The actions regarding the diversity of educational politics are usually divided into three categories: social-economic circumstances, multiculturalism and disability.
In the past, this classification was due to a bureaucratic mentality coming from measures regarding only groups of certain kind of people and not for the whole society.
The consequences in the educational field have normally led to stigma instead of integration, causing uniform life situations (and not "normalized"). The starting problems are very different depending on the group we refer to. People with disabilities, facing social disadvantages, belonging to a minority or immigrants face difficulties with a common factor: the conceptual delimitations sometimes lead to the creation of different work fields but we need to try to deal globally with a phenomenon that is not only educational but affects the whole society. Inclusion demands the combination of administrative and social measures to ease the acceptance of any person in any situation in life.
The origins of inclusive school go back to international events such as Salamanca's Declaration (1994) and Dakar Agreement (2000) within the UNESCO's action framework Education for All. The macro educational research in this line have a start-up barrier. Katarina Tomasevski, UN special rapporteur on Right to Education, points out that the global statistics coming from prestigious studies such as OECD's Education at a Glance frequently do not reflect discrimination because it is internationally prohibited. So, most of the absentees and those who do not finish their studies are immigrants, disabled or belong to minorities. These are the main victims of "social exclusion” (Tomasevski, 2005:63).
Another problem is the lack of statistics about the failure to keep a good educational praxis in school or the lack, for example, of a research similar to PISA in order to assess the education of the disabled, those with social disadvantages or those living in multicultural contexts.
The goals of this research are, in the first place, to set the differences seen in the assistance provided to all groups in the selected countries by analyzing whether the policies are directed to the achievement of certain goals causing more or less exclusion; in the second place, to verify whether the actual results acknowledged in each country's statistics show those differences either among groups or, within one group, among the different countries.
Once the debate is focused on schools and disabled, immigrants and students belonging to ethnical or cultural minorities, we study the situation in Spain (since the authors of this paper are Spanish and want to improve its situation), Italy (a model in inclusive education) and Portugal and Greece (since the social situation in both countries is similar to the other two) during the first decade of the 21st century.