Translating inclusion in French-speaking Belgian school organizations

This paper looks at how special needs education and regular schooling are two parallel structures in French-speaking Belgian school organizations, which are fundamentally challenged by the introduction of inclusion policy. The policy implementation of “reasonable adjustments”, a recent education inclusion policy that requires regular school and school governance to accommodate students with special needs, places the responsibility on several key actors, who become important gatekeepers in the process of enabling educational access (Charlier et al., 2019) and opportunities to students with special educational needs (Verhoeven & Dubois-Shaik, 2020). These actors are required to make decisions about whether a child or adolescent should be schooled in regular school, or should be put into a special needs school, a system that is identified by education research studies as reducing educational and professional opportunities for students (Dubois-Shaik & Dupriez, 2015). This paper tries to reveal through discursive policy and narrative analysis (Czarniawska, 2004), how the inclusion policy implementation is translated (Callon, 1987; Dubois & Vranken, 2012) in what is a highly sensitive field of negotiations and of decision-making in school organizations. These negotiations take place in what we identify in this paper as a soft (Lawn, 2009) ‘compensatory policy approach’, whereby existing structures, such as special needs schools, are maintained by education policy-makers for lack of financial, training-based and operational measures, but requiring from actors in regular schooling to accommodate needs and create educational equality.