Students with emotional and behavioural disability who receive their education in special settings often do not have access to the curriculum through evidence-based pedagogies, such as direct instruction, and instead complete packets of worksheets or participate in distance education. The current study was a collaborative action research project involving a special school for students with emotional disability and a local university to examine the effects of replacing online distance education with in-person direct instruction underpinned by Universal Design for Learning. Researchers sought to discover teacher and student perceptions of Universal Design for Learning, enablers and barriers to its implementation, and its effect on attendance and behaviour. Results suggested satisfaction on the part of both students and teachers and a positive effect of Universal Design for Learning on both attendance and behaviour.

In this study, we examined 535 primary classroom teachers’ causal attributions about challenging behaviour in West Bengal, India. The participants completed a questionnaire that collected information about their perceptions, causal attribution, and proposed strategies to address a range of challenging behaviours that were presented through five vignettes. The participants identified student-related and family-related factors as the main causes of challenging behaviour more frequently compared to teacher-related causes. They reported using proactive strategies more often than reactive strategies to address challenging behaviours in their classrooms. The findings provided insight into teachers’ causal attributions influencing their choice of classroom-management strategies, which helped to understand teaching practices and how they affect students. The implications of the study are presented to improve professional learning and practice for teachers and guide them to adopt strength-based strategies to address challenging behaviour in primary schools in West Bengal, India.

Support teachers are responsible for educating students with disabilities who have complex needs and require additional resources. Because of the highly stressful nature of the role, support teachers are at greater risk of professional burnout, higher attrition rates, and impacts on wellbeing. There is a distinct lack of Australian or state/territory empirical evidence on strategies to promote support teacher wellbeing. In this exploratory qualitative study, we applied thematic analysis to interviews of Tasmanian support teachers to find that their wellbeing relies on principals’ and leadership staff’s support and implementation of wellbeing and inclusive education practices. Support teachers are experiencing stress, anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and depression caused by workload, accountability for funding, and poor leadership. School leaders who value wellbeing and inclusive practices foster a positive culture, demonstrating ecological theory. This study marks an initial step towards understanding how to nurture the support teachers of Tasmania.

Inclusive education is enshrined in law and supported by the literature as best practice in education. Inclusive education has been shown to provide better academic, social and behavioural outcomes for children with disabilities than segregated learning environments. In the Northern Territory, Australia, however, the dual system of mainstream and special education persists and so too does segregation and exclusion. The Northern Territory education strategy commits to strengthening inclusion and empowering families in educational decision-making by listening to their voices. In this paper, we highlight some of these voices, examining the experiences and perspectives of caregivers of children with disabilities as they participate in education in the Northern Territory. Caregivers’ experiences were coded into categories of inclusion and exclusion. Those that were not clearly inclusion nor exclusion were identified and the theme of non-inclusion was created. Non-inclusion was analysed thematically and is discussed as a nebulous space that exists for caregivers, presenting significant challenges that threaten their child’s inclusion at school as they navigate this dual system. If Australian education systems are to provide genuine inclusive education, we need to understand the experiences of caregivers better so we can remediate the issues creating non-inclusion for children with disabilities and caregivers.

The purpose of this study was to systematically map and synthesise literature on interventions that promote the involvement of parents of school-aged children with disabilities in education. The study focused on peer-reviewed, primary intervention studies published in English between 2000 and 2021. Nine databases were searched, and 21 articles were identified and included in the review. The Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool was used to assess the quality of the included studies, and narrative analysis was used to synthesise the data. The duration of the interventions varied from 7 to 36 months. Most studies were conducted within the context of high-income countries and focused on parents of children with intellectual disabilities. Most studies reported positive effects on one or more groups: parents, children, schools, and communities. However, there was heterogeneity in the outcome measures used, which limits comparability across interventions. The quality assessment revealed high-/medium-bias risks in most articles. Future research should include higher quality studies driven by theoretical models. The results support the need for more research on parental involvement in the education of children with disabilities, especially intervention studies within the context of low- and medium-income countries.