Familialised Governance in Greek Special Education: Parental Roles Across Placement Pathways

Abstract

This conceptual article examines how special education in Greece is governed through the redistribution of institutional responsibility to families. It operationalises familialisation by specifying institutionally produced parental roles through which provision is organised under fragmented and contingent conditions. By tracing how these roles relate and shift across placement arrangements (e.g., parallel support, inclusion units, special assistants, home-based instruction, segregated schools), the article argues that parental labour can be understood as a structural condition shaping access to mainstream placement and support. It concludes that familialised governance converts formally equal rights within public education into unequal possibilities of realisation by making mainstream participation dependent on households’ differential resources and institutional capacity.

1. Introduction

Special education in Greece has developed through a complex and often unstable combination of legislative reform, administrative expansion, and policy discourse (Zoniou-Sideri et al., 2006). Since the enactment of Law 3699/2008, special education, which was already situated within the public education system, has been re-regulated through the consolidation of diagnostic and assessment procedures as central governance mechanisms, alongside the formalisation of differentiated placement options and support arrangements.

Table 1. Special education placement options within the Greek education system.

Institution	Location	Institutional Relation to Mainstream Classroom	Funding Source	Description
Home-based Schooling	Student’s home	Segregated	State-funded	Education is delivered at the student’s home, typically for those with severe health or developmental conditions that preclude school attendance.
Special School	Separate institution (may share facilities with mainstream schools)	Segregated	State-funded	Students attend segregated schools; interaction with non-disabled peers is limited and occasional. Special schools may be impairment-specific (e.g., schools for the blind) or designed to serve students with diverse diagnoses.
Inclusion Unit	Mainstream school (outside the general classroom)	Partially mainstreamed	State-funded	Students continue to attend the mainstream school setting while receiving targeted educational support in a separate instructional space for designated periods during the school day.
Special Assistant	Mainstream school (inside the general classroom)	Mainstreamed (individual support)	Privately funded by parents or caregivers	An assistant hired by the family provides individualized in-class support, supplementing or substituting state support structures.
Parallel Support	Mainstream school (inside the general classroom)	Mainstreamed (individual support)	State-funded (via National Strategic Reference Framework)	A special education teacher individually supports the student’s participation in the mainstream curriculum.

maps the main institutional arrangements through which special education provision is organised in Greece. By juxtaposing institutional location, relation to the mainstream classroom, and funding source, the table highlights the differentiated organisational logics through which support, segregation, and responsibility are structured within the system.

As Table 1 illustrates, placement arrangements differ not only in terms of educational setting but also in how responsibility for support is distributed between public institutions and families. While some arrangements are fully state-funded and institutionally embedded, others involve partial or indirect reliance on families, particularly where privately funded support mechanisms are introduced within public schooling. These variations constitute the institutional background against which the redistribution of responsibility examined in this article takes place.

The Greek education system is strongly centralised, with funding, staffing, and policy direction largely controlled at the national level. Despite the dominance of public provision, education is characterised by an extensive shadow education sector (Kassotakis & Verdis, 2013) and comparatively high levels of household expenditure, indicating a structural reliance on families to supplement formal provision. Critical analyses of Greek special education, however, have drawn attention to persistent implementation gaps, fragmented provision, and the continued presence of segregating practices, despite the formal expansion of mainstream educational routes (Nteropoulou-Nterou & Slee, 2019). A diagnostic culture grounded in medicalised and individualised understandings of difficulty continues to organise special education, with assessment, labelling, and categorical classification functioning as the primary gateways to support, placement, and resource allocation (Honkasilta & Koutsoklenis, 2024). Research further indicates that key support mechanisms within mainstream schools are characterised by instability, procedural mediation, and contingent provision, often requiring sustained parental coordination and intervention in order to function (Koutsoklenis & Papadimitriou, 2024).

Recent national estimates provide an indication of the scale and evolving distribution of special education participation in Greece. According to the Observatory for Disability Issues (2026), during the 2024–2025 school year, approximately 144,861 students with “disabilities and/or special educational needs” (with or without formal certification) were enrolled across primary and secondary general and special education, representing about 10% of the total student population in the country. Over the period 2020/21–2024/25, the estimated population of students with “disabilities or special educational needs” increased by approximately 39%, despite a simultaneous and steady decline in the overall student population. This increase has occurred primarily within mainstream schooling. During the same period, the number of students with “disabilities or special educational needs” attending general schools increased by about 40%, while enrolment in special education schools increased by roughly 20% (Observatory for Disability Issues, 2026).

The distribution of support within mainstream schools reveals substantial differences in access to specialised provision. Approximately 40% of students with “disabilities or special educational needs” attending general schools receive support only from the general classroom teacher, without additional specialised assistance (Observatory for Disability Issues, 2026). The pattern differs significantly between educational levels. In secondary education, an estimated 65% of students with “disabilities or special educational needs” receive no specialised support, whereas in primary education the corresponding proportion is approximately 14.5% (Observatory for Disability Issues, 2026). Where specialised support is provided within mainstream schools, it is most commonly organised through Inclusion Units, which supported about 37% of these students during the 2024–2025 school year (Observatory for Disability Issues, 2026).

Data also indicate growing pressures on existing support structures. Between the school years 2023/24 and 2024/25, the number of students attending Inclusion Units increased substantially, with an additional 3194 students enrolled, while the total number of Inclusion Units declined by 6.5%, from 3408 to 3188 (Observatory for Disability Issues, 2026). A similar pattern appears in the provision of Parallel Support. The number of students receiving Parallel Support increased by approximately 25% during the same period (from 19,315 to 23,960 students), yet this expansion has been accompanied by a documented reduction in the number of support hours allocated per student (Observatory for Disability Issues, 2026). Moreover, not all approved requests for support are ultimately implemented. Around 8% of approved requests for Parallel Support, corresponding to 2001 students, were not covered (Observatory for Disability Issues, 2026). In such cases, families may resort to privately arranged assistance. Official data record 1388 students supported by privately arranged Special Assistants during the 2024–2025 school year (Observatory for Disability Issues, 2026), although the actual number may be higher due to the prevalence of undeclared or informal employment arrangements (Koutsoklenis & Karagianni, 2024).

These patterns provide an empirical backdrop for the governance dynamics analysed in the article. The expansion of the population identified as having disabilities or special educational needs, the uneven distribution of specialised support across educational levels, and the growing pressure on institutional support structures together illustrate the conditions under which responsibility is redistributed within the system. The coexistence of increasing demand, partial coverage of approved support measures, and the reliance on privately arranged assistance indicates that formal provision does not always translate into stable institutional support. Within this context, families frequently become involved in initiating procedures, coordinating fragmented arrangements, and compensating for gaps in provision.

2. Methodological Positioning

This article is a conceptual–institutional analysis of Greek special education governance. It does not present new empirical data. Instead, it reconstructs how access to support and placement is organised through the legal–administrative architecture of provision and through findings from existing scholarship on Greek special education and parent–school relations. The analysis proceeds by developing an analytical model—familialised governance—and operationalising it through a role-based typology of institutionally produced parental roles across placement pathways. References to parental action and experience are used in an analytical sense and, where indicated, draw on secondary studies rather than on primary data collected for this article. The aim is to clarify mechanisms of responsibility distribution that shape the practical realisation of formally universal rights. The term “parents” is used as an analytical category referring to households’ institutional positioning within special education governance and includes carers or guardians in cases where parents are not present. While we recognise that care and parental labour may be internally differentiated within families (Katartzi, 2017), this article does not analyse intra-household divisions of labour. Nor is the term “parent” used here to denote a binary male–female distinction; rather, it refers to those adults who assume responsibility for the child’s educational participation.

In this article, governance refers to the ways education systems organise access to schooling, support, and placement by distributing responsibilities across institutions, professionals, and families. In special education, governance is particularly enacted through decisions over diagnosis, eligibility, and educational placement (Tomlinson, 2017). Contemporary education governance operates through indirect mechanisms (procedures, eligibility criteria, placement arrangements, and conditional access to support) rather than through uniform provision or direct institutional responsibility (Ball, 2017). Such arrangements rely heavily on proceduralisation and responsibilisation, positioning parents as key actors in sustaining educational provision under conditions of institutional fragmentation and resource constraint (Runswick-Cole & Hodge, 2009). From this perspective, parental involvement is not simply encouraged or valued, but can become structurally required for educational arrangements to function. Governance thus shapes who must act, coordinate, negotiate, or compensate in order for educational participation to be maintained.

Within this governance framework, ‘inclusion’ is treated as an evaluative and policy-level term rather than an analytical category. The analysis therefore uses the terms ‘mainstream education’ and ‘mainstream educational placement’ to describe institutional arrangements, allowing closer examination of how responsibility for educational participation is organised in practice. Research on parent–school relations in Greece indicates that parental involvement is shaped by asymmetrical relations of authority, accountability, and responsibility, rather than by equal partnership alone (Penderi et al., 2023; Slot et al., 2025). Research on parental perspectives in the Greek education system also highlights the importance of institutional and organisational factors in shaping parent–school relations. Koutsampelas et al. (2021) found that parental satisfaction with schools is closely associated with school-level factors such as leadership, communication practices, and organisational climate.

Existing empirical research on parental perspectives in Greek special education also documents the central role of families in supporting and navigating educational arrangements. Survey research on parental involvement in the education of students diagnosed with learning disabilities shows that parents and teachers attribute different meanings to parental participation in schooling. Parents tend to associate their involvement primarily with parenting and learning-at-home practices, whereas teachers emphasise communication and participation in school-level decision-making processes (Eleftheriadou & Vlachou, 2023). Similarly, studies examining parental perspectives on inclusive education for children diagnosed with intellectual disabilities in mainstream Greek schools report that parents frequently highlight organisational and administrative challenges, limited guidance and information from schools, and the need for sustained cooperation with teachers in order to support their children’s participation (Mavropalias et al., 2019).

Familialisation provides an analytical lens for examining how responsibility for care, support, and participation is redistributed from public institutions to families under specific institutional conditions. Familialisation has been previously explored in educational sociology as a structural positioning of parents in relation to schooling processes, marking involvement not simply as normative but as institutionally shaped labour (Edwards & Alldred, 2000). By bringing together a governance perspective and a familialisation framework, the article conceptualises parental roles as institutionally produced positions. In this sense, the article interprets Greek special education as operating through a familialised governance configuration, in which parental labour becomes a condition shaping access to mainstream education across different educational placement arrangements. The concept of familialised governance is used here as an analytical lens for examining how responsibility is redistributed across specific institutional arrangements rather than as a totalising explanation of the entire system. Different placement mechanisms and support structures generate distinct configurations of responsibility, which the analysis seeks to differentiate rather than subsume under a single uniform dynamic.

3. Conceptual Framework: Dimensions of Familialisation

The concept of familialisation originates in feminist welfare-state and political economy scholarship concerned with how responsibilities for care, support, and social reproduction are distributed across the state, the market, and the family (Lewis, 1992; Saraceno, 2016). Within this literature, familialisation refers to institutional arrangements in which families become the primary locus for the provision, coordination, or financing of care, either because public provision is limited or because policy actively assigns caring responsibilities to households. The concept is analytically paired with defamilialisation, which denotes policies and institutional arrangements that reduce individuals’ dependence on family relations by providing services, income supports, or rights that enable care and support to be organised outside the household. The framework is therefore used here as a heuristic device for examining how responsibility is distributed within specific institutional arrangements, rather than as a claim that familialisation exhaustively explains all dynamics within the system.

Early formulations of familialisation emerged from feminist critiques of welfare-state typologies that treated households as neutral units and obscured the gendered organisation of unpaid labour. By foregrounding care and dependency, this body of work reframed welfare regimes as systems that actively structure who carries responsibility for meeting social needs (Daly & Lewis, 2000; Lewis, 1992). Familialisation is therefore not simply a descriptive label but an analytical lens for examining how institutional design redistributes obligations and how this redistribution is patterned by gender, class, and social position.

A widely used refinement of the concept is provided by Leitner’s (2003) typology, which distinguishes between implicit, explicit, and optional forms of familialism. Implicit familialisation refers to contexts in which families become responsible not because they are formally designated as such, but because public services are absent, fragmented, delayed, or insufficient. In these cases, families step in to fill institutional gaps without formal recognition or adequate support. Saraceno and Keck (2010) similarly describe unsupported familialism as a configuration in which families are expected to provide care while institutional backing remains weak. This form of familialisation is particularly salient in education and disability contexts, where access to support is conditional, procedurally complex, and unevenly implemented (Runswick-Cole & Hodge, 2009).

By contrast, explicit familialisation refers to policy arrangements that openly promote or institutionalise the caring role of the family. Here, family responsibility is not merely assumed but formally articulated through rules, procedures, or policy designs that position the family as a recognised provider of care (Leitner, 2003). Explicit familialisation may involve legal expectations, administrative requirements, or institutional practices that integrate family labour into the normal functioning of public services. Although more visible than implicit forms, explicit familialisation is not necessarily more equitable, as it often reproduces existing inequalities in families’ capacity to respond (Saraceno, 2016).

Between these two poles lies optional familialisation, a configuration in which families are, in principle, offered a choice between providing care themselves and relying on non-family services. Comparative research consistently shows, however, that such “choices” are structured by access to resources, information, and bargaining power (Leitner, 2003; Saraceno, 2016). As a result, optional familialisation frequently operates as a class-selective arrangement rather than as a genuinely universal option.

Recent scholarship has emphasised additional dimensions that are crucial for understanding how familialisation operates in practice. One such dimension is temporality. Familialisation often functions as a time-bound mechanism that compels families to bridge waiting periods, administrative delays, or transitional phases within institutional processes. Responsibility is redistributed not only across actors but also across time, with families expected to absorb uncertainty and delay (Daly & Lewis, 2000). In education systems, this temporal dimension becomes visible where support depends on sequential procedures (assessment, certification, allocation) during which families must sustain educational participation in the interim (Runswick-Cole, 2008). In some contexts, family responsibility is activated temporarily, for example during short gaps in provision (episodic familialisation). In others, it becomes a durable feature of the system, with family labour constituting a permanent condition for access to support (continuous familialisation).

Another crucial dimension is stratification. Familialisation is rarely experienced uniformly. Because families differ in economic resources, cultural capital, and institutional literacy, reliance on family responsibility tends to produce classed and unequal outcomes. Comparative research shows that regimes with strong familialist elements systematically reproduce inequality by converting access to care and support into a function of household capacity (Saraceno & Keck, 2010). In education, this stratification becomes particularly visible where families can supplement or replace public provision through private expenditure, transforming inclusion into a market-mediated capacity rather than a universal institutional guarantee (Ball, 2003, 2017).

Familialisation is also a moralised process. It is sustained not only through institutional design but through normative expectations regarding parental responsibility. Research on parent–professional relations in special educational needs demonstrates how discourses of partnership and involvement can function as technologies of responsibilisation, reframing institutional shortcomings as matters of parental involvement while leaving professional authority intact (Vincent & Tomlinson, 1997; Runswick-Cole & Hodge, 2009).

Finally, a dimension of particular relevance to education and disability is medicalised familialisation. Scholarship on medicalisation emphasises that diagnostic categories expand through everyday institutional practices, not solely through the actions of clinicians (Conrad, 2007). In schooling, teachers and educational professionals play a key role in identifying difficulties and directing families toward diagnostic pathways. Diagnosis functions as a routing technology that translates pedagogical difficulty into administratively legible conditions governing eligibility for support (Slee, 2018). Parents are drawn into the work of activating, legitimising, and sustaining these classifications across institutional contexts. Medicalisation therefore operates not only as an ideological bias but also as a governance mechanism that enables the redistribution of responsibility from schools to families.

Taken together, these dimensions conceptualise familialisation as a multi-dimensional process through which education systems manage scarcity, uncertainty, and difference while limiting the transformation of mainstream institutions themselves. This framework provides the analytical basis for examining how parental roles are constituted within the Greek education system, how they shift across institutional arrangements, and how mainstreaming and segregation are governed through differentiated distributions of responsibility.

4. Operationalising Familialisation Through Parental Roles

In order to operationalise familialisation within special education, this section examines parental roles as institutionally shaped positions through which responsibility for educational support is organised. Rather than approaching parental involvement as a matter of individual attitudes or voluntary involvement, parental roles are conceptualised here as responses often required by institutional arrangements, eligibility procedures, and resource constraints (Runswick-Cole & Hodge, 2009; Vincent & Tomlinson, 1997). Each role reflects a specific way in which educational systems rely on families to sustain provision, coordinate services, or compensate for gaps in support (see

Table 2. Parental roles, dimensions of familialisation, and governance logics across placements.

Institution/Mechanism	Core Function in the System	Parental Role	Familialisation Dimension(s)	Governance Logic
Mainstream classroom (pre-diagnosis)	Production of normativity; identification of “difficulty”	Initiator (under institutional prompting)	Implicit; moralised; medicalised	Pedagogical difficulty is reframed as an individual/familial problem, triggering diagnostic legibility as a condition for support
IACSC	Classification, certification, routing to placement pathways	Initiator and consenter (under constraint)	Implicit; temporal; medicalised	Diagnosis operates as a governance threshold that shapes eligibility, placement, and responsibility
Parallel Support	In-class individualised support (often administratively contingent)	Coordinator/compensator	Temporal; continuous	Mainstream participation often depends on families absorbing delays, instability, and fragmentation of provision
Inclusion Units	Partial mainstreaming; internalised segregation	Negotiator	Temporal; continuous	Mainstream educational placement becomes conditional and continuously renegotiated in terms of time, space, and participation
Special Assistant	Privatised in-class support within public schooling	Employer/manager	Explicit; continuous; stratified	Unmet public obligations are converted into market-mediated provision; mainstream access becomes class-differentiated
Home-based instruction	Educational withdrawal under medical justification	Care coordinator/consenter	Implicit; continuous; medicalised	Educational participation is maintained through family-based care rather than institutional adaptation
Special/segregated schools	Educational containment framed as care and protection	Consenter/residual carer	Reconfigured familialisation (withdrawal from mainstreaming work; continued care dependency)	Responsibility for sustaining mainstream inclusion is withdrawn through segregation, without defamilialising care or dependency

).

As shown in Table 2, parental roles do not emerge as individual strategies but as institutionally produced positions linked to specific governance mechanisms. The table illustrates how different placement arrangements redistribute responsibility to families through distinct forms of familialisation, ranging from implicit and temporal forms to explicit and stratified ones.

The initiator role emerges at the point where a child’s difficulties can no longer be managed within the normative expectations of the mainstream classroom.

Initiation is typically shaped by institutional prompting and conditionality, rather than operating as an unconstrained choice. In this role, parents act as the entry point of legibility: they activate the diagnostic apparatus that transforms pedagogical difficulty into an administrable category. In the Greek context, the Interdisciplinary Assessment, Counselling and Support Centre (IACSC) does not operate merely as an advisory diagnostic service, but as a vertically positioned governance node, whose classificatory decisions carry administrative effects on educational placement and can stabilise students’ movement toward segregated trajectories (Papadimitriou, 2025). Initiation therefore marks the moment when responsibility begins to shift away from the school and towards the family. This role corresponds to implicit and medicalised familialisation, where access to support depends on parental activation of diagnostic pathways rather than institutional responsibility.

The consenter role refers to parental involvement defined primarily through acceptance under constraint. Parents are asked to endorse recommendations (diagnostic classifications, placements, or institutional pathways) that are formally presented as advisory but are materially difficult to refuse without losing access to support. Consent here is not equivalent to choice. It is a juridical and moral act that legitimates institutional decisions while redistributing responsibility to the family. This role exemplifies moralised familialisation, in which constrained agreement is reframed as parental responsibility for outcomes that are institutionally pre-structured (Gillies, 2005).

As coordinators, parents take on the task of aligning fragmented institutional arrangements. This includes liaising between teachers, support staff, diagnostic services, and administrative authorities; managing delays, inconsistencies, and gaps in provision; and ensuring continuity across school time and non-school time. Coordination becomes necessary where support is formally provided but often contingent in implementation (e.g., Parallel Support). The child’s mainstream educational placement depends not only on institutional presence but also on ongoing parental orchestration. This role exemplifies temporal and continuous familialisation, as families absorb delay and instability over extended periods (Daly & Lewis, 2000; Saraceno & Keck, 2010).

The negotiator role emerges in hybrid arrangements, most notably in Inclusion Units, where mainstream participation is partial and continuously redefined. Parents negotiate the terms of participation: how many hours a child remains in the mainstream classroom, which subjects are followed, how long withdrawal will last, and under what conditions reintegration may occur. This role reflects implicit but continuous familialisation, in which mainstream participation is formally affirmed yet practically conditional, requiring continuous parental labour to stabilise belonging.

The employer role represents the most explicit and intensified form of familialisation. In arrangements such as the Special Assistant, parents directly hire, pay, supervise, and manage personnel working inside public schools. Here, mainstream educational placement is no longer mediated primarily through institutional provision, but through private employment relations. This role constitutes explicit and stratified familialisation, converting unmet public obligations into market-based solutions and transforming inclusion into a class-differentiated capacity.

5. Relations Between Parental Roles

The parental roles identified above should not be understood as discrete, fixed, or mutually exclusive positions. Rather, they are relational, forming a structured pathway through which families are positioned within the Greek special education system. The relational structure of parental roles outlined in Table 2 helps clarify how these positions form a pathway rather than a set of isolated forms of involvement. These roles emerge in relation to institutional demands and are activated at different moments as children move across diagnostic, educational, and placement trajectories. Initiation constitutes the necessary point of entry into the system. Without the activation of diagnostic procedures, no formal support pathway becomes available. In this sense, initiation precedes all other roles. It marks the moment at which pedagogical difficulty is translated into an administratively legible condition and responsibility begins to shift from the school to the family. Diagnosis here functions as a governance threshold rather than a neutral assessment, activating medicalised and implicit forms of familialisation.

Once this threshold is crossed, parental involvement tends to become structurally required. Consent operates as the mechanism through which institutional decisions are stabilised and legitimised. Whether the proposed pathway concerns mainstreaming or segregation, parental consent functions as a juridical and moral act that authorises institutional outcomes. Although formally framed as agreement, consent is typically exercised under constraint, given that refusal may result in the withdrawal or non-provision of support. Through consent, institutional decisions acquire durability while responsibility is redistributed to families. This process reflects moralised familialisation, in which responsibility for outcomes is displaced onto parents while institutional authority remains intact.

In partially mainstream arrangements, coordination and negotiation tend to coexist. Where support is formally present but insufficient, unstable, or ambiguously defined, parents are positioned as required to coordinate between multiple actors and services while simultaneously negotiating the terms of their child’s participation. This includes negotiating time spent in mainstream classrooms, patterns of withdrawal, expectations of performance, and the boundaries of support. These roles reflect neither stable mainstream educational placement nor outright segregation, but a condition of continuous adjustment in which belonging is provisional and repeatedly redefined. Such arrangements exemplify temporal and continuous familialisation, as families are required to absorb institutional delay, fragmentation, and uncertainty over extended periods.

The employer role represents not a freely chosen strategy but an escalation of responsibility that typically emerges under conditions of prolonged institutional insufficiency, instability, or delay in publicly provided support (Koutsoklenis & Karagianni, 2024). By hiring and managing a Special Assistant, parents convert unmet institutional obligations into private employment relations. This shift intensifies familialisation and introduces strong class selectivity, as access to mainstream educational placement becomes dependent on a family’s economic and cultural resources rather than on universal provision. This arrangement reflects broader reforms in Greek education that reframe inclusion as an individualised and market-mediated responsibility, shifting the burden of educational support from public provision to families while preserving the formal architecture of mainstream schooling (Koutsoklenis & Karagianni, 2024).

Consent often reappears at moments of exhaustion. After sustained periods of compensatory labour—coordinating services, negotiating arrangements, or financing support—families may accept segregated placements as a means of withdrawing from the ongoing responsibility of sustaining mainstream educational placement. In this sense, segregation functions not as defamilialisation but as a reconfiguration of familial responsibility, relocating educational provision while leaving broader relations of care and dependency intact.

Throughout these processes, parents may inhabit multiple roles simultaneously and may cycle through roles repeatedly across school years. A parent may act as coordinator and negotiator at the same time, or move from initiator to employer and back to consenter as institutional conditions shift. This fluidity underscores that parental roles are not expressions of individual disposition but structured responses to a system in which responsibility for mainstream educational placement is progressively displaced onto families through implicit, moralised, temporal, and stratified mechanisms of governance.

6. Role Shifts Across Mainstream–Segregation Trajectories

Parental roles shift systematically as children move across different positions on the mainstream–segregation continuum. These shifts are not driven by parental preference or strategy, but by how educational arrangements distribute responsibility between institutions and families. In contexts of stable mainstream educational placement, where children remain primarily in the mainstream classroom and receive some form of institutional support, parental roles are typically centred on initiation, coordination, and negotiation. Parents initiate diagnostic processes in order to secure access to support, coordinate between teachers, support staff, and external services, and negotiate the practical terms of participation within the classroom. Familialisation in these contexts is largely implicit. Mainstream education is formally affirmed as a conditional right, yet its practical realisation depends on continuous parental labour to compensate for limited resources, delays, and institutional uncertainty. Such arrangements exemplify implicit and temporal familialisation, in which families are required to buffer the gap between policy commitment and institutional capacity (Leitner, 2003; Daly & Lewis, 2000).

In conditions of partial or conditional mainstream educational placement, parental roles become more intensive and enduring. Coordination and negotiation are no longer episodic but ongoing, as parents manage unstable staffing, fluctuating hours of support, and shifting expectations regarding attendance, performance, and withdrawal from the mainstream classroom. In these arrangements, mainstream educational placement is not revoked, but it is continually tested. Familialisation takes on both temporal and continuous dimensions, as parents are required to sustain involvement across school years without clear trajectories toward stability. Such arrangements function to preserve mainstream norms while externalising the work of adaptation onto families (Runswick-Cole & Hodge, 2009).

Privatised mainstream support, exemplified by the use of Special Assistants, marks a qualitative shift in parental roles. Here, parents assume the role of employers, directly financing, supervising, and managing support personnel within public schools. This role reflects an escalation of responsibility rather than an expansion of choice. It typically follows prolonged exposure to institutional insufficiency and operates as a compensatory mechanism where public provision has failed to deliver meaningful mainstream participation. Familialisation in this context is explicit, continuous, and strongly stratified by class. Mainstream educational access becomes a purchasable condition rather than a publicly guaranteed right, reproducing educational inequality through market mechanisms (Ball, 2003).

At the segregated end of the continuum, parental roles contract into that of consenter and residual carer. Placement in special or segregated schooling is formalised through diagnostic and administrative procedures that require parental endorsement. This placement withdraws from families the responsibility of sustaining placement within mainstream classrooms, such as coordination, negotiation, or compensatory provision, by relocating education to a separate institutional space. However, this withdrawal does not extend to care which remains largely familialised. What is reduced is not family responsibility per se, but the specific burden of making mainstream educational placement function in the absence of systemic transformation. Segregation thus operates as a governance solution to institutional incapacity rather than as a defamilialising alternative.

7. Conclusions

This article has argued that important dimensions of special education governance in Greece involve the redistribution of responsibility for sustaining mainstream educational participation from institutions to families. Through an analysis of institutional arrangements and the parental roles they require, the article has shown that familialisation is not an unintended side effect of implementation failure but a structuring feature of the system. By conceptualising parental roles as institutionally produced positions rather than expressions of individual involvement or choice, the analysis has demonstrated how familialisation operates through implicit, temporal, moralised, medicalised, and stratified mechanisms. Parents are required to initiate diagnostic pathways, consent to constrained options, coordinate fragmented provision, negotiate conditional mainstream participation, or directly employ support personnel.

Parent–school relations in Greece are formally articulated through policy discourses of partnership, involvement, and shared responsibility, yet substantively organised through asymmetric distributions of authority and obligation. While educational professionals and diagnostic bodies retain control over classification, placement, and the conditions of mainstream participation, parents are positioned as responsible for activating procedures, compensating for gaps in provision, coordinating fragmented supports, and, in some cases, financing educational labour. Partnership thus operates less as a framework of co-decision than as a mechanism of responsibilisation, through which institutional limitations are managed and rendered acceptable. In this context, parent–school interactions become sites of negotiation, compliance, and moral evaluation rather than pedagogical collaboration. Existing research describes these arrangements as asymmetrical and responsibility-laden, with collaboration frequently framed around individual parental adjustment rather than shared institutional accountability (Zoniou-Sideri & Nteropoulou-Nterou, 2007). Tensions, conflict, and parental exhaustion should therefore be understood not as failures of cooperation but as outcomes consistent with this policy configuration.

Inequalities in education are not produced solely through unequal access to resources or services, but through the institutional distribution of responsibility that governs access to education and support. Although Greek policy frameworks formally affirm equal rights to education and provision within the public system, access to mainstream educational placement in practice depends at least partially on families’ capacity to initiate procedures, coordinate fragmented support, negotiate conditions of participation, or privately compensate for institutional gaps. Equity thus operates as a contingent outcome, shaped by households’ differential capacities to meet system requirements. Familialisation converts formally equal rights into unequal possibilities of realisation, advantaging families with greater economic, cultural, and social resources in institutionally structured ways while intensifying dependency and exhaustion among those with fewer. In this sense, inequity in special education is not an accidental effect of imperfect implementation, but it emerges as an outcome consistent with governance arrangements that externalise responsibility onto families across different educational placement arrangements.

This article offers a conceptual–institutional interpretation of governance dynamics in Greek special education and therefore does not attempt to capture the full range of institutional variation across regions, schools, and administrative practices. While the analysis identifies recurring patterns in the redistribution of responsibility between institutions and families, further empirical research could examine how these dynamics vary across local contexts, school leadership practices, and professional cultures. Studies involving parents, teachers, and administrators would also allow closer examination of how these governance arrangements are experienced, negotiated, and potentially contested in practice.