In 1999, Cyprus Parliament passed legislation for the education of children with special needs. Cyprus was soon to discover, just like the US in 1975, the UK in 1981, Greece in 1981 and many other countries in the seventies and eighties, that the implementation of such a piece of radical legislation carries with it a number of old and new struggles. Little changed in terms of every day school practice. Or as Slee (2006, p. 112) puts it: ‘the special education fraternity considered its options, repainted the signs on the side of the bus and continued on largely unimpeded’. Moreover, ‘special education as a professional field experienced a real breakthrough and expansion’ (Vislie 2003, p. 20). Finally, in its implementation, ‘…integration did not have much focus on teaching and learning or on classroom processes.’ Preoccupied with structures and specialists, the integration policy ‘took for granted that reforms at the system level would have effect on teaching and learning as classroom practice.’ In other words ‘little or nothing was said about the quality of the integrated provision’ so all this change was not producing the required results in the regular classroom. Nor was it achieving effectively the improvement of education of pupils with special needs. In other countries the realization of this process necessitated a shift in terminology from integration to inclusion, although it is debatable whether this was followed by a shift in policy and practice. It is indeed clear from analyses such as Vislie’s (2003, p. 29) that ‘inclusion has not gained much ground in the western European region over the period … early to mid-late 1990’s’ and by comparison ‘special education has lost little ground’. Integrational legislation had been well established in these countries and educational segregation had long been under attack. Yet, we have ‘a reproduction of special education paradigms and rituals in regular classroom’. ‘The challenge for inclusion is to get free from the continuing focus on special education and become able to set its own agenda. Integration challenged the special education segregated practice by bringing new insights into the field, … by opening up for sociological critique for instance. If inclusive education is to advance, it will also have to lean on new insights. Vislie suggests that ‘the challenge is to join efforts with educationists working … on new educational paradigms in school policies and classroom practice’. Indeed, if Inclusive Education is to advance, we need to consider the very essence of democracy in education as being at the heart of inclusive education as a policy issue. The request is to offer all pupils access to a broad curriculum, which will enhance rather than diminish their educational and occupational choices and lead them to a life as varied as anybody else’s. This seems to me to have a good chance to materialize within a traditionally inclusive culture.

The paper is based on a research project carried out after an invitation from the Cyprus Minister of Education to evaluate the new integrational legislation 113(I)/99 which was first implemented in September 2001 in all the schools of the country. The project included a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, but only a part of the qualitative data will be presented here. The paper concenrates on the views of the education support staff employed by the ministry, which has been gathered through lengthy individual and group interviews. In a broadly ethnographic approach (Delamont 1992) the interviews were chosen in order to explore in detail the views of all types of support professionals involved in the implementation of the legislation, and to identify common goals and practices among them. It also aims to explore the philosophy and the motivation behind this practice and to explain the subsequent problematic current situation.

The paper concludes that: 1. The reality of integration is very different to the vision that brought the law about. 2. The problems arising are very similar to those faced before the law was enforced in terms of practice. 3. There are also new problems which have to do with the expansion of special education methods and staff within the mainstream system. 4. This is so because the emphasis has been –wrongly- placed on developing the special support rather than changing the regular classroom practice. 5. There are many reasons for this. One is that it is ultimately much much easier to do without disturbing the ‘regular’ routine of the school. 6. Another reason is because no-one, not even the decision makers who implement the legislation, has understood the philosophy behind the legislation, coming, as they do, from a special education background. There is also the possibility that some of them simply do not share it. 7. All this could have been avoided with careful ground preparation before hand. However, it is not too late to intervene now with corrective measures such as: intensive in-service training, curriculum differentiation and preparation of classroom material to support the regular classroom teacher.