Sofii N. Organizational-Pedagogical Conditions of Integrated Support for Students with Special Educational Needs in the Inclusive Educational Settings

The thesis presents a new well-founded theoretical support for providing additional integrated support for students with special educational needs within inclusive educational setting. Together with a new presentation of the concept of inclusive education, the author provides analysis of resources existing in the national legislation and examples of the best international practices of providing such a support. Based on the mentioned above understanding of inclusive education, the author identifies different types of the models of providing additional integrated support to students with special educational needs as well as the main mechanisms of their realization. The models, identified by the author, reflect different types of the teams created to provide additional support for students with special educational needs at the level of child, family, classroom, school and local community. Considering described model of providing additional support and mechanisms of their realization, the author identifies the main competences of the key team members necessary to provide quality support as well as pedagogical-methodological instruments to measure the level of the development identified competencies, including teachers' self-assessment; observation of teachers' practices; analysis of inclusive school development plans developed based on the results of the schools' self-assessment activities; survey. When applied in practice, this toolkit helped to identify a number of tried-out organizational and pedagogical principles of providing the complex integrated support for students with special educational needs within inclusive educational environment and to check their effectiveness. These principles were identified, substantiated and tried out in practice, e.g.: appropriate competences of the main team members: teachers, teacher assistants, special education teachers; capacity of school directors to provide relevant information and training to all participants of educational process (teachers, parents, children, technical personnel); existence of institutional support, and active cooperation with local communities. Based on those factors the model of providing effective integrated support to students with special educational needs within inclusive educational settings was developed and substantiated. In this context, the promising area of further academic research seems to be the development of scientific and methodological approaches to ensure effective integrated support of students with special educational needs at the level of basic school and further training or independent living. This research contributes to the academic understanding of integrated support, its models and mechanisms of realization, the specific work performed by different team members in teaching students with special educational needs.