Munich (dpa/lby) - According to the Bavarian Teachers' Association (BLLV), teachers feel left alone when it comes to including people with disabilities. The BLLV refers to a survey of 695 teachers on everyday school life, as the association announced on Monday. "Today, inclusion is only kept alive through the commitment and pedagogical idealism of teachers," said the chairwoman of the BLLV, Simone Fleischmann. Inclusion should not be a "savings model", she said to the Bavarian Ministry of Education.
According to the BLLV, 97 percent of the teachers surveyed believe that inclusion cannot be implemented under the current framework conditions. The teachers only felt supported by school support, colleagues and school advice on site. Above all, however, there is a lack of staff, good training opportunities and time.
According to the survey, pupils with special needs are also hardly taken into account in class formation. Inclusive classes are usually as big as non-inclusive ones. Teachers would then no longer have time to devote themselves to the individual children in need of support. In addition, the teachers have hardly any opportunities for further training. "Of course there is further training and support systems, but only in homeopathic doses," emphasized Fritz Schäffer, head of the association's school and education policy department.
The BLLV therefore demands that children with special needs be counted three times when budgeting and allocating hours at schools. This would make classes for children with special needs smaller. This would give the teachers more time to support these children according to their needs. In the opinion of the BLLV, there must also be more training opportunities, more teacher hours and hours for special educators at schools who are committed to inclusion.
The Free State has provided around 1100 new jobs for the implementation of inclusion since 2011, the Bavarian Ministry of Education announced. A large proportion of these positions are filled by special education teachers or teachers supporting individual inclusion. The topic of inclusion is also an integral part of teacher training.
