This paper engages with children’s agency in German primary school classrooms with paraprofessional assistance. With signing the UN-convention of the rights of persons with disabilities (UN 2006), Germany committed to create an inclusive educational system recognising the right to education for all pupils. In order to ensure the participation of pupils with special educational needs, paraprofessional assistance has been established as a resource of individual support. The structural conditions are complex, since paraprofessional assistance is a resource of social care and not of the educational system (Fritzsche & Köpfer 2021). Research indicates that the individual child-centred support and the close relationship between pupils and paraprofessionals can impact the pupils’ participation in the classroom as well as the social interaction with peers and that it can be a practice of labelling the pupils as ‘special’ (Ehrenberg & Lindmeier 2020). This raises the question of how the individual support practices affect, support or restrict the pupils’ agency. The paper discusses the findings from the PhD-project “Reconstructions of subjectivity, power and agency in the context of paraprofessional assistance in inclusive school environments”. The project uses an ethnographic design in order to reconstruct practices of subjectivation linked to ascribing or denying agency to the pupils using a theoretical perspective which links the ecological approach to agency (Biesta et al. 2017) to post-structural theory. Following the understanding of Butler (1997a, 1997b), we understand agency as the power to act emerging from processes of subjectivation and being related to subject positions in which individuals are addressed. In this understanding, agency is a performative concept in which social norms and structures are reproduced, potentially enabling individuals to resist and destabilise the social order (Butler 1993; McNay 1999). In linking the post-structural and ecological understanding of agency, we focus on how processes of ascribing or denying agency are framed by social norms, the ecological and temporal conditions and power relations from which they emerge. Within this theoretical framework, we present data from both participant observation in class-rooms environments and focus group interviews with primary school pupils that are analysed using a method which combines interaction-analytical and discourse-analytical elements. The focus lies on the following questions: • How do pupils in inclusive classrooms with paraprofessional assistance experience, achieve and negotiate agency? • How is their agency shaped by practices of individual support? Which spaces of acting are opened up to the pupils and how do they use them?

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