The topic about children with special needs and their acceptance by primary school staff seems important to me. All employees - teachers, principals, special educators and social workers - meet children with special needs, whose abilities are different, as well as the situations which employees find themselves in. In my dissertation, I research how employees accept children with special needs in primary schools. I focus on the employees’ opinions in the departments of lower education standard (hereinafter referred to as ONIS) and the departments of the special education programme (hereinafter PPVI) regarding inclusion, relationships, qualifications and their work. I believe that with the opinion or assessment given by the employees in the ONIS and PPVI departments, I can give the institution a comprehensive picture of their good practices and where we could further improve both individual employees’ and the entire institution’s well-being.
In the theoretical introduction, I present the literature on this topic. I dedicate myself to children with special needs, within which I define individual groups of children with certain specifics or deficits. I present the inclusion and integration of children with special needs. Next, I present how working with children with special needs affects their peers and what is the role and qualification of employees who work with such children. Finally, I present the aspect of social work as well. With the help of the empirical part of the paper, I conducted a research based on partially standardized interviews and qualitative data processing. The research involved 8 employees in the ONIS and PPVI departments, who in the 2019/2020 school year actively worked, taught and were in contact with children and other employees in the departments.
In the research, I found that the inclusion of children with special needs is good. However, the employees in the ONIS and PPVI departments estimate that as an institution in this area they could still do something. Employees help with inclusion in a variety of ways and say that successful inclusion requires a lot of effort. The staff of the ONIS and PPVI departments accept children well, and the relationship between them and the children with special needs is good. They also assess that the relationship between employees in the regular program departments and the children with special needs is satisfactory. Although exceptions are still present. Peer attitudes are both good and bad, but they are improving over the years. Qualification of the interviewees is good and constantly improves through various educations and reading literature. The institution could help them with various additional trainings and by inviting experts in this field. Interviewees describe the work as burdensome, difficult, but they enjoy it and find it challenging. My main suggestion is that employees continue to maintain the feeling for this work and relationship with children as I believe that this also encourages joy in children, learning and socializing with peers. However, more supervision would be needed at the school to help them cope with different situations.
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