Dialogue and partnerships between countries are essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. They provide the opportunity to learn what works in other nations and facilitate research and programmes, such as those between the European Union and Indian civil societies. Particularly, research collaborations can help to advance disability-inclusive education, as countries vary in terms of progress towards inclusion.  

It is estimated that 7.8 million children live with disabilities in India (UNESCO, 2019). There are policy and legal provisions for educating students with and without disabilities in the same classroom. However, societal, systemic, school, and family level challenges often prevent full inclusion (Singal, 2019). Deep social stigma regarding disability often results in affiliate stigma among parents of a child with special needs (Patra & Patro, 2019) and can affect teachers’ beliefs (Singal, 2019).

In effective schools, there is family and community involvement (Masters, 2004). Families and schools have a shared responsibility to help students reach their full potential. Family engagements are a series of interactions between the family and schools that are dynamic and everchanging (Xu, 2020). Family involvement leads to improved academic outcomes, behaviour, and student attendance, amongst others (Jeynes, 2005; Sheldon & Epstein, 2004; Sheldon, 2007).

Family-school partnerships are particularly important to help every child succeed in disability-inclusive contexts. They have academic, social, and emotional benefits for students with disabilities (Patrikakou, 2011). However, schools are required to allocate resources, offer professional learning opportunities for teachers, create communication routines, and allow parents to observe the strategies deployed in classrooms for successful collaboration (Patrikakou, 2011).

While speaking with the lead author, eminent inclusive education expert, Dr Umesh Sharma, said in his interview on behaviour management and inclusive learning environments, that the problem arises when teachers contact parents only when students misbehave (Chakraborty, 2023). Indeed, the concern for a significant number of Indian schools, like in other parts of the world, is to create regular and institutionalised strategies for collaboration with families.

Teachers in India expressed that they need support from parents in understanding the challenges of the child, for formal diagnosis, preparation of Individual Education Plans (IEPs), training on assistive technology, and in classroom teaching and learning activities (Chakraborty, 2023). However, there is a lack of empirical research in India on understanding how family-school partnerships have been established in the context of disability-inclusive education and what the challenges are, as existing literature primarily focuses on the experiences of parenting children with disabilities (Gokhale, 2021; Chakravarti, 2008).

This paper aims to explore family-school partnerships in disability-inclusive school education in India. The central question is ‘What are the opportunities and challenges of family-school collaboration for disability-inclusive education in schools in India?’ Specifically, we ask,

(i)                  What are the existing family-school partnerships that promote disability inclusion in schools?

(ii)                What are the challenges in building such partnerships for disability-inclusion?

(iii)               How do schools collaborate with families in the context of learning assessments?

The third question is particularly relevant as learning assessments for children with disabilities and factors affecting them haven’t received much academic attention. 

This qualitative study will gather the perspectives of school leaders to develop an understanding of the family-school partnership landscape in India for improving academic and co-academic outcomes for students with disability. The insights will enable policymakers and school leaders to design teacher professional learning opportunities that enable schools to strengthen their connections with families. Further, learnings from the study will promote the development of effective parent-school collaboration in disability-inclusive contexts which is emphasised in India’s National Education Policy (NEP, 2020).

A qualitative research approach was selected to understand the perspectives of school leaders on the efforts made to partner with families of students with disabilities and the challenges they face while creating those partnerships (Hatch, 2022). Semi-structured interviews were used to gather enriching insights into the area of family-school partnerships in disability-inclusive education (Winwood, 2019). Around 10 school leaders were interviewed from 10 private and government schools in urban cities in India reducing the chance of apriori assumptions. Schools that have enrolled at least 10 students with disability have been included in the study. Two researchers conducted the interviews with the school leaders. Informed consent was obtained from all school leaders participating in the interviews. The interviews were corroborated by school observation. The field work was conducted over a period of three months. Only those leaders were selected who had the experience of managing inclusive schools for more than 5 years. The participants were sampled based on purposive sampling and snowballing. The audio tapes of the interviews will be transcribed using tools and any mismatch between the audio and text will be corrected by the researchers manually. NVivo will be used to organise, store, and analyse the data for obtaining the results of the study. The data presented in the study are anonymous, and full confidentiality was maintained in the research process. Researchers will repeatedly read the transcripts to identify the expressions of the participants. This will be followed by a meeting for discussing the observations and notes of different researchers. The first author will code the data and group the data through an iterative process to arrive at the coding framework. NVivo will be used to derive visual representations to derive the themes, and eventually, the key findings of the study.

The study will describe the family-school collaborative practices in the schools of participants in the study. It will outline details such as the purposes of such collaborations, the frequency of collaborations, and the benefits of such collaborations for students with disability. It will also help to bring out the concerns of school leaders about the issues that hinder family-school collaborations including system, social, and family level challenges and what helped them overcome the challenges. However, the study will not report the effectiveness of partnerships or how the partnerships have benefited students with disabilities. The study will also elicit information on the school level factors that have led to the success of such collaborations. These could include the school’s culture of collaboration, school councils, strong guidelines or codes of conduct for building positive family connections, directions from school leaders on setting channels of collaboration, support from special educators, and professional learning for teachers for engaging with families of students with disabilities. The study will elaborate on those nuances that helped teachers forge partnerships with families of students with disabilities. The study will also highlight the role of teachers as communicators. Communication skills and channels are essential in formation of family-school relationships, and especially crucial in disability-inclusive education. In addition, there will be specific information related to collaboration with families for assessments, for example, understanding how the assessment criteria is communicated, the process of deciding accommodation, and how student performance is reported to set learning goals for every child.

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