Our conclusions

We had a very good time in Vienna and it was very interesting for us to discover a new school and a different school system. You can read about our main conclusions in the following lines:

The first thing we must mention is that the school systems of the two countries, Catalonia and Austria, have very different inclusion strategies and even points of view. Austria, like many other countries in Europe, has special needs schools. Many of the students with special needs who, in Catalonia, study in normal schools, in Austria study in these special needs schools. This means that dealing with diversity in the classroom is very different in the two countries. Here in Catalonia we deal with a wider range of diversity than in Austria, so we need more inclusion strategies in our schools.

Some of the universal strategies (the ones that affect all the students) that we have to deal with diversity in the classroom are new methodologies like cooperative learning or project work, classroom organization in groups of 4, a wide variety of assessment strategies, etc. We did not see any of these things in Austria. They do not work cooperatively, they do not have assessment rubrics, they do not modify the timetable to promote project work, etc. We saw many examples of "learning by doing", but we think we have gone one step further in Catalonia in this sense.

It was shocking to see that their classrooms are not digitalised. They do not have screens, projectors or even sound systems in the classrooms, and the students and teachers do not work with laptops. We think we are also more advanced here in this sense.

We were also impressed to see that it was the school who was in charge of controlling the COVID cases in the school.

Apart from all this, we saw some things that surprised us positively:

• The students have flexible timetables. In fact, their timetables vary according to the subjects they do. They can get into the school and out of it without being controlled. They are more autonomous than in Catalonia in this sense. This has a negative part, which is that families do not know the timetable in advance (it changes every year and they know in September), but it seems that the students are self-suficient there, and they travel to school on their own, by bike or using public transport.

• The schools are specialised. For example, the school we visited is specialised in STEAM and music. Students and families choose the schools according to the students' interests.

• They have many resources for diversity. In Pyrkergasse they have a diversity group in each level, and in these diversity groups there are 3 teachers in the classroom for most of the time.

• They have just one tutor in each group (in our school we have two), but classroom groups are smaller than here. It is true that some of the students were at home with COVID when we visited the school, but we think classroom groups have between 20 and 25 students in Austria.

Our conclusion is that the two systems are very different and it is difficult to compare. However, we think that we do a lot more things to deal with diversity with less resources. We wish we had as many resources as they do!