The democratisation of education has triggered new educational issues related to the advocacy of a school promoting equal opportunities and social justice. The need for education systems to guarantee access and success for all students has put education at the centre of the political and economic space. Thus, there are several political texts that, in the last decades, produce meanings and guidelines for the design of more inclusive educational systems. This has contributed to inclusive education becoming a nominally accepted concept (Nilholm, 2006) and to its assertion as in a global political vision (Pijl, Meijer and Hegarthy, 1997). In Portugal, the Legal Framework for Inclusive Education (decree-law 54/2018, of 6 July) established for the first time in the same legal normative, measures to support learning and inclusion (MSAI) for all students and reinforced the participation of the educational community (teachers, students, guardians and external stakeholders from local communities) for its implementation. This Decree-Law established formal moments for such participation and provided guidelines to create conditions for schools to affirm themselves as more politically democratic contexts (Trindade & Cosme, 2010) in which inclusive education is seen as a purpose for the whole community. Despite the potential changes that this text seems to point towards a more inclusive education policy, we assume that the process of implementation of education policies departs from the social engineering model in which the policy text determines the practices and effects (Stoer and Magalhaes, 2005). In this way we are arguing that the implementation of an educational policy is a process of meaning construction (Spillane, 2004). Having this as a reference, we mobilised for the research the theoretical-methodological approach of the Policy Cycle of Stephen Ball (1994), which assumes the characterisation of the investigated policy with the discussion of historical, legislative, discursive and political-ideological aspects (Ball, Maguire and Braun, 2012) from five contexts: context of influence, context of text production, context of practice, context of effects, and the context of political strategy. This critical and post-structuralist approach refuses the idea that structure is what will define policy and the political process; on the contrary, it argues that policy emerges from the priorities of different interest groups and their network governance (Veiga, 2012) and that it develops with the participation and interaction of groups of people who construct and constitute reality. Thus, according to this approach, the origin of policies is not circumscribed to an isolated moment or to one of the contexts of the policy cycle. In this paper we propose to explore the contexts of influence and text production of the inclusive education policy embodied in decree-law 54/2018, identifying its conditions of production (Pêcheux, 1993), i.e., the influences that collaborated to its placement on the agenda. To access these contexts of the cycle of inclusive education policy we analysed international and national texts, such as declarations, conventions, studies, opinions, reports and legal texts. The research questions that guided this analysis and that we intend to answer in this proposal are: What are the organisations that guide inclusive education policies? What are the ideas that underpin inclusive education policies?

To answer the questions listed, we need to know and understand the context of the influence of current inclusive education policies in Portugal. To this end we resorted to documentary analysis of inter/national reference texts that the Directorate General for Education (DGE) identifies on its website as guiding inclusive education policies. We justify this option by the competences of this central state service, such as "ensure the implementation of policies (...) of pre-school education, basic and secondary education and extra-school education, provide technical support to its formulation and monitor and evaluate its implementation" (Article 12, DL 266-g/2012). Subsequently, we collected other texts that are referenced in these texts indicated by the DGE and that we considered relevant to answer the questions posed. We followed the criterion of selecting documents published until 2018, the year of publication of the legal text DL 54/2018, which assumes central importance in this investigation. The documentary corpus includes international and national texts. Fifty-three international texts were analyzed, such as declarations, conventions, studies, opinions and reports, published between 1948 and 2018, by the following organisations: United Nations (UN); United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); World Health Organization (WHO); European Commission (EC); Commission of the European Communities (CCE); Council of the European Union (CUE); World Bank (WB); European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education (EADSNE); European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education (EASNIE); Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education (CSIE); and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Twenty-six national texts were analyzed, such as declarations, recommendations, opinions and legal texts, published between 1986 and 2018, by the following organizations: Ministry of Education (ME), Directorate-General of Education (DGE), National Education Council (CNE) and National Association of Special Education Teachers (ANDEE). All documents were analysed using the thematic analysis method in Braun and Clarke's (2006) approach; and we used the NVivo program (Zamawe, 2015; Allsope et al, 2022) to organise the data. Thematic analysis, as it does not require initial coding, gives the researcher a particularly relevant place in the way he apprehends and considers information. We understand that the choice of this path allowed a free, in-depth and complex search on the data that resulted in a vast record of notes on patterns and discourses that possibly would not have been identified and analyzed with another methodological possibility.

The thematic analysis resulted in 4 main themes that support inclusive education policies: diversity, equity, autonomy, participation. Increasing the diversity of the school population triggers global measures for equity, which rely on local autonomy and multi-stakeholder participation for their enactment (Ball, Maguire & Braun, 2012). The findings suggest that international organizations (e.g. UNESCO, OECD, WB, EASNIE) with different goals and priorities produce different, sometimes contradictory, meanings that feed into inclusive education policies. In the four themes we identified elements that refer to the idea of education as a public good (in the emphasis of the right to quality and inclusive education) and as a private good (in the emphasis of the relevance of choices, individualization and efficiency). In national texts (e.g. CNE and DGE) we identified elements of these ideals, verifying coordinated discursive communications (Schimdt, 2008) and an incorporation of supranational procedures (Nóvoa & Lawn, 2002). The theme of diversity is related to the recognition of different vulnerable groups excluded from the educational systems, being common to all organizations the reference to people with special educational needs, which seems to derive from the genealogical relationship of inclusive education-special education. In the affirmation that the education of all people is of equal importance and the need for greater investment by states in education to include everyone (per se, indicator of included and excluded), ideas of equality, justice and economic sustainability for nations collaborate, particular visions in which equity is fostered. The realization of principles of decentralization, freedom of decision, collective construction of curricula, leadership, and optimization of resources, constitute the semantic field of autonomy. Finally, the cooperation of external stakeholders, and the increased accountability of teachers, families, and the students themselves, support the issue of participation as one of the key factors in the development of inclusive education policy in Portugal.

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