The most critical questions facing the academic world nowadays are: What does it mean to be an educated person in the 21 st century? How not only to equip students with an adequate education in their field of study, but also to arm them with skills and knowledge required to leverage technologies effectively in the workplace? Much of the literature concerning these question dwell on educational milieu and space as two important notions in the context of the modern student-based approach in higher education. The professional experience and analysis of research papers have shown that the successful realization of educational aims greatly depends on the quality of educational milieu and space. Studentbased approach, which is becoming more and more popular in educational practice, emphasizes the importance of an individual approach to every student, the necessity to take into account learners' needs, targets and interests. Now the role of a teacher consists not only in knowledge transfer, but in introducing a variety of information sources and problem solving techniques to students, thus facilitating the process of their becoming independent, creative, motivated and responsible professionals.

Modern trends in the development of the world educational community are largely aimed at implementing inclusion and providing quality education for disabled people. However, the practice reveals a lack of readiness of subjects of educational environment for inclusion as a form of education that causes various communicative difficulties. They in turn complicate the implementation of inclusive education identified in international law. This work is to substantiate the need of a special educational environment aimed at the developing students' socio-cultural competency as a personal trait of the subjects of educational inclusion that provides social adaptation, integration, as well as professional and personal development of disabled people. Methods: method of review and analysis; expert evaluation method; survey questionnaire, questioning of subjects of educational activity, examination of products of educational activity; statistical methods of information processing. Sociocultural competency is a multi-level integrative personal trait that allows building communication on the basis of sociocultural interaction. It includes social, personal and activity-based preparedness of subjects of educational process. The leading methodological approaches to the design of an inclusive educational environment aimed at the development of this characteristic are proposed and substantiated in this work. The study also describes the criteria and quality indicators of an efficient inclusive educational environment that ensures the development the studied competency in students.  The results are interesting to Russian and foreign science that deals with developing theoretical aspects of educational environment design and managing the development of socially significant students' competencies in an inclusive educational environment.

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