Resource centers for educational inclusion in Spain: A profile of its normative development

Abstract

The advance of educative inclusion in virtually all over the world has led to the need of providing help through different services. It has also given a new role to special education centers, based on a double function: Attention of the students with severe and permanent special educational needs and their transformation into centers with resources to support the inclusive schools. This process, which was started in Warnock (1978) and was ratified by the UNESCO (1994) is now a trend in the majority of the European countries. Policy development and research in this field have been scarcer than in those derived from the inclusion itself. However, countries like the United Kingdom and Ireland stand out for their work. In Spain, the state legislation has followed the tendencies cited above since the early 1990s, but the research on the evolution and evaluation has not developed accordingly. With this research, we aim to study the current situation, especially in different autonomous communities, helping the current emerging Spanish research trends with it. In this study, we find different ways and degrees of development in the different communities; ranging from inactivity to intense advances in the last five years that might guide the different collectives involved in the inclusive education. We detected the necessity of boosting the normative development and enforcement, and the research on the key role that the special education centers can play in the inclusion.