Emotions and Social Policy: The Univerdi Programme As a Pathway to Inclusive Education

Since 2017, the Fundación ONCE, with the collaboration of the European Social Fund, has launched university training programmes for employment aimed at young people with intellectual, developmental and/or autistic spectrum disabilities, aged between 18 and 30 and registered in the Youth Guarantee System. The UniverDI programme of the University of Jaén is one of these programmes.

UniverDI is a social policy aimed at reducing inequality and stigmatisation of people with intellectual disabilities in a discriminatory context where there is a high level of stigma, such as the educational environment.

One of the activities carried out throughout the different editions are the inclusive classes, in which UniverDI students attend Bachelor's or Master's degree classes with normotypical students. The main objective of these classes is to promote the inclusion of this group both in the university environment and in other social environments, based on human relations and the emotions generated by them.

In the current context, in which social policies have begun to recognise the central role of emotions in achieving their objectives, the UniverDI programme is presented as an example of how these policies seek labour integration and create positive emotional environments that favour full inclusion.

The experience shows the transformative effect of emotions on the social inclusion of people with ID. However, experience also shows that discrimination and isolation of this group in previous stages of formal education hinders their insertion and development in the field of higher education, which points to the need to develop public policies for effective inclusion at all stages of education. These policies should promote strong emotional links from primary to university education, ensuring that structural barriers are removed so that people with disabilities can access and participate fully in education.