The Current State of The Inclusive Educational Environment in Vocational Educational Institutions of Secondary Vocational Education: a Pilot Study

The paper presents the results of the monitoring study of inclusive educational environment in vocational educational institutions of secondary vocational education based on the developed monitoring program, which involved 10 pilot regions of the Russian Federation. The authors identified the components of inclusive educational environment: organizational and managerial, subject-spatial, programmatic and methodological, informational and social. The study involved three categories of respondents from 94 professional educational organizations: representatives of administration (n=94), teaching staff (n=2332) and students (n=19264), including students with disabilities (n=1208). The method of questioning was used, which was provided by AIS "Monitoring of the inclusive educational environment"; an index analysis of inclusiveness of the educational environment at the regional level and at the level of individual professional educational organizations was carried out. Monitoring allowed to identify resources and deficits in relation to the requirements for inclusive educational environment in professional educational organizations, including not only special educational conditions created for students with disabilities, but also providing opportunities for quality education for all students, taking into account a variety of special educational needs and individual opportunities. The results of the study highlighted a significant contradiction between the high satisfaction of all groups of respondents with the conditions of the educational environment and low values for many indicators within the components of the inclusive educational environment, which may indicate a discrepancy between assessments of objective indicators and subjective perception of the conditions of the educational environment. Another contradiction is the high level of satisfaction and low level of involvement of both teachers and students in those types of activities which provide opportunities for self-actualization in colleges and technical schools, due to which the inclusive nature of the educational environment according to the hypothesis of our study appears. This observation requires further study.