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The purpose of this investigation is to gain insight into parents' perceptions of benefits vs burdens (value) of educational and healthcare service received for their child with ASD. Parents are the main integrators of long-term educational and healthcare service for their child with ASD.

Design/methodology/approach included (1) a sentiment analysis of discussion forum posts from an autism message board using a rule-based sentiment analysis tool that is specifically attuned to sentiments expressed in social media and (2) a qualitative content analysis of one-on-one interviews with parents of children diagnosed with ASD, complemented with interviews with experienced educators and clinicians.

Findings reveal the link between customized service integration and long-term benefits. Both parents and service providers emphasize the need to integrate healthcare and educational service to create holistic long-term care for a child with ASD. Parents highlight the benefits of varied services, but availability or cost are burdens if the service is not publicly provided, or covered by insurance. Service providers' lack of experience with ASD and people's ignorance of the challenges of ASD are burdens.

Ensuring health outcomes for a child with ASD requires an integrated service system and long-term, customer-centric service process because the scope of service covers the child's entire childhood. Customized educational and healthcare service must be allocated and budgeted early in order to reach the goal of a satisfactory service output for each child.

This is the first service research to focus on parents' challenges with obtaining services for their child with ASD. This paper provides service researchers and managers insight into parents' perceptions of educational and healthcare service value (i.e. benefits vs. burdens) received for their child with ASD. These insights into customer-centric perceptions of value may be useful to research and may help service providers to innovate and provide integrated service directly to parents, or indirectly to service providers, who serve children with ASD.

In this paper, the authors focus on a professional development programme in Cyprus aiming to enhance teachers’ intercultural understanding, awareness and competencies. This paper aims to focus on trainers’ and teacher trainees’ reflections upon a teacher professional development programme in the primary school in Cyprus with the largest number of Roma children.

The training was provided by a small team of six trainers. Immediately after each training session, each trainer participated in an interview, while three of the trainers participated also in a focus-group interview at the end of the training. The trainers’ data were complemented by semi-structured interviews with a number of trainees either before or after the training. All interviews were transcribed, while interview questions comprised the framework for the qualitative analysis. The findings are presented by means of content analysis which formed the basis for emerging themes.

The authors claim that trainee teachers appeared culturally aware and sensitive, as well as knowledgeable about intercultural education; furthermore, they seemed to implement different teaching methodologies and curriculum interventions to support Roma children’s inclusion in the local school community. At the same time, they seemed to adopt instrumental approaches towards the content and purpose of the programme, seeking explicit instructional guidelines, plans and heuristics to deal with Roma inclusion. Considering the mis-recognition of teachers’ efforts by stakeholders outside the school and the expectations of the educational authorities – voiced via their school inspectors – teachers desperately asserted the need for tangible strategies to help them cope with difference in their classrooms.

The authors argue that such professional development programmes should aim at facing, deconstructing and bringing to the fore prejudices and discrimination against the Other/s by valuing teachers, first, as reflective individuals and, second, as professionals with their own cultural backgrounds and identities, on which any training programme, of the kind presented in this paper, could start from and build on.

Even though there is no tailored magic recipe to make teachers’ daily professional enterprise in multicultural settings easy, to help teachers master the necessary knowledge, skills and confidence, the authors suggest that training should be directly linked to classroom practice and acknowledge stress and helplessness that accompany work in multicultural school settings.

The inclusion strategy in many educational systems needs to become more comprehensive to cope with varying sources of social exclusion, faced by vulnerable groups of a different cultural background, such as Roma. Teacher training thus needs to meet the challenges of working in a diverse and multicultural environment in general and with Roma children in particular. In view of the multicultural character of local societies, a more critically oriented humanistic education is needed based on tolerance and understanding.

The limited participation of Roma in the school system could be related to teachers’ (mis)conceptions about the Roma culture and that the widely different ways in which Roma relate to schooling are often disregarded by the school.

This paper highlights inclusion issues Indigenous people experience maintaining their mental health in the workplace.

Using a grounded theoretical approach, five sharing circles were conducted with the Nokiiwin Tribal Council's community members to better understand inclusivity issues related to workplace mental health.

Five themes emerged from the data related to enhancing inclusivity and workplace mental health for Indigenous workers: (1) connecting with individuals who understand and respect Indigenous culture; (2) respecting Indigenous traditions; (3) hearing about positive experiences; (4) developing trusting relationships and (5) exclusion is beyond the workplace.

The next step is to finalize development of the Wiiji app and evaluate the effectiveness of the app in helping Indigenous workers feel included at work and to improve workplace mental health. If effective, the Indigenous-developed e-mental health app will be promoted and its benefits for helping Indigenous workers feel included at work and also for providing accessible mental health resources, will be known. In the future, other Indigenous groups may be potentially interested in adopting a similar application in their workplace(s).

There is very little known about inclusivity issues related to Indigenous workers' maintaining their mental health. This paper identifies major issues influencing the exclusion and inclusion of Indigenous workers.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the development periods of home-based learning in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 pandemic, then discusses the differences in how the more affluent and well-educated middle-class parents and the economically and culturally disadvantaged working-class parents have dealt with the challenges of this new learning mode in their children’s education.

This research mainly adopted the qualitative research method, and used data from multiple sources, including online and offline participant observations, informal interviews and second-hand official reports.

The preliminary findings suggest that due to the closure of the formal schooling system, the impact of unequal family resources – such as tangible economic investment and intangible cultural and social support – on students’ academic performance has been exposed, thus reinforcing the pre-existing inequality between different social classes.

The findings of this paper are primarily based on preliminary observations and informal interviews, and it needs more systematic studies, both qualitative and quantitative, are needed to provide further empirical evidence to demonstrate the impacts of digital, housing and knowledge divide between the middle- and working-class families on students’ academic performance.

The paper presents new empirical data concerning the class mechanisms underlying home-based learning during the class suspension in Hong Kong. It shows that home-based learning in this challenging time has exposed the existing inequality in education.