Abstract:
Bhutan aspires to provide education to all children including those with disabilities and special needs. Inclusive education is a new concept in Bhutan and efforts to include children with disabilities in mainstream education are in the beginning stage. The country has achieved considerable progress in strengthening the provision of education for children with disabilities in mainstream school since early 2000. However, inclusive education initiatives are offset by inadequate teacher preparation, lack of appropriate policy and legislation, lack of conceptual clarity in the understanding of inclusive education, lack of parental involvement and poor coordination among the stakeholders. This paper on “Attitudes of Bhutanese school leaders toward inclusive education in Bhutan” is part of a larger study that aimed at investigating and examining the attitudes of Bhutanese school leaders, teachers and past students with sensory impairment towards inclusive education. The study is the first large scale mixed methods study on inclusive education in Bhutan and has a huge potential to influence inclusive education development in Bhutan. A 6-point Likert-type scale survey and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from school leaders and teachers in 8 schools identified as Special Educational Needs Schools in Bhutan, and from past students with sensory impairments who had been to schools in Bhutan and are currently employed as civil servants. This paper will report the findings based on the interview data generated from the interview of 6 school leaders and the survey data completed online by 20 school leaders (including School Principals, Vice Principals, and Assistant Principals) via Qualtrics. The interview data is being analysed using thematic analysis. Initial coding of interview data was rated separately by four different individuals to check the inter-rater agreement and the degree of concordance among the different raters was very high. In addition, Leximancer text mining software is also being used to confirm the key themes generated through thematic analysis. The survey data is being analysed using SPSS.