PhD student is awarded a project for the series Topics of the Public Agenda of the Center for Public Policy

Eugenia Victoriano, a UC Education Doctorate student, was awarded a project to be developed as an article in the series Topics on the Public Agenda of the UC Public Policy Center (CPP). The research project is titled “Support for Students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) in Professional Technical Higher Education: A pending challenge in Chile” and is in charge of a team made up, also, of Ernesto Trevino, academic and director of the Center UC, and Isabel Zúñiga, from My Talents Foundation.

The recognition obtained seeks to disseminate the work of UC professors, associated with public policies of national relevance, and during this 2022 it will provide funding for the development of research. In that sense,“Being able to count on the financing of the CPP and, even more importantly, the dissemination and support of this center, allows us to open up the subject and put it on the forefront of the discussion of public policies and future lines, both of research and of action, because there is very little empirical evidence on this”, explains the doctoral candidate.

The project

What is the probability that an SEN student will enter higher technical education? And how are they supported by current politics? These are two questions that the analysis will try to answer.

The project, which is already in the research phase, was born from the results that appeared in his doctoral thesis entitled “University policies: What opportunities do they offer to access for students with motor and sensory disabilities?”, which focuses specifically on university access policies. “As we proceed with the research, we realize that there is an important group of young people with special educational needs who arrive at technical training centers or professional institutes”, mentions the doctoral student.

The study analyzes the trajectories of this group of students and investigates the probability that they enter a technical training center or professional institute, contrasting it with the existing policies in this regard. The analysis works by crossing the data from the Ministry of Education of SEN students who were in the fourth grade and the higher education databases, to obtain the probability that a SEN student entered a technical training center (CFT) or professional institute ( IP).

In this way, he points out, based on the evidence found, "we realized that the CFT and IP receive students with special educational needs, but they do not have public policies that guide what they should do to favor their participation in conditions of equity in this context".

However, he says, they have faced obstacles, especially due to the lack of records of disabilities in private establishments: "Mineduc can only identify students who receive a subsidy for their special educational need, therefore, they are left out of this study those who participate in private private schools”. For the same, For Victoriano, this type of recognition is necessary to install in the thematic academy around SEN students, as well as to identify the factors that influence inequities and to be able to generate policies and actions to combat them.