Educational management of Down syndrome students in educational centres: family perceptions and teachers

The present paper analyses the perceptions and attitudes of parents of Down syndrome students regarding catering for diversity strategies and educational inclusion measures applied to their children in educational centres, as well as perceptions of teachers who serve. To achieve this aim, we opted for a mixed descriptive research design. The population under study comprises, on one hand, parents belonging to Down syndrome associations in Spanish federation Down Espana and, on the other hand, teachers, advisers and educationalists from Down syndrome associations working in integration centres. With this purpose, an ad-hoc questionnaire was designed and used to survey 218 fathers and mothers of Down syndrome students, as well as 22 in-depth interviews to education-involved professionals. For questionnaire validation (content validity), a group of 11 experts specialised in catering for diversity was selected by the "expert competence coefficient" (aka "K coefficient") procedure, and the obtained index exceeded 0.8. Analysis of questionnaire reliability by means of Cronbach's alpha test for a total number of 31 items was 0.86. Results clearly show that parents of Down syndrome children perceive educational centres' management positively. However, in spite of their agreement with inclusion criteria, they do disagree with their implementation, and highlight the lack of material and human resources as one of the main problems. In this sense, although teachers are also in favour of inclusion, they consider they lack appropriate training, time, and necessary resources and support to develop inclusion-oriented educational strategies under appropriate conditions.