Creating Specialized Conditions for Differentiated Education of Children with Special Needs in Russian Ungraded Schools

Within the existing legal framework of the Russian Federation, any child with a disability can study in an ungraded school, which obligates the school to create special learning conditions for the child: an adapted educational program, remedial support, an accessible environment, and special textbooks and teaching aids. Qualified specialists are required to provide these learning conditions: a speech pathologist, a psychologist, and a speech therapist. A “regular” school (not an ungraded school) faces the same difficulties but, on the background of a higher provision of resources, overcomes them in a simplified mode through networking and cooperation. Ungraded schools are often located in hard-to-reach areas and have limited opportunities to develop offline networking; one class can have several children with disabilities (up to three people) of different types (e.g., children with mild mental retardation and children with visual or hearing impairments) or with different degrees of one disability (e.g., a child with autism spectrum disorder and intact intelligence and a child with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disabilities). In this case, there appears the question of organizing differentiated training. On the one hand, this issue can be theoretically resolved by transferring children with SEN with a complex structure of disorders to remedial boarding schools. Simultaneously, other children with disabilities can study with the class, but the teacher will have to make more effort to organize the educational process (if the class is small, differentiated instruction can be organized more successfully than in a regular school). Technologies supporting the organization of differentiated training of children with special educational needs in ungraded schools can be structured as follows: distance technologies in the organization of remedial classes and the work of a specialist of remedial support or a teacher-defectologist; the role of parents in tutoring support of the child in conducting remedial classes; network interaction of ungraded schools with organizations of additional education, health care organizations, and social services; training of teachers on professional development courses in accordance with the structure of the child’s nosology; support from the regional psychological and pedagogical center (specialists from the center can provide support to the teacher in the methodological part and the child’s parents, building a system of support for families raising a child with special educational needs).