EASNIE has held the second in a series of webinars as part of the ‘Fostering Inclusive Quality Education in Finland and Ireland’ Technical Support Instrument (TSI) project. The webinars explore the foundational concepts of inclusive education.
Over 70 participants attended the second webinar on 30 September, which focused on resource allocation and use at school and regional levels.
The webinar began with a keynote speech from Dr Simoni Symeonidou of the University of Cyprus, who highlighted ways to improve human resources for inclusive education, such as developing co-teaching and universal design for learning methods. She outlined current approaches in Finland and Ireland and recommended methods to promote inclusive education in both countries, such as re-allocating resources to ensure a whole-school approach to education, rather than funding specific needs.
A thematic panel session followed, titled ‘Resourcing inclusive education: From whole-school approaches to regional resource centres’. The session included two presentations:
In ‘A whole-school response to inclusive education in Ireland’, Joe Travers, Director of the Centre for Inclusive Pedagogy at Dublin City University, Ireland, suggested solutions to segregated policies and resource allocation that limit inclusive education. These included shifting specialist resources to enable shared spaces and collaboration between teachers from both mainstream and special education as the norm.
Next, Liisa Pentikäinen and Sanna Komu from the Valteri Centre for Learning in Finland discussed Valteri’s role in supporting inclusive education in Finland. The speakers described how Finland has moved to a more inclusive system of resource allocation which relies less on learner diagnosis and assessment. As part of this change, Valteri is working to develop ‘communal schools’, where human resources and expertise are shared across a community through teacher training and co-operation with schools.
The TSI project team will use the insights and reflections from the webinar in developing strategies and roadmaps for Finland and Ireland.
All the webinar presentations are available to watch on the Multimedia page. A third webinar on collaborative working will take place on 23 October.
Read about the first webinar in the series, ‘Inclusive and special education – same or different?’.