Between inclusion and education standards

The focus of this volume

From an international perspective, national school systems have been significantly conditioned by two global trends since the end of the twentieth century. On the one hand, there is the movement towards an inclusive school system adapted to all pupils’ learning conditions, manifested, among others, by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006. On the other hand, there is the rapidly growing focus of school systems on standards and standard testing (Hamre, Morin, & Ydensen, 2018; Hopmann, 2007). The latter trend has resulted in increasing challenges for public education, where standards and standardisation have shifted the mass schooling project towards a strong emphasis on goal achievement for all students (Wermke et al., 2024). In this field of tension, one school profession, the profession of special educators (SEs), has been central, as it has traditionally had a special focus on those students for which the instruction in regular classrooms and the schools lack appropriate educational solutions. While much is known about how global trends have changed national school systems and teaching professions (cf. Wermke & Salokangas, 2021; Wahlström, Alvunger, & Wermke, 2018), we know little about how these trends have affected special education professions internationally (Cameron et al., 2018; Wermke, Höstfält, Krauskopf, & Adams Lyngbäck, 2020). The inclusion movement has led to a reduction in their traditional workplace and special schools, with the consequence that SEs now work much closer to regular teachers (Ainscow, 2016). At the same time, with an emphasis on achieving certain standards for as many students as possible, teachers in regular classes need more professional help to support all children to achieve the expected goals (Magnússon, 2015).

It is, therefore, not surprising that special education professions have grown in size and increased in relevance in many national school systems (Haustätter & Kuippis, 2015; Wermke, Höstfält & Magnússon, 2024). That is why knowledge about this profession in terms of its practices, its body of knowledge, and its intersection with other professions in the mass education project is greatly needed to further understand the complex relations within the school systems of the twenty-first century and contribute to a further development towards a genuine school for all (Ainscow, 2020). Moreover, even if the described trends are global, they do not form national school systems and professions in exactly the same way. How these trends affect national contexts depends heavily on context-specific particularities (Schulte & Wermke, 2019). The contexts for special education work can differ significantly both across time and space (Wermke et al., 2020), with a significant impact on the profession itself. Comparative studies of SEs in various systems will contribute to a further understanding of how SEs act within the nation-specific organisation of schools. Nation-specific differences thus become analytical devices that determine how certain professions take form in different contexts.

Against this backdrop, this book volume presents studies on the formation of special education professions since the 2000s in Germany and Sweden.

Due to significant similarities and differences between both school systems, a comparison of Swedish and German special education professions is especially interesting. Both national contexts share important similarities as democratic, Western and meritocratic school systems, and both aim to fulfil the UN CRPD to achieve a genuinely inclusive school for all. Historically, the education systems in Sweden and Germany have similar roots, but they have developed very differently over the recent decades (Wermke & Salokangas, Barow & Östlund, 2020). The Swedish comprehensive school system has for a long time been characterised by late differentiation and ambitions to reduce segregated provision of special educational support. In contrast, Germany has an early ability-tracked school with a highly developed special school system. We restrain our focus historically with empirical data, starting from the 2000s. Since this time, the mentioned megatrends, inclusion and education standards have gained strong power globally. We are consequently interested in how the historically emerged professions responsible for pupils with disabilities have been formed in the most recent 25 years. However, we still provide an even longer historical background, as it is needed to understand the recent dynamics of the special education professions.

This volume has an explicit theoretical interest. We want to understand the nature of special educators (SEs) as a school profession. By doing so, we want to theorise the various factors that impact SEs’ professionalism. A major premise for this ambition is that we understand education professions as embedded in education organisations, that is, school systems. We argue further that the profession-organisation interaction is also conditioned by context-specific particularities. Consequently, we investigate the hybridisation of bureaucratic standards in organisations, and professional norms and solutions. This is a significant contribution to the further development of theories of professions since most professions exert their occupation in large organisations in order to handle large groups of clients. SEs and teachers are as examples of this, as are doctors in hospitals, judges in courts, or officers in the army (Harris-Jenkins, 1970/2010). In addition, investigating the relation between how an occupation professionalises and how this process is conditioned by particular contextual particularities will further contribute to how we can understand professions, professionalism and professionalisation comparatively. This is particularly important in an era of frequent school system rankings and policy transfer between different countries (Hopmann, 2007). This volume reports the main results of a research project, which was financed by the Swedish Research Council between 2021 and 2024. In this project, the editors and authors of the book examined, in Germany and Sweden, the following aspects to gain further understanding of the nature of special education professions. We investigated (1) union journals’ descriptions of SE professions in Germany and Sweden from a historical perspective, (2) SEs’ perspectives on their practice in the nation-specific school systems and, finally, (3) special education students’ belief in inclusion and special education practice.

The volume is structured in three parts. Part I presents the background of our project, which concerns several dimensions. Both school systems are presented from a contemporary and historical perspective. We particularly focus on the dynamics of German and Swedish special education organisations and professions. Moreover, we present a review of international research on SE working conditions and professionalism, the projects’ methodological foundation and our theoretical vantage points. This first part is supposed to frame the empirical studies presented in Part II. For the sake of the volumes’ coherence, the empirical chapters build on the theoretical and methodological considerations, presented in part I. Therefore, they are rather descriptive and concentrate mainly on the empirical findings. This means that they comprise only brief former research and method sections. In this book, we employ the findings, presented in the empirical chapters, in a comprehensive theorising endeavour. This is done in Part III, which contains our discussion chapter in which we relate our theoretical starting and our empirical studies to each other.

International comparative studies indeed come with limitations. We focus here, first of all, on the interaction between nation-specific particularities, both from a historical and contemporary perspective, regarding the (re)formation of special education professions. Consequently, we cannot describe each case in all-encompassing detail. We are highly aware that there are significant differences between federal states in Germany and between municipalities in Sweden when it comes to the organisation of special educational needs. However, in this international comparison, we employ a more abstract perspective, which tries to build the study on what is seen as similar within a specific national case. In other words, we analytically assume the prototypical or collective existence of Swedish and German SEs, from which the individual SE in his or her specific context can deviate to a certain extent (Schulte & Wermke, 2019). The fact that there are differences of certain types between domestic and local contexts is part of the national conditions that are the focus of this comparison. Moreover, both education systems in focus experience a crisis regarding their schools in special education organisations. By citing Dostoyevsky’s Anna Karenina: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; hence, we argue that the type of crises experienced in the different systems are of explanatory value for our theorisation. Therefore, we do not evaluate whether Swedish or German organisation of special education is better or worse. Rather, we view them as path-dependent contextual solutions that have grown forth over time with particular consequences (ibid.).

Before we present each chapter, a brief discussion about terminology and translation must be conducted to eliminate misunderstandings. In particular, the historical chapter employs outdated terms and descriptions for people with identified special needs, such as ‘feeble-minded’, ‘dumb’, ‘deaf-mute’, and ‘idiots’, among others. From a contemporary perspective, these are considered deeply insulting and are thus only used as historically contextualised terms and not further commented on. We exemplify by showing the terminology of the time, and how societal perspectives on people with disabilities have changed. As this book is written for a present-day international audience, we will use the terminology ‘pupils in need of special educational support’, ‘pupils with disabilities’ rather than disabled pupils.