Time to stop polishing the brass on the Titanic: moving beyond ‘quick-and-dirty’ teacher education for inclusion, towards sustainable theories of change

Interest in inclusive education in the global south has grown significantly since the adoption of the Salamanca Statement in 1994. Increasingly, those who fund and provide education want to be seen taking action on inclusion generally and disability inclusion specifically. However, the much-welcomed enthusiasm to respond to global commitments is not always matched with the necessary expertise and commitment to longer-term action and change. The growth in inclusive education policies and pilot projects in the last decade is hard to miss, but changes resulting from these interventions are often less apparent. Why is that? Drawing on the Enabling Education Network’s 22 years of experience as a global inclusive education network and consultancy provider, we present alternative pathways for change in teacher education for inclusion. We stress that change in teaching practice remains limited not because inclusive education is a fundamentally flawed concept, but because too much focus is given to ‘quick-and-dirty’ trainings that quickly yield donorpleasing statistics and publicity-attracting case studies, but fail to elicit sufficiently extensive and sustainable change to education systems and cultures

The politics of early school leaving: how do the European Union and the Spanish educational authorities ‘frame’ the policy and formulate a ‘theory of change’

This article is an outcome of ABJOVES (Early school leaving in Spain. An analysis of young people's decisions, motivations and educational strategies)The article analyses the interaction between the European Commission and a sample of educational authorities in Spain with regard to the policy against early school leaving. Although this member state scores the highest proportion of early school leavers, apparently it is not adoptin some key recommendations issued by the Commission. In fact, while educational policy studies regret this "resistance", studies on EU policies suggest that the EU and the states normally negotiate the ambition and the evaluation of policies in complex ways. In this vein, the article draws on a method of discourse analysis to observe to what extent these educational authorities 'frame' the policy in the same terms and share a similar rationale or 'theory of change'. In brief, the findings point out that the EU, the Government of Spain and two significant regional governments retrieve a similar 'frame' but do not agree regarding the 'theory of change'