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How are children with disabilities educated in Austria?

Girls and boys are educated in the same school. Children from Catholic or Protestant families share the same classroom with children from an Islamic background. - This is a situation we have become used to in Austrian schools. But what about children with a disability and those without in the same classroom?

Until two decades ago it was widely believed that disabled children and slow learners should not be educated together with other children of their age. Special schools were thought to offer everything that disabled children need: specially trained teachers, fewer classmates, special teaching material and adapted buildings.

It is about twenty years since parents and some enthusiastic teachers began to question this policy, because they felt that sending their children to a special school meant separating them socially from the other children of their age group. The solution was seen in the possibility of having their disabled child educated in the local primary schools in what have come to be called integrative classrooms.

In the eighties, various models of common education of disabled and non-disabled children were tested in so-called "school experiments". In the nineties, new legislation has been enforced, which has changed the situation completely in favour of the disabled children, so that now they do have a legal right of choice.

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