Secondary School Teacher Attitudes towards Inclusive Education in Australia and China

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) is underpinned by the provision of quality inclusive education for all young persons, including persons with disabilities. Yet developing inclusive education contexts continues to be profoundly challenging across all nations. Teacher attitudes continue to be the most critical construct in efforts to build inclusive educational contexts. Understanding teacher attitudes towards inclusive education using a positive paradigm is urgently needed in developing ways to provide quality inclusive education programs to all students. This study utilised a survey in the form of a web-based questionnaire to examine 120 Australian and 143 Chinese secondary school teacher attitudes towards inclusive education using the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. The modified Teacher’s Attitudes towards Inclusive Education Scale (TAIS) and the self-designed UDL Framework Scale were adopted for the purpose of this study. Independent samples t-tests were utilised to identify the differences in attitudes of Australian and Chinese teachers towards inclusive education, including the UDL framework. Multiple regressions were used to determine whether statistically significant relationships existed between specific demographic variables (i.e., gender, years of teaching experience, and country) and respondent attitudes towards inclusive education. The main results revealed that Australian teachers showed more positive attitudes towards inclusive education than Chinese teachers. The researcher also highlighted the necessity for studies that analyse teacher attitudes towards inclusive education using an inclusive pedagogical framework, where the UDL framework is a suitable choice for this purpose