Why Europe’s Digital Schools Still Leave Disabled Students Behind

Europe has spent the last decade pouring money into digital education. Notebooks, tablets, wifi networks and learning platforms have reached millions of students, and the European Union’s Digital Education Action Plan 2021–2027 explicitly promises that students with disabilities will not be left out of the transformation. Yet a new comparative study of national policies in Austria, Croatia and Iceland suggests that the promise of inclusive digital education is far from being kept. Published in Frontiers in Education, the research by Tobias Buchner of the University of Vienna, Sonja Alimović of the University of Zagreb, and Anna Magnea Hreinsdóttir and Skúlína Hlíf Kjartansdóttir of the University of Iceland analysed schooling-related policy documents across three very different European systems, and found that inclusion remains unevenly embedded where it matters most: in the fine print of national policy.

The study set out to answer a deceptively simple question. If digitalisation is supposed to be a lever for implementing the right to inclusive education, as UNESCO’s 2020 report Inclusion and Education: All Means All and the EU’s Digital Education Action Plan both claim, then how have national education systems actually translated that ambition into policy? The researchers focused on students with special educational needs, a group international assessments have repeatedly described as digitally excluded from education and less likely to benefit from digital education policies than their peers. Using a comparative case study design, they examined legislation, national strategies, curriculum frameworks and governmental initiatives published primarily between 2015 and 2025, coding each document against four analytical dimensions: equitable access to digital devices, provision of assistive technologies and adaptive learning tools, development of teachers’ inclusive digital competencies, and support for digital skill acquisition among learners with special educational needs.

The theoretical framework drew on the concept of inclusive digital education, which aims to provide equitable learning opportunities by leveraging technology to support diverse educational needs. In practice, this means accessible digital infrastructures, flexible pedagogical designs, and organisational practices that address learner diversity, from screen readers and text-to-speech software that support students with sensory impairments to structured tablet use that helps students with intellectual disabilities build functional digital competence. The researchers adapted a four-part framework from the field, distinguishing general access to digital devices from access to assistive technologies, retaining digital competence with particular attention to learners with special educational needs, and adding teachers’ inclusive digital competencies because teacher capacity is central to translating digital access into inclusive practice. Absence was treated as analytically relevant too: where digitalisation policies made universal claims without addressing accessibility or learners with special educational needs, the researchers recorded that silence as a finding in its own right.

Austria presents what the authors describe as a paradox. The country has invested heavily in school digitalisation through its Master Plan for Digitalisation and the 8-Point-Plan launched after pandemic school closures exposed shortcomings. The device initiative under the 8-Point-Plan had already reached 95 percent of all students at secondary level I by 2023, and 87 percent of teachers across all school types now report using digital tools. Yet no codified right to assistive technology exists for students who need it. Provision remains legally ambiguous, fragmented across federal, provincial and social insurance bodies, and hampered by outdated equipment catalogues and explicit exclusions of school-related assistive technology from regional funding. Meanwhile, the curricular reform for learners with special educational needs was delayed by two years, and the new special education curricula show lowered and narrowed expectations for digital skills depending on disability type: students with learning difficulties receive reduced complexity and increased scaffolding, while students with intellectual disabilities are expected mainly to achieve supported, functional technology use, communication and participation rather than abstract or independently performed digital competencies.

Croatia tells a different story. The country’s legal framework is among the most explicit in the comparison: the regulation on the education of learners with special educational needs prescribes an individual educational plan for every such learner, and that plan must include recommendations for all accommodations, including information and communication technology. Learners with special educational needs have been included in Croatian mainstream schools for over 40 years, most received a tablet from their school, and they are entitled to assistive technologies according to their needs during their studies. The e-Schools pilot programme, the most significant domestic investment in digital education, distributed over 26,000 digital devices to students and saw mobile support teams visit more than 700 school locations by 2022, with 147 of the 151 pilot schools improving their digital competence by at least one level by 2018. Yet the gap between entitlement and everyday school practice persists. Available assistive technologies sometimes fail to match students’ needs, especially for those with complex educational requirements, forcing institutions and non-governmental organisations to apply for project-based funding such as the ATTEND project, which equipped 34 schools with assistive technology between 2021 and 2024.

The Croatian case also exposes a teacher-competence deficit. Although both special and mainstream teachers take compulsory courses on assistive technology during their master’s studies, only 31 percent of surveyed teachers apply universal design for learning principles in teaching activities, and only 28 percent use and promote assistive technology in daily instruction of learners with complex communication needs. Schools in rural areas still lack essential infrastructure for digital education, and the heavy dependency on EU funding introduces structural fragility into reforms whose long-term sustainability has not been secured. More recent developments signal greater ambition: the Whole-Day School reform, piloted in 62 schools from the 2023/2024 school year, made information and digital competences a mandatory subject across all primary grades, and the BrAIn project launched in 2023 aims to develop AI-based curricula and personalised learning recommendation systems. Whether these reforms close the implementation gap remains an open question.

Iceland operates under a third governance logic. Its universalist inclusion model frames inclusive education as a principle governing the organisation of the education system as a whole, rather than a separate form of provision for particular groups. A single national curriculum framework applies across compulsory schooling, digital competence is located within a broader conception of literacy, participation and critical engagement, and no separate digital learning goals exist for students with disabilities. Differentiation is expected to take place through individualised planning, adapted materials and support within the common framework. Assistive technology provision is distributed across sectors: national health insurance contributes to necessary assistive devices under the Health Insurance Act, specialist services such as the National Institute for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Deafblind advise schools and assess accessibility, and municipalities run their own tablet and one-to-one device initiatives. Research from Kópavogur indicates that tablet use can support multimodal learning, alternative forms of communication and student agency. But the decentralised structure creates substantial variation across municipalities, and the researchers found limited national guidance on accessibility, assistive technology or differentiated digital pedagogy.

Across all three countries, teacher education emerges as a weak link, though in different ways. Austria’s new primary teacher education curricula, implemented in the 2025/2026 school year, position digitalisation and inclusion as cross-cutting themes, but operationalisation varies starkly across institutions: one curriculum embeds the intersection across multiple modules including assistive technologies and AI-supported differentiation, while others reduce it to a single low-credit course or mere thematic proximity. The DigiKomp framework promotes digital diagnostic proficiency and individualised learning support as core competencies, yet other categories address inclusive practice only peripherally. Iceland’s teacher education programmes clearly represent both inclusion and digital competence, but often as parallel rather than integrated domains, and the country lacks a national teacher-competence framework explicitly defining inclusive digital education. Croatia’s training falls short of the competency demands implied by its own legal frameworks, particularly the obligation to develop ICT-integrated individual education plans.

The comparison’s most striking finding concerns the fourth dimension: digital skill acquisition for learners with special educational needs. Formal recognition of digital competence is increasingly widespread, but its link to inclusive pedagogy and equitable expectations remains uneven. Austria’s delayed and narrowed special education curricula contrast with Croatia’s genuine curricular commitment, while Iceland’s shared entitlement leaves the articulation of how supports connect to digital competence development largely to practice. The authors also note that empirical evidence on implementation varies across the three countries in date, scope and methodology, that special educational needs does not represent an equivalent legal or educational category across the systems, and that the findings support analytical rather than statistical generalisation.

The study’s conclusion is sobering for policymakers who equate digitalisation with inclusion. All three countries have invested substantially in infrastructure, yet inclusive digital education requires more than devices and connectivity. Sustainable progress, the researchers argue, depends on governance-sensitive frameworks connecting digitalisation, accessibility, teacher education, assistive technology and learner participation. The three cases represent distinct governance logics, federal-fragmented in Austria, centralised-aspirational in Croatia, and decentralised-universalist in Iceland, but each produced different domains of weakness, suggesting that policy-transfer approaches assuming context-neutrality will not work. The authors propose that an explicit inclusive digital education plan, connecting all relevant policy areas, might help avoid a digital divide between students and those labelled as having special educational needs, and they call for future research spanning more European countries, dedicated assistive-technology implementation studies, and evidence foregrounding student perspectives, especially for learners with complex support needs.

Subject of Research: Inclusive digital education policies for learners with special educational needs in Austria, Croatia and Iceland

Article Title: Inclusive digital education policies in three European countries: a comparative analysis

Article References: Buchner, T., Alimović, S., Hreinsdóttir, A. M., & Kjartansdóttir, S. H. (2026). Inclusive digital education policies in three European countries: a comparative analysis. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1919297. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1919297

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1919297

Keywords: inclusive digital education, digital education policy, special educational needs, assistive technology, comparative education, Austria, Croatia, Iceland, teacher digital competencies, digital divide, curriculum reform, European Union