Data as well as policy evaluation results indicate that the ratification of the CRPD – by Austria in 2007 and Germany in 2009 – can rarely make an impact on the implementation of the right to inclusive education in central European countries (EASNIE, 2020; KMK, 2022; Statistik Austria, 2022). A glance at the numbers shows that Germany represents the European average (7.02%) with 7.2% of students with SEN while Austria is below the average at 5.3%. This ranks both countries in the middle of the field regarding the percentage of students with SEN.

Like all European countries, Austria and Germany operate with assessment strategies to categorize students according to their abilities. The local school authorities organize the procedure to examine and assign eight to nine different SEN labels. A consistent and coherent examination strategy, nevertheless, is missing, but international classification systems like ICD-10 guide the diagnostic procedure (Buchner & Proyer, 2020; Gasterstädt et al., 2021). Thus, the organization of education and learning is shaped by traditional disability categories rather than an inclusive understanding guided by fostering participation, empowerment, and self-determination (Florian, 2014; Prengel, 2022). Based on an inclusive understanding, scholars and practitioners proclaim the organization of assessments that consider environmental factors, are conducted by multi-professional teams, and include inclusive classifications like ICF (Moretti et al., 2012; Sanches-Ferreira et al., 2014). This requires shifting the focus from diagnostics to pedagogics and thus administration with bottom-up rather than top-down approaches.

It results in the trilemmatic situation of administrating (inclusive) education regarding (1) the impact of (inter)national policies, (2) the bureaucratically top-down SEN assessment systems, and (3) attempts for inclusive bottom-up practices on the ground. This leads to the following question: What aspects constitute the research field of educational administration and inclusion in school education?

The paper contributes to the scientific debate on policy-making to implement inclusion in school education with a special focus on the role of educational administration in fostering social inclusion and diversity.

The paper presents the central parts of my Ph.D. desk research consisting of a Systematic Narrative Literature Review (SNRL). The research field of inclusive education and its nexus to educational administration has rarely been researched so far. Thus, the SNLR as an innovative method in educational research combines a traditional systematic approach with a snowballing strategy (Baumeister & Leary, 1997; Halász, 2019). It aims to map the research field of inclusion in school education and educational administration rather than limiting it to one specific aspect. The methodological focus of the SNLR helps to identify the theoretical implications and narratives that shape the highly interdisciplinary research topic. For the first research cycle, I used the three databases [Scopus, Jstor, and FIS Bildung] to start the review procedure with the following keywords »inclusive education OR inclusion OR special education«. The entry of »AND primary school OR secondary school OR school system« narrowed down the area of education. The terms »organizational education OR organisation OR administration OR bureaucracy ” finalized the search strategy intending to review the nexus of inclusion and educational administration across all school system levels. The German database was fed with the equivalent terms “Inklusion”, “Schule”, “Organisation”, “Administration” and “Bürokratie”. The search presented 292 papers. Following the research purpose, the selection criteria included a) English or German language, b) publishing date < 2007, c) theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches on inclusion in school education and educational administration, and d) abstract. 57 papers met the inclusion criteria and were scanned by their abstract and full availability. Then, nine papers suit the research purpose. The second research cycle switched to snowballing to identify further literature, which was not considered by the first cycle because the SNLR is not limited to scientific literature but includes working papers, grey literature, etc. (Boyle et al., 2014). 105 documents expanded the literature corpus and finally included 114 relevant pieces.

The results show that the research activities in the field of inclusion in school education and educational administration are very promising in terms of understanding the implementation of inclusion holistically. The SNRL revealed three main narratives: the policy narrative, the steering narrative, and the assessment narrative. All narratives vary from different ontological, epistemological, and methodological origins. They reveal different (practical) approaches with overlapping top-down and bottom-up characteristics to implement inclusion on the ground. The SNLR pictures the interplay of politics and individuals as key for successful implementation. All three narratives appear in the Austrian and German school context and describe the systematical interplay between education policies and the individuals’ practices to implement inclusion on the ground. The second narrative referred to as the steering narrative can be defined as predominately in Austria and Germany. Thereby, the Special Educational Needs Assessment constitutes the governance of inclusive education. The administration of inclusion seems to have pure steering characteristics rather than explicit pedagogical implications for students´ education and learning processes as the assessment narratives promote. The underresearched policy narrative points to the relevance of education policies and their impact but also their reproduction on the ground. As the systematical interplay between education policies and individual practices seems to be key for the implementation of inclusion on the ground, the talk shed light on the policy narrative. Using a traditional systematic review approach emerged as insufficient due to the little high-impact research and resulting from the gap in the research topic of inclusion in school education and educational administration. Thus, the extension towards an SNRL proved to be a suitable method for an overview of a wide range of interdisciplinary research.

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