A comparison of Australian and Swiss secondary school teachers’ attitudes, concerns, self-efficacy, and intentions to teach in inclusive classrooms: does the context matter?

The study examines attitudes, concerns, self-efficacy, and intentions of secondary school teachers from Australia (n = 140) and Switzerland (n = 221) to teach in inclusive classrooms. Australian educators had more positive attitudes towards inclusion, fewer concerns and higher self-efficacy to teach inclusively when compared to their Swiss counterparts. Further, the authors found that Australian teachers had significantly more positive intentions to teach in inclusive classrooms when compared to their Swiss counterparts. Considering intentions to enact a behaviour play an important role in the actual enactment of the behaviour, (Ajzen 1991) it was important to determine if predictors of participants’ intentions differed in Australia and Switzerland. Overall, Swiss teachers’ intentions to teach in inclusive classrooms were more strongly influenced by the variables of attitudes, concerns and self-efficacy than those of the Australian teachers. All three variables predicted Swiss participants intention scores, while two (i.e. attitudes and self-efficacy scores) predicted Australian educators’ intention scores. The researchers examine the variability of policy reforms and teacher education programmes as a potential explanation for the differences in these two countries and discuss implications of our findings for both these and other countries implementing inclusive education reforms.