Presentation: School, Family and Community: A Necessary Alliance for Inclusive Education

Abstract

The monograph School, Family and Community: a necessary alliance for inclusive education responds to the need to contribute to the debate on a topic of great relevance in the construction of schools committed to the principles and values that underpin inclusive education. I would therefore like to thank the magazine's director, Cynthia Duck, for offering us the opportunity to create this space for reflection.

We know that the benefits of this partnership for the different members of the educational community and for the school as a whole, as well as for the environment in which the school is located, are extensive and well known (Epstein, 2011). We have a significant amount of evidence to show that this is the case, as will be shown in some of the articles that form part of this monograph. While the school, family and community themselves are highly influential contexts in the development and education of all learners, when a collaborative relationship is established between them, the resources generated from the synergy produced by working together are, by definition1 , ‘greater than the sum of those available to each of them in isolation’ and, therefore, greater, more diverse, useful and meaningful for all involved. As Bronfenbrenner (1979) argued in his ecological model of development, the educational potential of the different microsystems, such as the family or the school, increases when they are able to work together to achieve common and shared goals related to the pupils.