Partnership between School and Parents - Reality or Illusion of Inclusive Education

This paper deals with the issue of partnership between the teachers in the first triad of the compulsory nine-year school and the parents whose children attend the mentioned cycle within the current education reform in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) with particular reference to the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton (HNC). The paper is based on a survey research (carried out at the end of 2009 and the first half of 2010) on attitudes of 571 parents from the FBiH and 145 from HNC, respectively, using a five-point Likert scale regarding 26 items. In both samples of parents - from the FBiH and HNC - so far there has been an evident negative attitude towards inclusive education, due to a lack of appropriate information, cooperation between relevant factors, readiness by schools (organisational, material issues) and teachers to carry out inclusive education tasks, its political background ("top-down" model), etc. Therefore an urgent need is arising among all relevant subjects to work in synergy in order to provide decent and quality inclusive education, taking into account the benefit of all the children/pupils in general.