These facilities target the fight against educational vulnerability when they identify the accessibility of education systems as a mean allowing for combining performance and equity to combat social inequalities. For example, this may take the form of measures and initiatives targeting the most vulnerable populations and linking the accessibilization of school environments to the acquisition of a minimum base of learning, knowledge and skills that are socially and professionally capitalizable.
The aim of these facilities is to maximize the chances of academic and social success for all learners, regardless of their individual characteristics, when they make accessibility a vector for combating discrimination, and for preventing academic failure and dropping out of school. They consist of measures promoting an inclusive school that is concerned with giving concrete expression to the individual rights of students and associating the accessibilization of school environments to the promotion of each individual’s talents and his/her commitment to the educational processes that are made possible on a daily basis by the actions of “inclusive” teachers. These facilities tend to emphasize the early identification of factors hindering school performance and the well-being of pupils in order to avoid, a priori, recourse to special settings.
The institutional anchoring of accessibility is also inseparable from the existence of professionals who specialize in managing school diversity, such as special teachers, and, more generally, as shown by Plaisance (Chapter 7), from a new division of labor between the mainstream and the special provision. Reforms of the specialist provision undertaken by the countries in the European Union have gradually extended the provision’s aims to include all stakeholders involved in schools, over and above support for pupils in difficulty. They require the provision to contribute to the prevention of school failure through institutional accommodations and arrangements that complement the initiatives targeting students themselves. Before defining the conditions for a referral to a special setting, the provision is asked to act on school environments by supporting, for example, teachers or school heads to enable the school to put learner’s success at the heart of concerns (European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education 2019).
As Evans shows (Chapter 2), many OECD countries have linked their inclusive policies to the development of targeted facilities and resources to enable schools to make their educational environments more accessible. These resources may consist of financial incentives to offset the additional costs of educational differentiation and the diversification of modes of educational organization, such as the “model demonstration projects”1 developed in the United States or the “new strategic innovation fund”2 created by Ireland. They are methodological when they take the form of guides for good practice and one-off training activities for teachers; Norway, for example, has established psycho-educational support services to provide methodological support to schools. These resources consist of human support, especially when, as in Malta or the United Kingdom, coordinators specializing in the management and/or consideration of educational needs are responsible for supporting schools in defining and implementing policies aimed at making school environments more accessible. These human resources also target teachers by having special teachers supporting them, as is the case in Italy, in their efforts to personalize practices by advising them, for example, on the strategies that may be required in particular cases, or even by providing them with tools on which to base their work. Of course, they also address students with special educational needs through educational assistants intended to support them in the exercise of their profession as students, as is the case in France (OECD 1999; European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education 2013).
Moreover, the institutional anchoring of accessibility is inseparable from the use of tools and procedures intended to create a culture of success on the basis of empowering school actors to take responsibility for implementing inclusive education and of constantly improving the quality of practices. Above and beyond the adaptation of practices to presupposed needs, the imperative of accessibility finds its protective character in the empowering effect of the modes of pedagogical organization, that is, in the identity-related resources acquired by people to enable them to define themselves and act as actors capable of being the authors of their future and actively engage in educational processes (Rose and Meyer 2002). As a result, the concretization of the accessibility imperative is consubstantial with the mobilization of governance mechanisms and management tools from the business world in education systems, notably through the generalization of evaluative practices. The mobilization of such tools should make it possible to identify, as Evans shows (Chapter 2), the use of additional resources mobilized by education policies for learners with special educational needs. This is intended to provide information on the ability of education systems to make themselves universally accessible to the greatest number of students while being adapted to the particularities of each individual in order to satisfy the principle of equity without contravening the requirement of performance. The regular use of assessment tools and techniques, particularly when they include the specific dimensions of inclusive education, as in Italy, is intended to provide schools with indicators and procedures that encourage them to look inward and question their effectiveness in terms of educational success and well-being.
The generalization of evaluation practices has been accompanied by a change in perspective. As Mons points out (Chapter 3), evaluation methods go beyond the measurement and certification of student achievement; they focus on the ability of young people to mobilize the skills required to solve concrete problems in the context of lifelong learning and, correlatively, on the ability of school systems to develop human capital. These assessments provide information on school performance: they cover learning achievements (in mathematics, French, science, etc.), the level of schooling of pupils (including those with SEN), their progress and identify inequalities linked to the type of disability, social background or gender (Champeaux et al. 2019). In the cases of the United Kingdom and Poland, they assess the success rates of SEN learners compared to the overall school population and identify inequalities in this respect (Ebersold et al. 2010); they also describe, as in PISA, the obstacles to learning induced by teachers’ practices (OECD 2007).
Thus correlated with a dedicated institutional framework, the consecration of the imperative of accessibility contributes to the advent of a post-disciplinary school that reconfigures the symbolic order governing pedagogical activity, as well as the relations between the stakeholders involved. It contrasts the durability of the institution, historically anchored in political, economic and social struggles, with the ephemeral nature of learning organizations, aiming at making themselves accessible for all learners and making quality assurance a source of organizational and pedagogical dynamism, and a guarantee of performance and equity. It contrasts the school as a space for order and standardization with the school as a micro-society, defining itself as a space for personal and social development, supported by a management ideal claiming an ethical dimension, and making quality assurance a vector of social justice. It substitutes the figure of the pupil, who should be raised through a normative conception of pedagogy, with that of the learner, who should be actively involved in the processes and learning by differentiating practices (Ebersold 2017b).
I.3. An imperative subjected to orchestration by institutions
The second part of the book links the reinvention of the school to the advent of a collective imagination underpinning the implementation of the accessibility imperative to its orchestration by schools to combat institutional discrimination. Indeed, accessibility cannot be decreed. Its realization is a consequence of the way in which schools legitimize, on a daily basis, an institutional normativity to their school members, whose dynamics of change are based on taking into account
