How do inclusive education and individual coaching affect the labour market outcomes of students with disabilities?

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Silke Anger; Professor Dr. Malte Sandner
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544599723

Inclusion of young individuals with disabilities is on top of the political agenda in many countries. Despite this focus, in Germany segregation by disability status is widespread in the education system: 50% of all students who leave school without a degree attended a special needs school and 56% of students who leave a special needs school without a degree had not started vocational training up until age 20. Until now, economic research has paid little attention to inclusion and barely analyzed which policies are effective to support students with disabilities. To add new insights to this topic, the proposed project examines the effects of education and support policies for students with disabilities and special needs in Germany - in particular inclusive vs. separate education as well as individual coaching - on their school graduation and their transition into the labor market. The proposed project will give empirical answers to three questions: first, whether inclusive or separated education, i.e. special needs schools, is more beneficial for the school-to-work transition of students with disabilities; and second, whether the enrollment of these students in a targeted individual coaching program improves their graduation and transition in the labor market. Third, the project will answer the question which children with special needs should be admitted into special needs schooling and coaching programs and whether children with disabilities who attended a special need or a regular school benefit differently by the coaching Until now, despite its theoretical ambiguity and the high policy relevance of these questions, empirical evidence is surprisingly small. For the analysis, the project will use detailed administrative social security data with information on disability status, school biographies, i.e. whether and for how long a student attended a special needs school, take-up of the coaching, place of living, and various labor market and educational outcomes for almost all disabled young individuals in Germany. The project links these data with the location of special needs schools and other regional characteristics, such as the number of special needs school students in a district. These linkages produce a unique data source that allow to create credible instruments and a valid difference-in-differences estimation. Using these empirical approaches will overcome biases in the estimates due to students selecting into a specific type of school or into coaching. The high number of individuals in the sample allows to obtain valid results also for small student subgroups.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants