The quality of inclusive education for students with disabilities in the primary school and the secondary school

Abstract

The inclusive education, which actually presents complex determination, whose essence is equality and equal opportunities, and smaller exclusion within the educational system, is a challenge that the Republic of Macedonia strives to overcome. This determination, by itself, offers opportunities for the children with special educational needs to obtain education of equal quality as the other children, reasonable adaptation, support in satisfying specific needs and overcoming every obstacle. The subject of this research is an analysis of the quality of education of students with developmental disabilities included in Primary and High schools in the territory of the city of Skopje. The research included 102 respondents in total, divided into two groups. The first group consists of 51 teachers and members of professional associates from elementary schools, and second of the same number of teachers and members of professional associates from high schools. The results of this research clearly express the teachers’ attitude towards inclusive education (55,9% from total respondents confirmed their positive attitude). In primary schools, 80,4% of the respondents have declared that there are prejudices towards people with developmental disabilities, while in high schools, this percentage is 47,1%. The teachers from primary schools and those from high schools have different attitudes towards the inclusion of students with autism and intellectual disabilities in the same schools as the students without developmental disabilities. By analyzing the results of the research, we can conclude that while both groups strive towards positive attitudes about inclusion, a greater number of high school teachers have more favorable attitudes compared to teachers in elementary schools, despite the fact that they did not have training on inclusion (100%) and did not have experience in working with students with developmental disabilities (19,6%).