Although, UNESCO (2019) calls for schools to become “welcoming spaces …  where respect and appreciation for the diversity of all students prevail” (pp. 11, 15), educators and educational systems continue to stive to promote all students’ right to presence, participation and achievement in their education. For inclusive education to be realised, an intersectionality of architecture and inclusive education is emerging in the policy context (UNESCO, 2019, 2020), calling “State parties”/governments to take measures for “removing architectural … barriers to mainstream education” (UN, 2016, p. 15). This paper contributes to the emerging field of the role of architecture in supporting the translation of inclusive policy into practice for all students.

Affirming a collective responsibility to promote inclusive education, the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) – Education 2030 in the “Incheon Declaration and SDG4 – Education 2030 Framework for Action” established the need for the enactment of inclusive education to be “country-led”, requiring a “whole of government” approach. The Framework for Action was informed by three principles: education as a “fundamental human right and an enabling right”, ensuring equal access to inclusive education “free and compulsory, leaving no one behind”; education as a “public good” and a “shared societal endeavour”; and gender equality ensuring access, completion and empowerment for “girls and boys”, “women and men” (UNESCO, 2016, p. 28). Within the “whole of government” approach, the Framework for Action recognised that governments “will need the support of all stakeholders”, that is, “civil society, teachers and educators, the private sector, communities, families, youth and children” and understanding that they “all have important roles in realizing the right to quality education” (UNESCO, 2016, pp. 28, 60). However, this raises the question of how the right to quality education can be fully realised. According to UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 (2019) “school infrastructure must be improved, creating safe, accessible spaces” (p. 11). Therefore, allowing the affordances of architecture to emerge, ensuring safety in the architectural design of a school responds to students’ needs, while meeting policy requirements.

Richard Meier (1984) at the 1984 Pritzker Architecture Prize Ceremony described architecture  as “vital and enduring because it contains us; it describes space, space we move through, exist in and use” (p. 1). School spaces have been reported in the literature for their role in the education of students with disabilities (Buchner, 2021; Jin et al., 2018), students with English as an additional language (Everatt et al., 2019; Wrench et al., 2018), and all students (Kallio, 2018; Ytterhus & Åmot, 2021). Space has been recommended as one of the resources affecting student learning (OECD, 2013, p. 24) with research providing evidence that school architecture that meets the qualities of being “accessible, suitable and appropriate” is deemed to “benefit all learners” (Ackah-Jnr & Danso, 2019 p. 205). It is now widely accepted globally that inclusive education refers to “an optimum learning environment [that] benefits all students” (Boyle & Anderson, 2020, p. 208). However, this raises the question of what an optimum learning environment for all looks like. Informing the intersectionality of architecture with inclusive education, this case study in a primary school setting in metropolitan South Australia reports on student and educator experiences of ‘suitable’ and ‘designed specifically for children’ material-economic arrangements enabling students’ inclusive education.

The research questions that underpinned the study were:

• What role does architecture play in students’ inclusive education?
• What do school community members perceive to be the enabling and/or challenging arrangements to students’ inclusive education?

This study explored the intersectionality of architecture and inclusive education in a single case study of a primary school (students aged 5-12 years) in metropolitan South Australia with implications for schools worldwide. Appreciating cultural and linguistic diversity, the school was selected “on the recognition of attempts to respond to diversity” (Bristol, 2015, p. 817) with a reported diversity of ‘50 different ethnic and cultural groups in the school’ and with ‘approximately 60% of the enrolments’ meeting the English as additional language (EALD) criteria (2019 Annual General Meeting); the school was categorised among the most educationally disadvantaged schools in South Australia. Therefore, implications of this study can inform inclusive practices for the education for all worldwide. Being committed to a systemic whole school (OECD, 2007; UN, 2006; UNESCO, 2017) and intersectional approach to inclusive education (Migliarini et al., 2019), this study explored the role of architecture as an intersubjective space in a school community. The study employed a qualitative case study participatory co-design approach with its epistemological and ontological premises informed by a practice architectures (PA) lens. Practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) can enable researchers to explore and identify “how some particular sets of sayings (language) come to hang together with a particular set of doings (in activity, or work) and a particular set of relatings (e.g., particular kinds of power relationships or relationships of inclusion or exclusion)” (Mahon et al., 2017, p. 8). Participants included three parents/carers and 34 educators of the school community including two school leaders, 21 teachers, 9 staff members who did not specify their role, one Education Support Officer and one teacher/numeracy support staff member. Additionally, promoting students’ rightful participation to express their views freely (UN, 2006, 2016) and support “meaningful change” (Dollinger et al., 2021, p. 751), the researcher worked closely with two student cohorts i.e., ten from Reception (aged 5-6) and 21 from Year 4 (aged 9-10) including nine students with disabilities; speech delay, Autism Spectrum, Asperger’s syndrome, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), intellectual disability and arbitrary disorder. Data was collected through; surveys with parents/carers and educators, as well as focus groups and visual participatory co-design methods including auto-photography, digital and hand-made storybooks, and digital construction models using Tinkercad. Data was imported into a qualitative computer software, NVivo. The coding process followed a thematic content analysis combining inductive and deductive approaches (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Nowell et al., 2017).

Informing ways to promote sustainable changes in students’ inclusive education, one staff member recommended that ‘good quality educational furniture’ would support students’ inclusive education, whereas one of the school leaders identified a future direction towards ‘safe’ and ‘quality furniture’. This school leader identified furniture used in the past as ‘poorly made’ and not ‘sustainable’ as opposed to the new furniture at school, which was ‘well-made’, ‘suitable’ and ‘designed specifically for children’ in line with one of the school’s values stated on the school website: ‘We have established the architecture of the class to provide the best learning environment’. Prioritising furniture ‘designed specifically for children’ suggests that the furnishing was user-friendly. Having user-appropriate and user-friendly furnishing for all students has been supported as a tenet of inclusive education. Through an intersectional lens, findings affirm that material-economic arrangements ‘suitable’, ‘flexible’, ‘inviting’ and ‘comfortable’ can further enable students’ inclusive education, with their right to ‘safety’ through inclusion of cushions and beanbags being reinforced by students in the current study. Educators in this study referred to ‘quality’ and ‘sustainability’, terms further supported by the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on education suggesting the need to support and sustain inclusive practices in the future. The school leader ‘re-imagined all learning areas’ including classroom décor in a collaborative consultation with teachers and architects, all of whom considered what ‘children like[d]’. Such a collaboratively informed approach has the potential for change to be sustainable in the future as an inclusive practice. Sustainability further supports an orientation towards future and in response to the past. Having taught and researched in schools in Central Greece and South Australia, the presenter will discuss findings of this study and their implications for students’ right to access and succeed in safe, inviting, multi-functional and diverse learning environments within global inclusive education initiatives.

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