Parents’ Assessment of the Inclusive Educational Environment of the School and Their Participation in Its Creation

Abstract

The role of parents as participants in educational relations, and especially in the context of inclusive education, has attracted the attention of researchers for a long time, and this attention does not weaken, confirming the importance of this topic. In this work, we set ourselves the goal, based on monitoring data for 10 regions of Russia, to determine, on the one hand, the opinion of parents about the readiness of schools for inclusive education based on a number of indicators of the inclusive educational environment, and on the other hand, their participation in various forms of work offered by schools. The sample was randomly formed by strata (selection of regions, selection of schools, selection of parents). The total sample size was 121,364 parents from 679 schools, where the proportion of parents of students with disabilities was 6,99% (8 478 respondents). For data processing, a random sample (10% of the total number) was formed and used for frequency and correlation analysis. A frequency analysis of parents’ opinions on various aspects of a school’s readiness for inclusion revealed three groups of characteristics of an inclusive educational environment, differing in levels of readiness: the first concerns the professional level of teachers and support specialists, the second concerns the relationships between teachers and students, as well as between students, the third concerns the general material and technical equipment of schools, materials, textbooks and educational equipment adapted for children with disabilities, as well as the adaptability of the school space and its territory. The frequency analysis is confirmed by the results of correlation analysis: the characteristics included in one group showed a strong correlation with each other, and in different groups showed an average correlation. An important exception was the strong correlation between the level of professional readiness of teachers and the relations between teachers and students. Parents' participation in the forms of work offered by the school turned out to be significantly less than the perceived opportunities for participation, which confirms the hypothesis that there is a significant difference between the perceived opportunities for participation and the actual participation of parents in the forms of work offered by schools. This is consistent with the position that the key to attracting parents to participate in creating an inclusive educational environment is the connection between the conditions created by schools and the requests of parents as subjects of educational relations, their active position in supporting the efforts made by the school.