Our wish was to increase the skills of the participants in this project in the field of inclusive education. To do so, we identified three main objectives: - Discover or strengthen our knowledge of European education systems and more particularly better understand the inclusion of special needs students in mainstream education in Croatia. - Better understand how special needs are met by the educational institutions of the host country, what the ressources (human and material) are and what kind of training teaching staff get. We need to compare this with what is done in our academy in order to improve our teaching skills by observing working methods. - Discover new digital tools particularly adapted to specific education needs (connected objects, applications, interactive educational games) and assess their use in class, thus contributing to the technological development of our schools.
Our team consists of 2 primary schools and one secondary school located in a priority education zone, teaching a so-called underprivileged public. The inclusion of special needs students in mainstream schools is one of the measures aimed at reducing inequalities at school. The participants in this project hold different positions. As teachers, it is difficult to implement the inclusion of all pupils with special educational needs, within the same class, in a satisfactory way while managing different levels in the classroom. We lack the knowledge to better include these students, teach them and perhaps assess them differently, with the aim of reducing inequalities between students. As headteachers, we also encounter difficulties in liaising with parents about the provisions their children would need. We had, in a previous project, identified European partners and we were particularly interested in the transition from primary school to secondary school, which is much easier and more obvious in Croatia for example, since pupils attend the same school from the age of 7 to the age of 15.