Special education adaptions in inclusive classrooms, manifested in Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), have been widely established as key instruments for supporting inclusive education across different national contexts. The IEP, in particular, is a legally mandated and pedagogically grounded instrument that is central to the education of students with special educational needs and is reflected internationally in inclusive education frameworks. It formalizes the right to individualized educational provision through collaborative planning among multiple stakeholders. Adaptations can include, for example, access to special resources, adapted assignments, support from a special educator, special seating arrangements, or extra time for examinations.

Previous research has shown that such recommendations are widely regarded as conceptually meaningful, yet their practical usefulness for teachers remains uneven, with recurring concerns related to clarity, feasibility, and alignment with everyday classroom practice (e.g. Bray & Russell, 2018; Rotter, 2014). The findings point to a fundamental tension at the heart of current IEP arrangements. On the one hand, IEPs seem to function reliably as legal artefacts of proof: they document entitlement to support, provide parents with a formal basis to claim services, and offer schools a defensible record of compliance. In this respect, IEPs are largely successful. On the other hand, they seem to fall short in fulfilling what they are also intended to stand for, namely, a pedagogically meaningful framework that guides instruction and supports students’ learning in practice. What is secured is the right to support, rather than a tool that reliably enables the kind of support teachers and students actually need. 

Against this background, the present survey study examines how classroom teachers in Germany and Sweden perceive the usefulness, implementation, and everyday relevance of special education adaptions in inclusive mainstream schooling. Particular attention is given to classroom teachers because they are responsible for implementing special education recommendations such as IEPs in everyday inclusive classroom practice, while their scope of responsibility and access to support remain ambiguously defined in the literature and the authors prior empirical findings (e.g. King et al., 2017; Kozi̇Koğlu & Albayrak, 2021; LeDoux et al., 2012; McKay et al., 2018; Rotter, 2014). At the same time, the ways in which teachers can access, interpret, and use IEPs are also shaped by national policy frameworks, school-level organizational arrangements, and professional traditions (e.g. Bray & Russell, 2018; Durmuş & Ergen, 2021; Rose et al., 2012; Timothy & Agbenyega, 2019). The study therefore adopts a functional comparative perspective by examining how similar pedagogical challenges related to the use of special education recommendations are addressed within different institutional contexts in Germany and Sweden. These two contexts are particularly interesting to compare because both countries have established systems of special education assessment and documentation while differing substantially in school structures, professional autonomy, inclusion practices, and support arrangements (Wermke & Beck, 2025). The differences and similarities enable exploring what different educational systems and organizational arrangements make of the same type of document, and how these conditions shape the ways IEPs are used, valued, and perceived in practice.

An online questionnaire was conducted with classroom teachers working in inclusive settings in Sweden and in two federal states in Germany, namely Baden-Württemberg and Berlin. Approximately 200 participants were reached in each country, resulting in a total sample of around 400 teachers. In Sweden, the survey was distributed via the internal Stockholm University server to classroom teachers working in comprehensive schools. In Germany, distribution was carried out with the approval of the Ministry of Education, which forwarded the questionnaire to schools of the same type. Berlin and Baden-Württemberg were selected to capture variation within the German sample, as the two federal states differ in school organization and approaches to inclusive education. At the same time, Sweden and Germany provide a particularly informative comparison because both have established procedures for special education assessment and documentation, while differing markedly in school structures, inclusion practices, and support systems. This combination allows the study to examine as mentioned above, how similar forms of special education recommendations are taken up under different institutional and organizational conditions. The questionnaire included items on teachers’ background, their practical experiences with special education recommendations, and their perceptions of the usefulness and implementation of such recommendations. It consisted primarily of closed-ended items measured on a six-point Likert scale and always included the response option “I don’t know” for reasons of validity and to account for differences between national contexts, as not all items could be perfectly aligned across countries. In addition, several open-ended questions were included to gain deeper insights into teachers’ experiences and to explore which types of support documents are perceived as more or less helpful in practice.

The preliminary findings indicate that the practical relevance of special education recommendations for teachers varies across school contexts. Their contribution to inclusive teaching is likely to be shaped not only by institutional frameworks, collaborative practices, and teachers’ professional capacity, but also by how access to IEPs is organized, by the type of information teachers receive (e.g., brief support lists versus more comprehensive diagnostic and pedagogical descriptions), and by whether the language and structure of the documents are understandable and workable in everyday practice (e.g., concise and pedagogically oriented versus overly technical, lengthy, or cumbersome). In this sense, the usefulness of IEPs is anticipated to depend on what teachers are able to interpret and enact in everyday classroom work, and under which organizational and professional conditions such interpretation becomes possible. Overall, the expected outcomes point to the need to understand special education recommendations not only as formal documents serving legal and accountability functions, but also as context-sensitive resources that support teachers’ instructional work and enable students to receive meaningful educational support. At the same time, the study is expected to prompt a critical examination of what an IEP document must accomplish in everyday school practice and how it can be designed to meet such demands under different institutional and organizational conditions.

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