David Towell comments on a just-published international study that seeks to explore this key question.
Author: David Towell
The global movement to develop educational systems that welcome diversity and enable all students to learn together in common learning environments is long-established. In Canada important innovations stretch back more than a half-Century and since the 1980s, New Brunswick in particular has been a pioneer of inclusive education at the level of the whole province. Indeed lessons from their experience were an important contribution to a now famous conference in Salamanca, Spain whose 30th anniversary was celebrated last year.
However even in Canada the journey to inclusion has been neither easy nor rapid. Reasons for this are complicated but to put it succinctly, it turns out that the widespread implementation of quality, equitable and inclusive education is a radical proposition requiring significant change in the whole system of education: accordingly it faces political, cultural, organisational and professional barriers that all need to be addressed to ensure success in the classroom. Effective strategies for achieving this transformation need to weave together several elements including new approaches to valuing diversity in the wider culture, fresh thinking about the purpose of education, more flexible curriculum and assessment processes, innovations in pedagogical practices and related teacher training, investment in enhanced classroom support and sustained leadership.
New Study: Current Roles of Support Teachers, Analysis of Their Contribution to Inclusive School: A Narrative Review by Lara Astudillo, Celicia Simon and Maria Luz M. Fernández Blásquez
The first take-away from this new study is simple: these factors are interdependent. Change in one element is likely to be ineffective unless it is integrated into this kind of systems thinking.
We come back to this point below.
As its title suggests, the study focuses in depth on what 'support teachers' do (and what they should do) to best promote inclusive cultures, policies and practices that enable every student to flourish. The three authors all work at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). Their method - narrative review - involves secondary analysis of 23 fairly recent research papers (selected from an initial trawl of 743 partly relevant articles) and drawn from fifteen, mostly higher income, countries.
Of course, even within countries and certainly across countries and languages, the same words - 'support teacher' - may have different meanings. (Not discussed here, some jurisdictions may use apparently similar words to mean something different: in the UK, education employs a lot of 'teaching assistants' to help out in the classroom but mostly these are not qualified teachers.) This study certainly has in mind qualified and experienced teachers.
The study seeks to clarify what 'support teacher' means by describing what they do in relation to three questions: what are their functions in regular schools; where are these functions undertaken and with whom? Analysis of the articles suggests most of what support teachers do can be understood in terms of four professional functions:
Looking across the 23 research papers, this review concludes that there is widespread confusion about the goals of support teacher work and how much time it is appropriate to devote to each of these functions. Insofar as there is a major focus, it is the first function, working with students experiencing difficulties, and much of this is done outside the regular classroom.
In evaluating these findings - indeed in addressing the normative question which provides the title for this commentary - the Spanish authors turn to New Brunswick experience. Every few years in the evolution of the inclusive education system in New Brunswick the Education Ministry has invested in high level reviews of progress. One of these, commissioned by Minister Jody Carr, was undertaken by Angela AuCoin and Gordon Porter near the start of the last decade. Its main conclusions are embedded in Policy 322 and subsequent implementation proposals.
Importantly, they also undertook a study of support teacher activity that suggested the need for much greater clarity in this role. The New Brunswick policies identify the core function of support teachers - requiring around 60% of their time - as providing direct support to classroom teachers in developing the instructional strategies needed to include diverse learners. (More on this on Inclusive Education Canada's new website The Source.)
Astudillo and colleagues commend this reconceptualisation of the support teacher role. Returning to my first takeaway above, making education fully inclusive requires that support teachers become important facilitators of transformational change with all members of the educational community, not least to establish the wider conditions required to enable effective classroom leadership.
The publisher is Citizen Network. Inclusive Schooling: What should Support Teachers do? © David Towell 2025.
education, Inclusion, Inclusive Education, England, Article
