2023

Sofii, Nataliia ; Fedorenko, Oksana ; Novyk, Iryna; Harju-Luukkainen, Heidi; Kangas, Jonna

Providing children right to quality inclusive education cannot be realized only by the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers. It requires a continuous collaborative effort of multiple professional groups around the child and the child’s family inside and outside early childhood institutions during early years. This chapter focuses on interprofessional collaboration as the premise of providing high-quality inclusive education during ECEC in Ukraine for children with special educational needs (SEN). Since this area has received very little attention in Ukrainian research the aim of this chapter is to give an overview of both the research conducted on the field and to highlight the legislative and early childhood teacher education premises for organizing interprofessional collaboration of the country for the benefit of special needs education (SNE). At the end of the chapter, a model that describes the interprofessional collaboration for children with SEN in Ukraine is suggested. The model includes three levels: level of state; level of early childhood institution and level of early childhood classroom in the context of educational reforms, which are taking place in Ukraine during recent years and are aimed at the development of relevant quality conditions for inclusive early childhood teacher education.