Effective funding mechanisms can be an incentive for inclusive education. They can promote capacity building and empower stakeholders to develop innovative and flexible mainstream learning environments for all learners.

Funding mechanisms can act as an incentive for segregation and exclusion when teaching and support in mainstream settings is seen as inadequate for meeting learners’ needs. This may lead stakeholders to perceive that special settings (i.e. separate schools and classes) provide better educational support for some learners. The policy goals linked to this issue are:

Flexible financing systems must ensure a school development approach. This approach should build learning communities through the development of innovative and flexible forms of teaching that combine performance and equity.

Financing mechanisms that act as a disincentive for inclusive education are to be avoided. The main message underpinning this issue is supporting school teams to take responsibility for meeting all learners’ needs. The policy goals linked to this issue are:

Exclusionary strategies that deny learners their right to education and inclusive education, and/or unnecessarily label learners as requiring an official decision of special educational needs should be prevented.

These strategies may exclude learners from education, from participation in inclusive education, or from engagement in meaningful learning opportunities. Such strategies are often linked to the over-identification of learners who require an official decision of special educational needs and, consequently, to increasing expenditure related to segregation and/or individual learner support and provision. The main message underpinning this issue is the need to finance strategies that lead to educational inclusion, not exclusion. The policy goals linked to this issue are:

Process factors close to children’s everyday life in early childhood education have the greatest impact on the quality of children’s experience and outcomes.

The Inclusive Early Childhood Education (IECE) project found that process factors that have a great impact on the quality of children’s experience include relationships, interaction between children and adults in pre-school and between the children, play, forms of learning and participation.

Project findings and recommendations from the Inclusive Early Childhood Education project can be found in a series of outputs.

The positive benefits of early childhood education directly relate to and depend upon high-quality structural and process elements, such as funding and parental involvement.

The Inclusive Early Childhood Education (IECE) project found that although there are cultural and societal differences in the perspectives on quality in early childhood education, the dimensions of high-quality probably share enough features to assert that the general dimensions of high-quality are universal.

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