Inclusive Education in Australia: Lessons from Dr. Kate de Bruin ~ 1026

Tim Villegas
Australia is known for many wonderful things: the Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef, shrimp on the barbie. But did you know about their movement toward inclusive education practices? Stick around to find out more. My name is Tim Villegas from the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education, and you’re listening to Think Inclusive, a show where with every conversation we try to build bridges between families, educators, and disability justice advocates to create a shared understanding of inclusive education and what inclusion looks like in the real world. You can learn more about who we are and what we do at mcie.org.

Dr. Kate de Bruin is a professor of inclusive education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She has taught in secondary school and higher education for 20 years. In her academic work, she has developed inclusive education courses for the Master of Teaching and Master of Education programs at Monash University. Dr. de Bruin’s research focuses on inclusive education policies and practices. She examines evidence-based system-level and school-level practices that promote quality and equity for all students, with a focus on students with disabilities. Dr. de Bruin regularly provides professional development to school teachers and writes for both academics and the general public. She is a member of the academic advisory board for All Means All, the Australian Alliance for Inclusive Education.

Here is what we cover in today’s episode:

• The significant differences between the Australian and American education systems
• The long history of Australia segregating students with disabilities
• The growing movement in Australia to move towards inclusive education

Before we dive into today’s amazing interview, I’ve got something important to share. Have you ever felt like you’re losing touch with the people in your life, but you don’t want to be glued to social media all the time just to get updates? Well, fret no more because I’ve got the perfect solution for you: Together Letters. It’s a fantastic tool that can bring you closer to your loved ones. How does it work? It’s simple. Together Letters is a group email newsletter that gathers updates from all its members and combines them into a single easy-to-read newsletter for everyone. No fancy apps, no complicated platforms needed. Just good ol’ email. We even use Together Letters to keep our Think Inclusive patrons connected with each other. Plus, here’s the best part: groups of 10 or less can use it for free. So why wait? Head over to togetherletters.com and sign up right now. Reconnect with your favorite people, because Together Letters has got your back.

And now, my interview with Kate de Bruin. Thanks for being here, Kate. I really appreciate it. It’s okay if I call you Kate, right?

Kate de Bruin
It’s very nice.

Tim Villegas
Okay. So we were talking right before we hit the record button, and you said that you don’t have school districts? Could you just unpack that for me first before we dive into the questions? Because in the United States—oh gosh, I used to know this—I think there’s like 15,000 school districts. I want to say that might be low, but I think that’s it. I think it’s around 15 to 16,000 across all 50 states. I don’t know if that includes territories because I’m not an expert in that. So how does that work then if you don’t have school districts?

Kate de Bruin
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So we are a federated education system a bit like the United States. We have states and territories, and they run their education systems. They have constitutional authority to run education, and the federal government here provides some funds—most of the funding for that. And then we have several school systems: the state education system, the independent school system (private schools), and another set of private schools run by the Catholic education authorities. So we’ve kind of got three systems, and then multiple states and territories.

If we just focus on the public school system—the state education systems—they are generally divided into regions, kind of quadrants of the state if you like, and within that there are regions that have offices for administrative purposes from the Department of Education perspective. But they don’t seem to work in the same way that districts do in the United States.

I visited the United States a few years ago and went to different school districts and talked to people from the Education Office, and I got a sense of how completely different the system is there. We have a very decentralized system here, which means that the authority to make decisions and do a lot of stuff has been devolved to the level of the school. For example, professional learning budgets—schools and individual teachers can do whatever they like, whatever they deem is relevant to their class and their interests.

Whereas what I saw, for example, in Kansas, which I visited, was that at the district level, there’s a lot of decisions and responsibility that rests there. In one district that I went to, they said, “Look, we have a lot of kids in state care, we have a large number of kids who’ve been affected by trauma.” So they determined that was a priority for professional learning, and that’s what the majority of teachers were able to access there. The quality checking was done at the level of the district, and so on. That doesn’t happen here. It rests all the way down at the level of the school and the teacher.

Tim Villegas
Well, that must be really difficult then, especially on our topic—inclusive education—because how do you have any sort of accountability on who gets what resources? And then the other question I don’t even think I put in here is the differences between the special education system of a district versus a school in Australia. We have the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), and there’s the law—the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Then you also have federal funds that are distributed to the states. So how does that work in Australia?

Kate de Bruin
That’s a really good question. We have something sort of similar. Your laws are much better than ours. We have non-discrimination law that includes education—it’s got Section 21 on education—but it also covers housing, transport, employment, and all aspects of non-discrimination across society. There are a set of standards written to go alongside that—standards for compliance. If schools are meeting their obligations under our federal Disability Discrimination Act, then here are the standards you should be meeting: standards for enrollment, participation, and so on.

But I look with great envy at the systems of accountability that you have in your country, and at transparent reporting. We don’t have those, and that’s a matter of frustration for me. It’s not a particularly exciting topic when I keep talking about transparency and accountability—it’s hard to get people excited—but in reality that’s where the magic could be happening.

We don’t have transparency at all. We have a long-standing and well-established system of stratified, segregated options for students. When I say options, many of them weren’t optional at all. We have separate special schools, and those are countable, so we know in each state how many kids attend those. But within many schools we have what’s called a separate unit, which is like a mini-special school over in the corner. It often has a separate fenced-in playground. It might share an address but nothing else.

In some schools, children are integrated on a part-time basis if they are in those units. They might share the playground, the library, maybe the art room. It’s quite variable. And then there are schools with special education classrooms. Now, the kids who attend segregated units and classrooms are counted as being in mainstream because they are on the grounds of a mainstream school. So we actually have no idea how many kids are segregated in this country.

There was a big review of our Disability Discrimination Act done by the Productivity Commission. They found that lack of data very problematic. That was a long time ago—when the law was only about 10 years old—but it’s never really been addressed. So back to your question: without districts, how does this work in terms of transparency and accountability? It kind of doesn’t. There are federal initiatives designed to introduce accountability; they’re only about five years old, but they’re really designed for financial accountability and not much more.

Tim Villegas
Wasn’t there some sort of National Commission on Disability? I should have had it up before you came on because I wanted to talk to you about it. Let me see if I can find it.

Kate de Bruin
I can jog your memory: it’s the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation of People with Disability.

Tim Villegas
Yes. And how long has that been going on?

Kate de Bruin
It’s been going for a couple of years now. I don’t have the exact span of years to hand. I was summoned as a witness the year before last.

Tim Villegas
Let’s see. I wrote about it in 2019, so that’s been three years—actually November of 2018—so almost exactly three years ago. And there was a Royal Commission hearing on inclusive education in Queensland.

Kate de Bruin
That was one of the hearings. There have been, I think, three hearings on education. The commission has broad scope—employment, housing, COVID-19 responses, access to health care—the full spectrum. We have a fabulous senator who lives with disability and has been a strong advocate for this Royal Commission. It wouldn’t have happened without his advocacy and insistence. It’s still going on quite slowly, and those of us who work in inclusive education are fervently hoping that an outcome will be a planned closure of separate special schools. It’s got another good year to run, so watch this space.

Tim Villegas
Right. And even if there is an outcome, there’s the time it would take to actually close the schools. Then what do we do with the learners? They would have to go back to their neighborhood schools. Since you don’t have school districts, are the schools neighborhood schools?

Kate de Bruin
They are. We’re state-based, and I live in Victoria, one of the southernmost states on the eastern seaboard. Schools generally serve a local community and have a catchment zone. If you’re going to a public school, you generally need to be within that zone. In my state, it used to be that you could request access to a school outside your zone. That led to distortion of student numbers. A school might start a program and do incredible PR around it and cream certain students out of the local community, or distort in other ways.

There’s one fabulous school not far from here that’s made an excellent name in reading—committing to teaching every kid to read. A lot of kids with specific learning disabilities sought to enroll there because they weren’t getting high-quality reading instruction in their local school. That distorted enrollments. It’s now much harder to bypass your zone. You need to go to your local school and press your local school to lift its game if there’s something you think they need to be doing.

Tim Villegas
I think there’s an impression about Australia—and apologies for the generalization—that you’re doing something more right in certain schools than we are regarding inclusive education. In the United States, we have the law, and it’s clear about learners being included to the maximum extent. There are many interpretations and misinterpretations, but when we talk about all learners—especially those with extensive support needs—that seems to get missed. People say, “Not those kids.” For students with significant intellectual disabilities or extensive medical needs—people disconnect. There’s an impression that because you have the UN Charter and it’s top of mind, you have more going on. Is that an incorrect assumption?

Kate de Bruin
I’m really sorry, but it is. That said, there are standout schools. With decentralization and school autonomy, you get amazing schools doing amazing things. The first hearing of the Disability Royal Commission heard from three school leaders who created fully inclusive environments and described what they did. That shows it’s not impossible—but it’s not widespread.

I’d argue that the ongoing presence of segregated schools hinders innovation and reform because they operate as a release valve—especially for the kids you mentioned, the “surely you don’t mean those kids” group. At enrollment, parents can be told, “We have no idea how to do this. Your child would be better off going elsewhere.” The law says they’re not allowed to refuse an enrollment. But a non-discrimination law says you’re entitled to enroll in your local school; you have to press for that entitlement, and you don’t have clear recourse if that isn’t forthcoming.

As an academic who writes publicly, I get contacted by parents for help. One parent told me the school where their child was enrolled—without telling them—rang the local special school, handed over the parent’s contact details, and asked them to line up an interview because they thought the child would be better off there. That’s not widespread, and I try to remember parents and teachers come from a well-intentioned place. We share a desire for kids to get a good education and feel safe and welcome. But the presence of separate schools signals that there’s somewhere else for these kids to be—that not everybody belongs at their local school.

Tim Villegas
Would you say that’s the biggest issue or a major struggle for people pursuing inclusive education in Australia—is it those special schools, or something else?

Kate de Bruin
It’s a huge part of it. Their continued existence signals there’s another place for them. I work in a Master of Education program in inclusive education. I teach teachers already doing this work. Many work in separate special schools. Some come into my courses presuming I’ll see them as opposition. I don’t. We’re all trying to ensure the most vulnerable kids get access to an education.

But maintaining two separate systems is expensive and inefficient. It funnels kids elsewhere and is painted as parental “choice.” It isn’t really a choice. Imagine twins—one has an intellectual disability. One goes to the local school; for the other, the “choice” is presented: the special school has speech pathologists, occupational therapists, smaller classes, a bus system. If the local school says, “We’re not set up for your child,” while the special school lists all its supports, it’s not an equal choice.

It would be a brave government to tell parents, “We’re taking away your choice,” or to tell parents who had a damaging experience at the local school, “We’re closing the place where your child feels safe.” If we got a government to say, “Let’s do this,” it would still take time. We need to build teachers’ capacity in local schools and do a lot of work on values and attitudes. People say, “The system isn’t ready.” We’ll be waiting forever. That day won’t come on its own. You need a timeframe: “We will be ready by this date.”

Tim Villegas
Is there an organization in Australia that assists schools with a transformation toward inclusive practices?

Kate de Bruin
Not in the formal way you’ve described. There are organizations in disability and education: the Australian Coalition for Inclusive Education—known as All Means All—and Children and Young People with Disability Australia (CYDA). They have good resources and recently worked with the federal government to produce accessible resources for families. But there isn’t a formal push for school transformation the way there has been in the United States.

The reforms in IDEA 2004 exerted system pressure—driven by the rise in the number of students with learning disabilities after the original reforms in the ’70s. Australia had the opposite experience. Those students were never funded for additional support in our system. They were called students with “learning difficulties,” and were never funded. That’s one group that fell into the crack created by a funding model driven by disability labels. You have a physical impairment—you can get targeted funding. A hearing impairment—install a sound-field system. But students we’d call dyslexic or with dyscalculia were not funded, so the system wasn’t pressured as it was in the U.S.

We don’t have a big appetite for school transformation. We have a tired workforce of teachers who just survived a pandemic. There isn’t a lot of appetite for transformation.

Tim Villegas
You recently wrote a piece in LDA Bulletin—Learning Difficulties Australia’s bulletin—about learners with learning difficulties not receiving funding, but that didn’t stop you from helping them. Could you tell that story?

Kate de Bruin
Sure. I was fairly new to teaching—maybe in my second year. It began with reading. We had a number of kids who couldn’t read. We had a new person take over the Learning Support Department. She was fabulous. Around the time the U.S. National Reading Panel released its report and Australia had the Rowe Report, she became interested in reading and concluded that if there are kids in high school who can’t read, it ends there for them. They can’t access the textbooks—everything stops.

I had also been completely unprepared for the number of kids who couldn’t read in my class. I felt underprepared and angry about that. Our school was on the urban fringe of Melbourne, with enormous disparity of wealth and poverty—mansions on the bay and, a couple of kilometers inland, low-income housing estates with third-generation unemployment. All of those kids were at my school. It made for a lovely place to work—a bit like the world. But I could see some kids would be trapped in the life of their families—on track to be fourth-generation unemployed—and we had the power to change that. I just didn’t know how.

I connected with the new Learning Support head and said, “I don’t know how to help, but I want to help.” We started small: a homework club with fresh fruit; anyone who wanted help could come. We got professional learning about reading and started running a reading intervention called Corrective Reading—really the only one with evidence for older students.

The following year, two girls enrolled in Year 7 with intellectual disability. They shared a paraprofessional and were put in my class. I was given a 300-page novel to teach. Not only could they not read it, they were reading around a Grade 3 level. I also taught Year 12, so I knew where schooling led. I thought, “I’ve got you for six years—aside from teaching you to read, what do I need to do to get you within cooee of expectations?”

I needed to give them access to the content of the book so I could teach structured writing: topic sentences, using evidence. But there was no ebook. I tried to make an ebook—told it breached copyright. I’m tenacious, so I kept calling and thinking. Eventually, I discovered I could make an alternative format if a commercial version didn’t exist. But when I spoke to the copyright licensing agency to triple-check, they said no one else could access it unless they met the legal definition of disability under the DDA.

So students with dyslexia in our reading program, or the wave of newly arrived migrants—English not their first language—couldn’t access the recordings. I focused on the two girls and thought about how to expand later. We needed to make audio recordings fast. My colleague said, “Let’s see if anyone wants to help.” We emailed the staff. This was a big school—about 2,000 kids—and we were inundated. It was a seminal moment: you can’t do this on your own. These kids don’t belong to us—they’re everybody’s.

About 70% of staff helped. Each read a chapter aloud and recorded it. Students ended up with a navigable recording they could skip by chapter. Every teacher made a bullet-point summary of the chapter, each point supported by a quote. I could teach those girls—still learning to read—how to write structured essays because they had access to content. Both went on to complete schooling through Year 11. I count that as a success.

We then scaled it out. We started considering ebooks when choosing texts, and accessibility became part of practice. I didn’t know it was called inclusive education then. Inclusive education isn’t invented; it’s an organized way of thinking about good practice, accessibility, and high-quality instruction that supports everybody—it’s a tide that lifts all boats, not special ed for the few. What I did for those two girls helped all the kids: clearer, explicit teaching, a bank of quotes and summaries ready to use. It shaped my teaching early on.

Tim Villegas
When did you decide to move into research? Was that your ground zero?

Kate de Bruin
No. I taught for a number of years after that. I had my first child and took family leave, later had my second. I realized I couldn’t return to full-time teaching for a while. I had been running reading intervention and cross-curriculum support, assisting teachers with accessibility—but I had no credential. I applied for a job and didn’t even get an interview, which was humbling.

I undertook a master’s in inclusive education—ironically, the course I now teach. I was mindful of kids we never served well: students on the spectrum and students who’d experienced trauma. Not for lack of trying—we just didn’t know how. I didn’t yet have language like executive function and planning. High schools are unique environments—primary approaches don’t always transfer when students move classrooms every 40 minutes.

I ended up doing a PhD because I wanted answers I could take back to schools: “Do this.” I thought I’d get that from a PhD. I now know answers are never simple.

Tim Villegas
You now teach classes for a master’s in inclusive education, and your students are sometimes in special schools, right? Do you ever get students who rethink their job choice?

Kate de Bruin
Yes, often. Many have only ever worked in those environments. One said to me, “I know how to work with kids with unpredictable behaviors from trauma. I know how to work with kids who don’t speak and use AAC. I don’t blink if there are kids with nappies or catheters. But I have no idea how to teach at grade level. None of our kids access the curriculum at grade level.” That rings in my ears years later.

That’s how I begin my classes: we all have different expertise. I acknowledge what people can and can’t do and talk about being proud of what you can do and humble about what you can’t. It’s frightening for people to say, “I have no idea.” People feel it reflects on them personally. It doesn’t. It’s a function of a dual-track system with low expectations for students with disabilities—as if accessing grade-level curriculum is impossible when we know it isn’t.

I do careful work challenging the belief that some kids can’t or shouldn’t access grade-level content—the idea that a “life skills” curriculum is appropriate for some students by default. I avoid making people feel I’m calling them bad teachers. I build a culture of acknowledging gaps and sharing.

Students do a professional placement. I’ve developed relationships with schools that do this well—reading instruction, positive behavior support, effective use of teacher aides (rather than pull-out or “Velcro in the corner” models). I try to expose students to good practice. They often come back saying, “I couldn’t have imagined what I saw until I saw it.” We need much more of that.

Tim Villegas
There’s a video produced in Australia—“What Is Inclusion?”—a little girl with Down syndrome from Queensland. My organization—the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education—uses it a lot. The contrast is powerful: first the girl with a teacher’s aide in the back, then in the middle—still not inclusion—then included in the life of the class. When people who can’t quite imagine it watch, their eyes open. It’s beautiful.

Kate de Bruin
I use that video a lot too. It shows the difference between placement and genuine inclusive practice in an easy-to-understand way, told in the voice of the little girl. I traveled to the U.S. to visit systems running MTSS well—Kansas and Vermont. Seeing a system done differently felt like traveling into the future—or that I’d come from the past. We don’t have the laws, funding models, and culture of school transformation to go with them.

That film comes from the Community Resource Unit in Queensland, who do fabulous work. But the people I end up showing it to are those who’ve already come to do a master’s—they’ve bought in. I get teachers from special schools who feel sad, saying, “I thought I was doing inclusion—teaching students with disabilities at a school that welcomed them.” I say it’s important to be precise with language. Your classroom may be nurturing and caring, but that’s not inclusion—it’s something different. I wish those videos were built into teacher preparation in all universities. I don’t believe they are.

Tim Villegas
Not even in the United States. While systems may be more closely aligned, they’re still separate a lot of the time—unless a district has been intentional about integrating them. The examples of authentic inclusion need to be part of teacher training for all teachers, not just those trained to work with learners with disabilities.

Kate de Bruin
I think what people imagine inclusive education looks like and what it does look like are very different. Journalists often ask me to recommend a school where they can see an inclusive classroom. I ask, “What do you think you’re going to see?” It will look like any other classroom. Unless there are children who appear visibly different, you’ll just see a classroom. You won’t know this student has language or attentional difficulties, or that this student has serious mental health needs, or that this student is autistic. If they’re included and learning well, you’re unlikely to see something separate and different for them—if you do, it might not be inclusive at all. That’s never the answer journalists want.

Tim Villegas
That’s a great point. I recently visited a historically inclusive district: high placement data, inclusive mindset from top leadership. As I observed, I thought, “Where are all the kids with disabilities?” They said, “You’re probably not noticing them—this is just life here.” It’s hard to put into words unless you experience it.

Kate de Bruin
Exactly. We need to see more of it. Teachers don’t love having their classrooms filmed and put online, and not all parents want that level of publicity. For kids who are visibly different, we’re asking them to bear an extraordinary burden of scrutiny. Parents are often exhausted from years of advocacy to get their school to that point. We ask an unreasonable amount of the parents and kids with disabilities to do the publicity.

Tim Villegas
We’re running up on time. Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Kate de Bruin
In the United States, you have two credential pathways: special education and general education. We don’t have that here. That means we don’t have teachers in schools widely exposed to inclusive practices and evidence-based approaches that work for everybody, or ways to layer additional supports that supplement classroom instruction rather than creating something different elsewhere.

On the one hand, we don’t have structural separation in our workforce. On the other hand, we lack some of the leadership expertise I saw in U.S. schools—teachers acting as instructional coaches and providing professional feedback. That’s the next frontier for both countries. In Australia, we need more teachers trained in inclusive practice in schools. From what I saw, the U.S. needs to upskill general education teachers and make this part of core practice. That’s the next frontier.

Tim Villegas
Absolutely. Teachers coming through education programs don’t need to be experts in working with learners with disabilities, but it needs to be an expectation.

Kate de Bruin
You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to be here.

Tim Villegas
Think Inclusive is written, edited, and sound designed by Tim Villegas and is a production of MCIE. Original music by Miles Kredich. If you enjoyed today’s episode, here’s one way you can help the podcast grow: become a patron and get access to ad-free episodes and behind-the-scenes posts. Join our Together Letters group and get a sneak preview of MCIE’s new podcast series Inclusion Stories.

Special thanks to our patrons: Melissa H., Joiner II, Pamela P., Mark C., Kathy B., Kathleen T., Jarrett T., Gabi M., Aaron P., Paula W., and Carol Q. for their support of Think Inclusive.

For more information about inclusive education or to learn how MCIE can partner with you in your school or district, visit MCIE.org. Thanks for your time and attention, and remember: inclusion always works.