The realization of the contract of inclusive education after the signing of the UN-Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires highly professional specialists in special needs education, whose central quality characteristics consist in diagnostic assessments and the effective support of developmental and learning processes, beginning in pre-school sector (especially preventive fostering), continuing in school age (evidence-based support of developmental processes in school) as well as in phases of professional integration and rehabilitation and also in all processes of social participation.

The Department of Special Needs Education and Rehabilitation focuses in accordance with I. School of Educational and Social Sciences on “Participation and Dropout in Education and Rehabilitation”. Beside the pedagogic-philosophic examination of different epistemological paradigms the Department sees itself obligated to an empiric approach, which makes a contribution, with the help of research approaches in social- and educational-sciences (especially field studies, controlled single-case-studies, intervention studies), to the evidence-basing of the special needs education practice in the field of “Prevention and Intervention in Processes of Absenteeism and Dropout”.