Is bilingual education inclusive? Analysis of the presence and support strategies for students with special educational needs

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. Our educational system faces two important challenges today, namely, an inclusive approach to education and fostering bilingual programmes within mainstream education. In Spain, research on the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN) has usually been carried out tangentially since it has been regarded as just one among a range of aspects subject to analysis within the scope of broader studies. Using a mixed methods approach with quantitative predominance, this paper seeks to study the implementation of bilingual programmes from an inclusive perspective, analysing the presence of SEN students as well as the support they receive or the reasons for their exclusion. METHOD. Out of a population of Primary and Secondary schools with a bilingual programme, information of both a quantitative and qualitative nature was collected through an ad hoc questionnaire that was addressed to their management teams, resulting in a sample of 48 schools. The categories drawn from the qualitative findings were obtained through an inductive process. RESULTS. Our results show that SEN students abandon the bilingual programmes in their transition to higher courses, that the support strategies are more common and inclusive at the Primary stage of Education than in Secondary Education, and that the difficulties of the students are generally claimed as reasons to justify their exclusion, while school management issues and educational practices are disregarded. DISCUSSION. We conclude discussing these results and highlighting the need to address inclusion taking into account both the actual teaching performance and pedagogical intervention in schools and the students’ limitations.