Equal Opportunities in an Inclusive and Sustainable Education System: An Explanatory Model

Marta Medina-García,Lina Higueras-Rodríguez,Luis Doña-Toledo

doi:10.3390/su12114626

Marta Medina-García, Lina Higueras-Rodríguez + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114626

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Jun 5, 2020
Citations: 14	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Almería, University of Granada

Abstract

Equal opportunities is an objective to be achieved in a sustainable society, as formulated by various sustainable development objectives. Inclusive education refers to the right of all people to education, guaranteeing the presence, participation, and progress of all students and, above all, equal opportunities. However, today, it is a dual and controversial issue, as it appears among the strategies and objectives planned at international and European levels, but its application and real development is still far from being a right with guarantees. Moreover, the concept of integration remains in most areas and many education policies. Therefore, the objective of this work is to establish which integration and inclusion measures favor equal opportunities. The study offers, as a major novelty, the results of empirical research, which provides a scientific framework to this process of equal opportunities. It is approached from the perspective of teaching staff with a sample of 133 professionals. The results are analyzed through factorial analysis and multiple linear regression. The results show that the aspects related to inclusion (measures of attention to diversity, high knowledge about inclusion, and adapting the system to inclusion) have a significant positive effect. The integration of students reduces equal opportunities in a statistically significant way. The results are of interest for educational policies and for decision-making and strategies to achieve sustainability and inclusion in the school environment.

Highlights

When analyzing the aspects that the international community gathers regarding the right to education, we can verify that they contemplate or are limited to the formal aspects referred to educational centers, teachers and students, but they offer content and regulations concerning equal opportunities [1]
If we focus on the approach based on addressing needs, Parrilla [8] considers that, in integration, the needs are those of the students and a set of actions is adopted to address them and ensure that they are adapted to an ordinary school, quite the opposite of the inclusive approach
In order to understand and compare how the dimensions included in the questionnaire were structured, an exploratory factorial analysis was carried out to understand how the items related to educational inclusion behaved (40 total)

Summary

Introduction

When analyzing the aspects that the international community gathers regarding the right to education, we can verify that they contemplate or are limited to the formal aspects referred to educational centers, teachers and students, but they offer content and regulations concerning equal opportunities [1]. These are reflected in documents of international community (United Nations Human Rights and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), such as the International Convention on the Rights of the Child [2], the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities [3] and its subsequent 2016 report, and even in Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), which supports the guiding principles of the World Education Agenda 2030. It is necessary for the education system to offer equal opportunities to all children, no matter what the differences between them are

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