Attitudes Towards Inclusive Education Under the RPWD Act, 2016: A Comparative Study Among Stakeholders of Education

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPWD) Act, 2016 marked a decisive shift in India's disability policy from a welfare-based to a rights-based paradigm, mandating inclusive education for children with disabilities within neighbourhood schools (Kukreja et al., 2026). While the legal architecture of the Act is comprehensive, its translation into classroom-level practice depends substantially on the attitudinal orientation of the stakeholders who implement it, teachers, parents, and school administrators. The present study compares the attitudes of these three stakeholder groups towards inclusive education under the RPWD Act, 2016, and examines whether gender influences this attitude, using a sample of 100 stakeholders drawn from higher secondary schools of the Patna region, Bihar. A descriptive survey design was adopted, and data were collected using an attitude scale adapted from the Sentiments, Attitudes and Concerns about Inclusive Education–Revised (SACIE-R) framework (Forlin et al., 2011). Illustrative analysis (one-way ANOVA and independent-samples t-test) indicated that school administrators reported the most favourable attitude, followed by teachers, while parents reported comparatively lower and more variable attitudes; gender did not emerge as a statistically significant differentiator. The findings are discussed in relation to existing literature on stakeholder attitudes towards inclusion (Avramidis & Norwich, 2002; De Boer et al., 2011; Guillemot et al., 2022) and the study concludes with implications for teacher training, parental sensitisation, and administrative capacity-building under the RPWD Act framework.