Special and Inclusive Education in Portugal: Facts and options

In the last decades poruguese government have been doing a great effort to educate children with disabilities on regular schools. Teacher education, different kinds of resources, school and support organization lead to very impressive numbers: today only a little more than 2% of children with disabilities are education in special schools. In January 2008, a new law was published in portugal aiming a new organization of Special Education. In this article the main aspects of this law are described as well as statistical data that allow us to understand its impact. as "reference Schools" and "specialized units" in the regular schools. In the end of the article some critical remarks are raised namely about the use of ICF-CY (WHO, 2007). financing system and the need of a more precise of evaluation of the implementation of this new law.