The Finnish Understanding of Special Education and Inclusion: Treating all Students as 'Special'

This study describes the Finnish understanding of special education in relation to the understanding expressed in Türkiye’s official documents and evaluates it through the concept of inclusion. The data of this basic interpretive qualitative study consist of three official documents from each country, at the level of a law, an implementing regulation and a teacher qualification document, and semi-structured interviews with three special education teachers, a school assistant, a principal and a school psychologist in Finland, coded on five criteria: who needs special education, who decides, where it is provided, who provides it and how that person is trained, and how it relates to mainstream education. The Finnish documents and interviews show that in the Finnish understanding the pupil who needs special education is any pupil who struggles at any moment, that the special education teacher employed in Finnish schools works as the teacher of every struggling pupil, and that support is provided within ordinary teaching in ways that avoid stigma, with decisions at the general support tier made collaboratively. The Turkish documents, the only Turkish data, tie special education to the individual diagnosed by an assessment board, to a teacher trained in a separate undergraduate programme and to regulated settings. The two understandings differ not in their commitment to inclusion but in whether special education begins before or after diagnosis; Finland pursues inclusion not by abolishing special education but by opening it to all students.