A comparative study of the impact of enhanced input on inclusion at pre-service and induction phases on the self-efficacy of beginning teachers to work effectively with children with special educational needs

There is a well-founded assumption in the literature that the first year of teaching presents challenges to beginning teachers. However, few studies have looked empirically at how beginning teacher perceptions about teaching ability change from the pre-service to the novice teacher year. This is particularly the case for inclusive education, where no substantive empirical studies have measured such a change in teacher perceptions across these phases of teacher development. This study tracks changes in the perceived self-efficacy of teachers in relation to working effectively with children with special educational needs (n = 67) following an inclusion-enhancement programme in the pre-service phase and enriched induction on inclusion in the novice teacher phase. The study employed a repeated panel survey design with an intervention and comparison group. A critique is made of the domain specificity of current measures used for considering self-efficacy for inclusion, and an alternative approach proposed. Results indicate that there were relative gains in self-efficacy from the start to the end of the pre-service teacher year due to the enhancement programme, and that these gains were maintained in the novice teacher year. However, there was no evidence that the induction enrichment had any impact on self-efficacy in this domain. Implications for the timing and intensity of induction for beginning teachers, as well as for future research directions on teacher education, are considered.