, 2013; Bhroin and King, 2020; Martinez and Porter, 2020).

Finally, additional and specialized professionals (e.g. special education teachers) are linked directly to IEPS and connected with the risk that class teachers and subject teachers to do integrate students with IEPs in their planning and delegate to specialized professionals the responsibility for them, (Mitchell et al., 2010; King, Bhroin and Prunty, 2017; Bhroin and King, 2020; Martinez and Porter, 2020)

In Italy, in contrast to other European countries where separate curricula are formulated for certain categories of students with so called special educational needs, the IEP represents a tool which aims to guarantee all pupils access to the national curriculum and the curriculum of the school (Ianes & Demo, 2021). Despite the almost three decades long practice in the use of IEPs, problems and dilemmas are still arising (e.g., Associazione TreeLLLe, Caritas Italiana & Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 2011).

On this background, this paper aims at analyzing the way class teachers and support teachers describe the relationship between IEPs and class planning in Italian primary school classes.

The paper presents some of the first results of the study TOP PLAN that is investigating (1) how teachers and parents describe the elaboration of the IEP, (2) how teachers describe, and parents perceive the implementation of the IEP in the everyday school practice and (3) how teachers describe, and parents perceive the relationship between the IEP and the class planning. The project is conceived as multiple case study (Yin, 2014), in which the case is built of a primary school class and data are collected by means of document analysis of the IEP and three semi structured interviews, one with a class teacher, one with the support teacher and one with one parent of the child with the IEP. Overall, 18 second and fifth grade primary school classes with at least one student with an IEP from three different Italian provinces (Bozen-Bolzano, Torino, Roma) participate to the study. In this paper, the results of the qualitative content analysis (Schreier, 2012) of the 36 teacher interviews on the main category “Relationship between IEPs and class planning” will be presented.

In terms of results, the paper will present the elaborations of teachers around four main issues: (1) the role played by IEPs in class planning, (2) the role played by class planning in the elaboration and implementation of IEPs, (3) the challenges and (4) facilitators in connecting IEPs and class planning. Results will then be discussed form the perspective that IEPs can be considered an embodiment of the “dilemma of difference” (Norwich, 2010). On one side, teachers describe how IEPs support a deep understanding of individual talents, preferences and interests and impact class planning making it sensitive to those characteristics, which enable participation and learning on a high-quality level. On the other side, teachers also describe planning practices that make the IEP an “othering” tool, a marker of difference, in similar ways also previous literature showed (Martinez & Porter, 2020; Andreasson & Carlsson, 2013).

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