Inclusive education (IE) has become a central policy objective across education systems worldwide. The adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) marked a decisive step towards legally binding commitments to IE at all levels (United Nations, 2006). This development builds on earlier international frameworks, notably the Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994), which positioned IE as a normative ideal. UNESCO later reinforced this by defining IE as a systemic effort to remove barriers to participation and learning. Together, these frameworks underpin an international policy agenda that has been unevenly implemented in national reforms across Europe and beyond.

Despite this strong international consensus, comparative research shows that the systemic realisation of IE remains uneven. Many countries continue to operate hybrid systems in which inclusive ambitions coexist with long-standing segregated structures (Ainscow et al., 2019). This observation leads to the central research question guiding this workshop:

Which policy-level conditions enable inclusive education to move from a legal and normative commitment to a realised system-level outcome?

Theoretical framework

Within this research workshop, IE is approached primarily as a policy implementation challenge, rather than as a school-level or pedagogical issue. This perspective draws on classical yet enduring theories of top-down policy implementation, most notably the work of Mazmanian and Sabatier (1983), who identify a set of structural conditions that shape whether public policies achieve their intended outcomes. Their framework highlights the importance of clear policy objectives, coherent policy design, sufficient implementation capacity and long-term policy stability.

For the purpose of comparative international analysis, this workshop adapts the Mazmanian and Sabatier framework to the field of IE and operationalises it into five macro-level policy conditions:

1. Normative and legal anchoring of IE: the extent to which IE is explicitly embedded in binding legislation or regulatory frameworks as a guiding principle of the education system.
2. An explicit policy theory of inclusion: the presence of a clear causal logic explaining how policy measures are expected to lead to IE outcomes.
3. Instrumental and organisational coherence: the degree to which policy instruments—such as funding mechanisms, support structures, regulations and accountability arrangements—are aligned to promote inclusion and discourage segregation.
4. Structural implementation capacity: the availability of stable professional, organisational and material resources to implement IE policies at system level.
5. Policy stability and priority over time: the extent to which inclusive education remains a sustained policy priority across political cycles.

Together, these conditions provide a theoretically grounded analytical lens for examining how IE policies are designed, implemented and sustained across different national and regional contexts.

Methodological approach and purpose

Methodologically, the workshop adopts a comparative configurational approach inspired by Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Ragin, 1987, 2008). QCA allows for the analysis of combinations of conditions, acknowledging that similar outcomes may be achieved through different pathways. The workshop applies a crisp-set logic, calibrating conditions as present (score=1) or absent (score=0). Given the use of five conditions in a crisp-set QCA design, a minimum of 17 cases is required to ensure sufficient configurational diversity for a meaningful comparative exercise.

IE is treated as a system-level outcome, defined in line with CRPD Article 24, which emphasises non-exclusion from mainstream education, participation in local communities, and the non-dominance of segregated educational pathways (United Nations, 2006).

In this workshop, participants are invited to represent their own national or regional education system and to reason explicitly from the legislative and policy framework that applies in their context. Through a structured calibration exercise (0 = absent, 1 = present), the workshop enables systematic comparison across European and international cases and is oriented towards collective knowledge production, including the development of a jointly authored comparative article.

This workshop adopts a comparative, theory-driven and configurational approach informed by crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Rihoux & Ragin, 2009). QCA is particularly suited to international education policy research, as it enables systematic comparison across a medium number of cases while accounting for configurations of conditions, equifinality, and contextual diversity (e.g., Van Mieghem et al., 2022). The analytical framework draws on top-down policy implementation theory, building on the classical yet enduring work of Mazmanian and Sabatier (1983). Their framework is adapted to IE and operationalised into five macro-level policy conditions that are theorised to shape the system-level realisation of IE: (1) normative and legal anchoring of IE, (2) an explicit policy theory of inclusion, (3) instrumental and organisational coherence, (4) structural implementation capacity, and (5) policy stability and priority over time. The workshop is explicitly designed as a collaborative research exercise. Participants are invited to represent their own national or regional education system and to analyse the implementation of IE from the perspective of the legislative and policy framework that applies in their context. Each country or region is treated as a single case. Using a structured calibration template, participants assign binary scores (0 = absent, 1 = present) to each policy condition and to the outcome variable, based on legislation, policy documents, evaluation reports, and established research. Clear definitions and decision rules are provided to ensure transparency and cross-national comparability. The outcome variable is defined as the system-level realisation of IE, drawing explicitly on Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). IE is conceptualised as a property of the education system as a whole, characterised by non-exclusion from mainstream education, participation in local communities, and the non-dominance of segregated educational pathways. For the comparative analysis, the calibrated data will be analysed using Tosmana, a software tool specifically designed for configurational comparative methods such as QCA (Cronqvist, 2019). Tosmana will be used to explore patterns of necessary and sufficient conditions and to identify recurring configurations across cases. The Flemish education system is introduced solely as an illustrative example of the calibration process. The workshop is exploratory and hypothesis-generating, and the collective calibration across approximately 17 national or regional cases will form the basis for subsequent comparative analysis and a jointly authored international publication.

This research workshop is expected to generate comparative, theory-informed insights into the policy conditions that enable or constrain the system-level realisation of IE. Rather than producing definitive causal claims, the workshop is explicitly exploratory and hypothesis-generating, focusing on recurring patterns and configurations across national and regional contexts. A key expected outcome is the identification of structural implementation bottlenecks that persist despite strong international commitments to IE. Comparative calibration across approximately 17 cases is expected to suggest that normative and legal anchoring alone may be insufficient to realise IE as a system outcome, particularly in the absence of coherent policy instruments and adequate implementation capacity. Preliminary insights from the illustrative Flemish case indicate that strong legal commitment and policy stability can coexist with limited implementation effectiveness, a pattern that may recur across other contexts. In addition, the configurational analysis is expected to reveal multiple pathways towards (or away from) IE, highlighting equifinality rather than a single optimal reform model. This challenges linear policy narratives and underscores the importance of context-sensitive policy design within a shared international rights-based framework. Finally, the workshop is expected to result in a shared comparative dataset and the establishment of an international research collaboration, providing the empirical basis for a jointly authored publication on inclusive education as a policy implementation challenge across Europe and beyond.

Ainscow, M., Slee, R., & Best, M. (2019). The Salamanca Statement: 25 years on. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23(7–8), 671–676. DOI:10.1080/13603116.2019.1622800. Cronqvist, L. (2019). TOSMANA: Tool for small-N analysis (Version 1.6) [Computer software]. http://www.tosmana.net Mazmanian, D. A., & Sabatier, P. A. (1983). Implementation and public policy. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. United Nations. (2006). Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. New York: United Nations. Rihoux, B., & Ragin, C. C. (Eds.). (2009). Configurational comparative methods: Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and related techniques (Vol. 51). Singapore: Sage. Van Mieghem, A., Verschueren, K., Donche, V., & Struyf, E. (2022). Leadership as a lever for inclusive education in Flanders: A multiple case study using qualitative comparative analysis. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 50(5), 871-888.