Conference Agenda

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.