The stance for the paper is that students with disabilities should be offered individualised and

personalised learning plans or supports. Scaffolding students with disabilities with differentiated
strategies has been an inherent requirement for the teaching profession, as Australian Professional
Standards for Teachers (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL], 2011) has
articulated the inclusivity of students with additional learning needs, which has been underpinned
by the belief that, according to Foremen & Arthur-Kelly (2011, pp.2-34), all the students can learn.
Personalised learning plans with differentiated content and strategies aid in exploring the potentials
of students with special learning needs as much as possible, and thus these students can have more
life opportunities.

Although students with disabilities are physically integrated into today's classroom, it unnecessarily
means that current teaching practices have successfully addressed their additional needs and
engaged them with learning. Instead, most of these students are still excluded from education due
to the lack of personalised supports and plans, which further accelerates the gap in terms of
academic outcomes and life skills between students with additional needs and the mainstream.
Inclusive education is no longer a new theme in Australia public educational system with their right
to education first guaranteed in 1992 by the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) (Federal
Register of Legislation, 2016). The DDA is improved and enhanced by enacting Disability Standards
for Education 2005, which attempts to ensure students with disabilities can have the same
opportunities and choices in education as other students (NSW Government, 2020). Despite the fact
that more students with disabilities are enrolled in education, there is no clear evidence showing
that these students are able to actively participate in learning (Department of Education and
Training [DET], 2015). Although students with disabilities are always discussed or presented as a
group in legislation, the fact is that the context of each student is different and unique, which means
there are no universal practices to approach exclusivity of these students. In other words, inclusive
education inherently requires personalised learning plans to address various learning needs framed
by contexts. However, many teachers still fail to deliver individual learning plans as their judgements
on students with disabilities are influenced by misconceptions and stereotypes. Another barrier in
implementing personalised learning plans is that teachers do not have adequate information about a
student with a disability to individualise a learning plan as the voice of students is always omitted in
the discussion of addressing learning needs.

Although students with disabilities are always grouped or labelled by their impairments or
disabilities, each of them is an individual case framed by their unique contexts, which means even
students with the same impairment still can require completely different strategies considering their
own settings. The same disability or disorder can be presented in different ways which lead to varied
learning needs. For example, a study conducted by Fleury et al. (2014) on students with Autism
Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has suggested great heterogeneity in their reading habits and capabilities.
In another similar study, researchers have employed individualised interventions to address the
behaviour problems of students with ASD, given that their communication and socialisation are on
different levels (Koegel et al., 2012). Moreover, disabilities sometimes can overlap with other issues
which require more comprehensive strategies to include these students in education. Studies have
suggested that the educational settings should develop or collaborate in more culturally appropriate
programs for Aboriginal communities to aid in the early diagnosis of disabilities as these students are
socioeconomically disadvantaged (DiGiacomo et al., 2013; Green at al., 2014). Likewise, the
scaffolding will be differentiated for students with a combination of disabilities (Pizzo & Bruce, 2010;
Coleman et al., 2015). Thus, it is impossible to engage a student with a disability in education
without looking into her or his own situation.