Providing Inclusive Primary School Education for Children with Special Educational Needs in Wartime Ukraine: Challenges and Current Solutions

Abstract

Since 2011 primary school students with special educational needs (SEN) in Ukraine have been allowed to study alongside mainstream students in the inclusive education program established by the Ministry of Education and Science. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 challenged the possibility of maintaining inclusive education for children with SEN, which required providers to find new solutions. This paper focuses on the first response of inclusion providers in the Ukrainian primary school education system to the challenges of working in wartime from February to May 2022, using teachers in the city of Kryvyi Rih as a case study. A quasi-experimental study (n=495) involved a group of inclusion providers (n=92) in comparison to mainstream primary school teachers (n=403). The research included: collecting data on the professional qualifications and experience of the teachers; questions on changes in the educational process and the number of students; the Psychological Stress Measure; Oldenburg Burnout Inventory; Brief Resilience Scale; and Miroshnyk Teacher’s Roles Self-Assessment Scale (MiTeRoSA), designed as an online survey. The inclusion providers faced numerous challenges due to the war, namely, (a) the enormous workload of preparing for classes (^*=8.7, p