Inclusive education is widely accepted as a useful policy to promote the participation of all students in regular classrooms (Ainscow & Miles, 2009; Ainscow & Sandill, 2010). At the heart of the implementation of inclusive education is the creation of a conducive school environment where all students, regardless of their ethnicity, ability and race, could participate and develop their innate potentials (Eman et al., 2022; Sharma et al., 2022). This suggests that schools will be responsive to the needs of all students as part of an effort towards promoting the participation of all students in regular classrooms (Sharma et al., 2022). Indeed, there is recent interest in understanding the nature and creation of inclusive school climate and its ability to enhance the participation of all students (Eman et al., 2022). In this study, school climate was operationalized as effective support by teachers, effective participation of students in lessons and healthy peer relationship. However, in Asian contexts, there is limited exploration of the inclusive school climate especially from the perspectives of parents who are important stakeholders in the implementation of inclusive education. In Asian contexts, parents raising children with disabilities have reported challenges pertaining to the implementation of inclusive education (Sharma et al., 2013; Singal, 2019). In order to advance practices, there is the need to understand the school climate and its suitability for enactment of inclusive education for children with disabilities. The overarching aim of this study was to explore the extent and comparison of inclusive school climate across the three countries. A total of 684 parents raising children with disabilities were recruited from three Asian countries: China (n = 372), India (n = 60) and United Arab Emirates (n = 252). The parents completed the Parental Perception of Inclusion Climate Scale (Sharma et al., 2022) which was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis to understand the underlying factor structure in an Asian context. The study has the potential to generate useful information about the nature of school climate for inclusive education in Asia as well as offer useful directions to policymakers.

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