Secondary school teacher attitudes towards inclusive education and their inclusive pedagogical orientation: a comparative study of Australia and China

Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) relies on quality inclusive education, yet its development remains challenging worldwide, including in Australia and China. Although both countries have pursued inclusive education through systemic reforms, challenges persist in everyday teaching. Teacher attitudes are recognised as important for inclusive education, however, positive attitudes alone are insufficient to explain how inclusive education is realised in everyday teaching. This highlights the need to examine teachers’ pedagogical orientations as reflected in their attitudes towards approaches that aim to remove exclusionary barriers (e.g, the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework). This study surveyed attitudes towards inclusive education and inclusive pedagogical orientations, conceptualised through attitudes towards the UDL framework, among 120 Australian and 143 Chinese secondary school teachers. Independent samples t-tests, correlation, and regression analyses indicated that Australian teachers reported significantly more positive attitudes towards inclusive education and the UDL framework than Chinese teachers. Across the full sample, attitudes towards inclusive education significantly predicted attitudes towards the UDL framework, with a stronger relationship observed in Australia. The findings highlighted pedagogical orientation as an important explanatory layer between attitudes and inclusive practice, underscoring the need for coherent inclusive pedagogical frameworks to support teachers’ instructional decision-making across diverse educational contexts.