Assessment of Inclusive Practices in Educational Institutions

The development of tools for measuring and evaluating the inclusiveness of educational environments is currently regarded as an important educational and social objective in the Republic of Belarus. In this regard, particular attention is given to the creation of a system of criteria and indicators for assessing the implementation of the principle of inclusion in education and determining the inclusion index. The purpose of the article is to present the developed toolkit for assessing the inclusion index in education and to describe the results of its approbation. Monitoring served as the methodological basis of the study.

Data were gathered from 1,116 educational institutions operating in different regions of the Republic of Belarus, including the city of Minsk. The study covered both urban and rural preschool and general secondary education institutions. Four respondent groups participated in the monitoring process within each educational institution: administrators, teaching staff, parents (legal representatives) of typically developing children, and parents (legal representatives) of children with special psychophysical development needs.

The composition of respondent groups was determined by the objectives of the study and the need to obtain comprehensive and objective data. A total of 53,092 responses were analyzed. The study was conducted in 2024. The article focuses on the assessment of the “Inclusive Practice” marker as a component of the educational institution inclusion index, demonstrates the possibilities of applying the proposed toolkit for analyzing the inclusiveness of educational environments, presents the results of the empirical study, and identifies directions for further research in this field. The findings presented in the article may contribute to the development of national approaches to monitoring inclusion processes in educational institutions in the Republic of Belarus.

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