engleski

Feeling Welcome at School: An Insight into Predictors among School Practices and Policies

Following on Bartlett’s (2014) adaptation of Booth and Ainscow’s (2000) conceptualization of the Index for Inclusion, the presentation examines one of the crucial indicators of school inclusiveness – the question of whether children feel welcome at school. Its aim is to illustrate main conclusions deriving from the research on inclusive education in 7 Croatian schools included in the project “Regional Support for Inclusive Education in South East Europe”. The data was collected via survey that assessed pupils’ perception of inclusion within schools (N=690). The presentation focuses on single indicator revealing whether pupils feel welcome at school, using other indicators of inclusion policies and practices as predictors of the latter. The findings disclose that the average feeling of being welcome at school ranges between somewhat and much (M=3.58, SD=1.02). Pupils that attend VET schools have significantly (F=7.87, p<.05) lower average on this item than pupils in primary schools and gymnasia. Multiple regression analysis showed that indicators of inclusive practices and policies explain 42% of the variance in pupils’ feeling of being welcome (R=.646, p<.05). The items that show statistically significant associations with whether one feels welcome are those pertaining to other students/teachers being friendly, being involved in formulating rules, absence of bullying, being helped with problems by other students/teachers and perception of fair assessment. Conversely, the question of physical barriers and inclusiveness being (declaratively) important policy did not appear to correlate with whether an average pupil feels welcome in his/her school. The data reveals practices/ policies that contribute most to understanding of pupils’ feeling of being welcome at school and questions some factors usually seen as milestones of inclusiveness.

school inclusiveness; feeling welcome at school; inclusive practices and policies

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