What About Inclusion in Germany? Joint Learning by Disabled Persons and Non-Disabled Persons Is a Matter of Social Responsibility

As a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Germany is committed to enabling broad participation by disabled children and adolescents in standard school education. ZEW educational economist Friedhelm Pfeiffer discusses the benefits and risks associated with this goal.

PD Dr. Friedhelm Pfeifer is a senior researcher at ZEW and a lecturer at the University of Mannheim, Department of Law and Economics. His research interests include the causes and economic consequences of investments in education for individual and economic development as well as the evaluation of labour market and educational policy measures. As member of the Mannheim educational advisory board, Friedhelm Pfeiffer advises the city of Mannheim on educational issues. In addition, he is a member of the educational economics committee at the Verein für Socialpolitik.

In the past few months, Germany has witnessed a vigorous debate about inclusion. What is the problem?

School inclusion is intended to give all children and adolescents, including those with disabilities, the opportunity of participation in the highest possible quality educational services in the community. Nobody should be excluded. In fact, this is a worthy societal objective. It essentially seeks to take these two worlds, regular schools and special schools for children with disabilities, which are currently separated both spatially and institutionally in Germany, and to unite or at least realign them.

So the problem is not particularly about the objective. Participation has long been a major priority in educational policy. However, the debate about inclusion has made it clear that there are quite different notions about how to practically implement participation in the highly differentiated German educational system, and how to define disability.

What competing notions are there about appropriate support for children with disabilities?

On the one hand, we have our current highly differentiated system for educating disabled children, with specific support adapted to individual learning needs within a community of students with similar disabilities. It is a critical necessity in this respect to define exactly what constitutes a disability and from what degree of disability on considering special schooling seems appropriate. From a scientific perspective, such determinations are never completely free from errors of judgement and bias.

On the other hand, there is the notion of inclusion – that is, the idea that disabled persons should be able to participate in instruction as part of a classroom community that includes all young people, regardless of their individual needs. However, it may be difficult or even impossible for students with certain kinds of disabilities to keep up with conventional instruction in such a classroom community.   

How widespread is school inclusion at this time?

In terms of inclusion at schools, Germany still has a long way to go. According to the recent education report, only about 28 per cent of all students with disabilities are enrolled in schools where non-disabled students are also taught. Conversely, 77 per cent of all students without handicaps are learning exclusively in schools without any disabled students.

Students with a handicap are currently distributed across nearly 3,300 special schools (approximately one out of every ten schools), and eight different kinds of special schools have been developed to address specific special educational needs. In these special schools, a teacher is responsible for 5.5 students on average, often throughout the school day. In mainstream schools as a whole, the ratio of students to teachers is 14.3 students per teacher.  

Given such different needs for assistance, can regular schools provide joint education for non-disabled and disabled students?

The answer largely depends on how this inclusion is organised. It will be crucial to discover forms of instruction and accompanying measures in daily school life that enable the participation of individuals with disabilities, without compromising previous school performance. In this context, a major question is whether integrating special education into regular schools will require additional resources (that is, beyond the resources available for regular plus special schools), or if existing funds will be sufficient.

UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities came into effect in Germany in 2009. Among other things, the convention requires that all signatory states make major efforts in the school sector, to allow children with and without disabilities to be educated together in the future.