Safe Enough to Belong: Examining the School Safety Experiences of Students with Disabilities Through a Leadership Accountability Lens

This phenomenological study examined how students with disabilities and school personnel experience and locate responsibility for safety within four Beijing mainstream schools implementing suiban jiudu placement. Interviews with 22 students and 12 personnel revealed that disability-based exclusion is rarely recognized as a safety concern, and that formal accountability pathways diverge from practiced reality: responsibility for safety incidents devolved onto part-time resource teachers lacking formal authority or time. Findings extend distributed leadership theory by showing how safety accountability, though formally assigned, becomes diffused across roles never designed to coordinate, leaving students’ protection dependent on informal, under-resourced relationships rather than institutional design.