From children to teachers with special needs

Inclusive education means that all pupils attend school in their locality. In The Netherlands various subsequent national education policies aimed towards this goal. These policies have however pursued an individual model of inclusive education, in which personal attributes taken to be special were the point of departure. The outcome has sooner been more exclusion than more inclusion. In this article we advocate that by re-designing education around handling diversity and so creating settings in which individual barriers to participation are absent, a social model of inclusion is better able to achieve true inclusion. A first significant step in moving away from individual towards the social shaping of inclusive education is to henceforth speak of teachers' special professional needs instead of pupils with special needs.