Collection of Individual Educational Plans (German)

After obtaining permission from the relevant authorities, Individual Educational Plans (IEPs) were collected in one federal state in Germany at the beginning of 2019. Participation was entirely voluntary. The sample contained 112 fully anonymised IEPs from seven schools.

The documents contained in this dataset have all been written in German.

From primary schools came 54.5 % of the IEPs and 45.5 % from secondary schools. Forty-one IEPs (36.6 %) did not have a clear indication of grade level. Encompassed were at least documents from grade levels one to eight.

60.7 % of the IEPs were written in a table format, 39.3 % in a list format. In most cases (70.5 %), it was unclear whether the IEPs were produced for pupils with identified special educational needs. Of the documents, 24.1 % were related to ‘special educational needs in learning’ (‘sonderpädagogischer Unterstützungsbedarf im Bereich Lernen’). Only 5.4 % of the IEPs were related to other support areas mentioned explicitly.

Documents cataloguing

Funds supported the study from the ‘Teacher Training and Education Research Centre’ (CeLeB) of Hildesheim University to employ a student research assistant, facilitating data collection and preparation. Nevertheless, the collection is a compilation of documents that was collected with comparatively few resources.

No manual for the codes is therefore available.

During the data collection, various documents were provided by the schools as IEPs. However, 8 of the 120 documents assembled in the present file were merely cover sheets to groups of IEPs (documents 18, 26, 30, 40, 42 and 43; document No 47 contains only observations and is not a complete IEP).

Codes were used on-site in the schools during collection to catalogue the documents.

The code consists of four parts: AA-BB-CC-DDD

Part AA: indicates the number of the school in the sample.

Part BB: indicates the type of school (01=primary; 02=secondary)

Part CC: indicates the type of document (01 = IEP; 02 = school internal curriculum: whereby only IEPs are included in this dataset)

Part DDD: consecutive page numbers per school included in the sample