Leadership for inclusive education: the case of Nepal

In Nepal, I witnessed many school-going people being disadvantaged in terms of educational opportunities. Despite my limited knowledge and skills, I joined the teaching profession at an early age. To address this issue, I undertook an in-depth study exploring leadership for inclusive education to answer four questions: how school leaders define inclusive education, what its barriers are, what the key aspects of leadership are, and what strategies schools are implementing to foster inclusive education. This exploratory and qualitative study is underpinned by a social constructionist epistemology. It needed to examine the life experiences of educators and students and wider institutional cultures because what they do and say is paramount (Bray, 2008; Hammersley, 2006). Therefore, the study has aspects of ethnography. It employs narrative and case study methods to collect qualitative data from 21 individual and semi-structured interviews and two focus group discussions with students to seek their experiences about the research topic. Findings indicated that complex, intertwined specific local factors, including a lack of clarity in inclusive education policies, contribute to educational disadvantage. This study found that schools are doing their best but have limited knowledge and skills in educating everyone, which requires immediate intervention. Findings also indicated inconsistency in the understanding and deployment of inclusive education, even within the same school. This impacts how it is fostered. Unlike other studies that focused on specific groups and children, this study focused on educating a diverse group of secondary school levels. Similarly, this study found that the primacy of leadership in promoting inclusive education in schools prioritises the role of cultural transformation. Therefore, this study has opened possibilities for further research, such as dimensions of inclusive leadership, strategic differences in educating different age groups, and inclusive education policy and programme design.