Maura Gelati, Full Professor of Special Education and Pedagogy at the University of Milan-Bicocca, outlines the professional profile of the support teacher from a historical retrospective.

At the beginning of the last decade, thanks to the framework law 104/1992, mainstream schools were opened to all disabled people, regardless of the severity of their disability. In the spirit of this law, the task of the support teacher, who has their own specialisation, should be the integration of the disabled pupil into the class group. The author concludes that there is the need for continuous training of the support teacher, not only to promote a real school integration of the disabled child but also to establish meaningful relationships with extracurricular professionals and services in the community, in order to respond in an integrated way to the special needs of the pupil.