The way in which special education is conceived varies around the world, and pratice varies accordingly. One of the current debates concerns the concepts of mainstreaming, integration and inclusion - and whether these are in fact different concepts, or simply differnt terminology.
This book is based on the assumption that inclusive education is a necessary part of providing high quality education for all. Using international examples, it clarifies the rationale for inclusion and demonstrates how it can be put into practice.

It is now widely believed in many Western countries that the segregation of students with special educational needs is problematic, and that wherever possible these students should be educated alongside their peers in regular education settings. There has been a general move towards integrating special and regular education into one system that caters for a much wider range of students. But the outcomes in various countries have been very different. This book describes and evaluates these outcomes in the hope that teachers and other professionals may be able to profit from each other's experiences. The book provides both quantitative and qualitative information, analyzing the similarities and differences between integration practices in six Western countries: Italy, Denmark, Sweden, the United States, England and Wales, and the Netherlands. The editors discuss the factors that are critical to integration from a teacher perspective, and explore the aims and limitations of integration.

The way in which special education is conceived varies around the world, and pratice varies accordingly. One of the current debates concerns the concepts of mainstreaming, integration and inclusion - and whether these are in fact different concepts, or simply differnt terminology.
This book is based on the assumption that inclusive education is a necessary part of providing high quality education for all. Using international examples, it clarifies the rationale for inclusion and demonstrates how it can be put into practice.

This innovative collection combines research reviews in special education and an exploration of the findings from these reviews from practitioner and policy maker perspectives. It consists of five sets of papers, the first of which in each set presents a summary of a conventional research review, and the second - commonly produced in collaboration with teachers - translates the review findings into classroom and policy making implications. The first four sets of papers derive from work commissioned by the National Council for Special Education in Ireland. They deal with best practice and outcomes in the education of pupils who are deaf, visually impaired, on the autistic spectrum, or have emotional and behavioural difficulties. The fifth set is based on a review of explicit memory studies in populations with intellectual disabilities that was submitted to the European Journal of Special Needs Education. This direct pairing of technical and practitioner-oriented perspectives is relatively unusual, and the collection will be a useful addition to the literature for academics, practitioners and policy makers. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Special Needs Education.

How can ordinary schools cope with pupils with special needs? What must they do to move beyond the rhetoric of the integration to effective practical action? Seamus Hegarty aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the key issues in the UK. The National Curriculum, local management of schools, changes in teacher training, the role of parents - are discussed and related to day-to-day realities.