'Inclusion' as an Educational Reform Project: fragmented policy discourses on 'difference' and limitations for realties of education?

This paper addresses the weaknesses of the 'inclusion' reform, increasingly launched in national systems of education in Europe, and questions whether inclusion as a project poses a real challenge to educational differentiation. Recent research proposes that although inclusion has had an impact on many educational systems in the States, Australia and Europe with, for example, the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation, and putting an emphasis on how schools respond to 'diversity', often the local interpretation of inclusion is evasive and has been reduced mainly to a change of language rather than of practice (Armstrong, Armstrong and Spandagou, 2011). This study suggests that part of the reason of this evasiveness of national 'inclusion' projects may lie in the fragmentation of the notion of 'difference' itself, rooted in and deeply influenced by national and regional political landscapes and agendas; educational institutional and social histories; market-driven management and logic of education; and pre-existing power relations with respect to social and political membership. Looking at two different national case-studies, located in Belgium and Switzerland, this paper explores the respective education policy discourses of 'inclusive education' and if/how 'difference' within these discourses is fragmented into three key areas of disability, cultural diversity and socio-economic background. These three aspects are 'problematised' in education discourses, (re-) triggering a national response which
ideas of International policies of 'inclusion' or 'integration'. This paper addresses the logic of pre-existing normative ideologies about what 'difference' constitutes, what 'needs' this incurs and what measures need to be taken.