This study presents an advance of the results of the research project titled “What is inclusive education missing? Participatory research looking for responses to exclusion and inequity in education in Western Andalusia”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. For two years, two research teams from the University of Cádiz and the University of Seville have worked together to develop a community diagnosis of the situation in Andalusia with the aim of building projects with their local educational communities for the advancement of schools that value diversity through their policies and practices.
 
This specific work is focused on the voices of school counselors, i.e., key agents for the mobilization of inclusion (Goodman, 2005) who are often largely forgotten in schools (Calvo, Haya & Susinos, 2012). Analyses around an inclusive education point in two directions regarding these fundamental educational agents. On the one hand, they need to be and feel included in the ecology of the school (Clark & Crandall, 2009), and on the other hand, they have to transform their advanced role towards collaborative models (Bemak, 2000).
 
Andalusia is a region in Southern Spain, where the poverty rate reached 32.8% in 2021, compared to the 21.7% national average (National Institute of Statistics, 2021), which makes it the second region in Spain with the highest risk of poverty or social exclusion, with a rate of 38.7% compared to 27.8% in Spain. The unemployment rate is currently 19% of the active population, positioning itself as the second Spanish region with the highest percentage of unemployed people and with a GINI coefficient of 34.8. It is the third region in Spain with the highest early school leaving rate (21.8%) (European Anti-poverty Network, 2022). This indicates that Andalusia continues to maintain notable differences (5.8 percentage points) compared to the Spanish average of 16%, and almost doubles the European Union average (10.1%). Early school leaving continues to reflect differences between men and women, with almost 10 percentage points (9.9) (men 26.7% and women 16.8%). These data are reflected in the population under 18 years of age. In fact, the report "Poverty and inequality" of the Children's Observatory in Andalusia (Rodríguez, 2021) states that 22.8% of boys and girls are in a situation of relative poverty (this figure is increasing in girls), 10.1% are in severe poverty, 9.3% have severe deprivation of access to basic materials, and 8.7% live in homes with low labor intensity. This reality, together with other descriptive data of the Andalusian context, such as the significant percentage of foreign population or people residing in rural areas, translates into factors of inequality and social exclusion (Escarbajal, Izquierdo & Abenza, 2019), which increases the risk of situations of school dropout and educational exclusion (Escudero, 2005), whose inequalities can only be reversed from the development of more inclusive school contexts (Fernández-Menor & Parrilla, 2021).
This research is aimed at attaining the following objectives:
1. Explore, identify and analyze the policies of exclusion and social inequality developed in Andalusia, using primary and secondary sources from a multi-agent and multi-vocal point of view.
2. Prepare and develop a Map of action priorities against exclusion that serves as a roadmap to develop changes and improvements in the Andalusian context.
 
The purpose of this paper is to answer the following questions: What are the issues that concern educational counselors in relation to exclusion/inclusion in Andalusia? How can they help to understand exclusion/inclusion? What is the role they play regarding inclusion? What obstacles and levers do they find for the development of inclusive education? What proposals do they have for improvement?

This study is based on a participatory and emancipatory methodological approach (Armstrong & More, 2005) based on a community perspective. It is built on the participation of key agents of the territory in the research itself, not only as informants but also as agents that collaboratively mobilize proposals that are linked to the development of inclusive education. From this option, we speak of inclusive research that investigates not only inclusion, but also for inclusion and through inclusive processes (Nind, 2017).   Following a participatory research design (Kemmis, McTaggart & Nixon, 2013), the study is organized in 5 phases, which begin with the preparation of the groups and the selection of informants (phase 1), the development of a descriptive-interpretative study of exclusion in the region (phase 2) and the development of a Map of Action Priorities against educational exclusion (phase 3). This is followed by the design of participatory projects to improve inclusion at the local level (phase 4) and, finally, the transfer and mobilization of knowledge of practices to improve exclusion (phase 5) is developed. This work is focused on phases 2 and 3, which have a descriptive-interpretative character. Phase 2 was developed through the documentary analysis of secondary sources (reports, statistics, news, etc.) that would make it possible to report on the state of the issue of exclusion in Andalusia, as well as to bring up dilemmatic issues. Phase 3 starts from the report prepared in the previous phase. Based on the identified dilemmas, infographics were prepared to disseminate the information among the informants in an accessible way; and an in-depth interview script was designed, which would allow collecting information from different agents (politicians, teachers, counselors, families, students and NGOs) with common elements and other diversified elements. Data analysis was performed through a system of emergent categories and thematic and interpretative codes, using the qualitative software MAXQDA 11 to reduce and manipulate the information. This work focuses on the contributions of 6 educational counselors from two different provinces (Cádiz and Seville) and on their contribution to the multi-agent and multi-argumentative analysis of exclusion and inclusion policies in Andalusia.

The results obtained are provisional, given the state of the investigation. Now we need to design, with the participants, improvement projects based on the mapping of priorities. In this sense, school counselors point out the following: One of the main issues that concern them is that teachers continue to have a very restrictive view of inclusive education, which is in fact based on the categorization of students, as occurs in many other regions and countries. Moreover, although the regulations formally support an inclusive perspective, it is full of contradictions that confuse the school community: it continues to problematize the subjects and not the contexts. They identify that there are other elements that are leading to situations of exclusion, because attention is not paid to them through educational policies and they point out that, in inclusive education in Andalusia, we are forgetting about the entire population with low socioeconomic and cultural levels. They are concerned about school coexistence, grade repetition and school dropout, and how these issues can be approached from an inclusive approach, in the context of the response to diversity. The barriers include: a restrictive and problematic view of diversity (frequently resembling situations of disability), instability of teaching teams, late teacher training, and continuous regulatory changes. However, the school counselors also declare that they have proposals for the development of an inclusive education in the centers: some from a political dimension, such as the reduction of the ratio or the consolidation of support programs that are working well (i.e., "Impulses Program"), and others that can be addressed from the school, such as collaborative practices that also incorporate said programs, the strengthening of pedagogical leadership, and the creation of transit projects between educational areas. They speak to us about the need for inclusive education from a community perspective.

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