INTERAGENCY AND INTERDISCIPLINARY COOPERATION IN THE SYSTEM OF SUPPORT FOR CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31392/UDU-nc.series19.2026.50.04Keywords:
inclusive education, psychological and pedagogical support team, social worker, correctional educator, interdisciplinary interaction, children with special educational needsAbstract
The article examines the interdisciplinary interaction of a social worker and a correctional (special) educator within the psychological and pedagogical support team for a child with special educational needs. The relevance of the topic is driven by the rapid growth in the number of students with special educational needs in inclusive classes of general secondary education institutions in Ukraine, which shifts the central problem from ensuring access to education toward ensuring the quality and coherence of support. The aim of the article is to substantiate the content, mechanisms and barriers of the interaction of this dyad and to outline directions for its optimization, using Laura Bronstein's model of interdisciplinary collaboration as an analytical lens. The study is theoretical and desk-based; its source base comprises current normative legal acts, official statistics of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, and Ukrainian and foreign scholarly publications. Drawing on the current regulatory framework, the author distinguishes the roles of the social worker as a representative of the social services system and the social pedagogue as a pedagogical worker of an educational institution, and shows that the widespread conflation of these terms reflects a real institutional split in the social dimension of support. Applying Bronstein's five components of collaboration to the dyad, the article demonstrates that genuine interdisciplinarity is not guaranteed by joint membership in the team but requires the deliberate implementation of interdependence, newly created professional activities, flexibility, collective ownership of goals and reflection on process. The decisive barrier is shown to be structural. The proposed directions of optimization focus on institutionalizing the coordination of support, drawing on foreign models, and on turning the individual development programme into a genuinely shared instrument of the two systems.
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References
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