The education of children with special needs requires conscious and systematic work centred on the child or adolescents and their needs. The education of every individual is a fundamental human right. In secondary education, the goal of every individual is to obtain an education or a profession that opens up further educational or employment opportunities. In accordance with the law, students with special needs receive certain adaptations and/or additional professional support, depending on the programme in which they are enrolled, to ensure their successful completion of secondary education. The individualised educational programme (IEP) is a document and process that is critical to the successful education of students with special needs as it takes into account the unique needs, strengths and weaknesses of each individual. It is defined in the Act on the Guidance of Children with Special Needs (ZUOPP-1, 2011), which, although it does not provide a precise definition of the Individualised Educational Programme (IEP), outlines the basic legal framework for its elaboration and implementation. When implementing the IEP, all school professionals working with the students must work together, as it is a team effort. The quality of the IEP as a document and process also depends on how the professionals understand it, i.e. what the IEP means to them.
In the empirical part of this master's thesis, we analysed the perception of the IEP among secondary school professionals (counsellors, other support staff and teachers). Using a qualitative analysis of 296 responses from secondary school teachers and 54 responses from secondary school counsellors and other support staff collected as part of the national evaluation study "Identification of problems and good practises in the education of children with special needs with proposals for change" (2020–2022), we analysed the data on the definitions of the IEP. We investigated how school counsellors and other support staff, as well as teachers in secondary schools, perceive the IEP and which aspects they focus on most in their perceptions.
The results of the survey show that most secondary school teachers and counsellors and other support staff consider the IEP to be an important and useful document, while a minority consider it unnecessary and irrelevant. Their definitions mainly referred to the strengths of the IEP, although they also highlighted the weaknesses and challenges they face in preparing and implementing the programme. In their definitions, it was often mentioned that an IEP is helpful for all parties involved, both for the teachers and for the student with special needs and his/her parents. The notion of an IEP was also largely focused on content, especially adaptations and aids, cooperation and teamwork.
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