Abstract
The notion of inclusive education has become so cluttered with interest group agendas that inclusion no longer has a clear meaning for schools. The Government's inclusive education policy must keep individual children's needs in focus and avoid assumptions about particular categories of need. It must ignore academic idealists who suggest that special educational needs are redundant 'artefacts of the functionalist quest for rationality" (Skrtic, 1991). It must send a message to subversive professionals, telling them to concentrate on practical realities rather than flirting with new paradigm theories that lack "empirical grounding" (Norwich, 1999). It must refuse to condone the travesty of personal dignity perpetrated by normalisation fanatics who want to change the "appearance and social functioning of devalued people" (Hall, 1997). It must encourage special schools to set ambitious targets for improvement and for a wider community role. It must not let LEAs implement the policy too unevenly, despite their different starting points.
Inclusion was once widely understood as an approach to the organisation of schooling that merged special and mainstream education and made every child a full member of an age-appropriate class in their local school, doing the same lessons as others with the others (Hall, 1997). Taken as a vision of an educational system offering equitable access to socially valued resources, or "excellence for all children" (Government Green Paper on Meeting Special Educational Needs, October 1997), this understanding might have endured. Taken literally, the notion of inclusion has collided with the practical reality of schools as we know them and foundered.
If we are to salvage the necessary components for building a more inclusive educational system, we must first clear the clutter of interest group agendas that obscure the real issues.
The academic idealists' agenda purports to represent a quest for equal opportunities and human rights. A number of utopian campaigners not only wish to abolish special schools but also separate classes run by specialist teachers in mainstream schools, because they believe segregated educational provision is inimical to egalitarianism. In order to make the abolition of specialised schools and classes look like a responsible proposal, these idealists have to deconstruct the concept of special educational need and scatter its contents across the full spectrum of children's educational needs.
The assumption underlying the academic idealists' allegedly new paradigm, which is in danger of taking us back decades to where we were before seventies practitioners had started "identifying and treating student deficits" (Booth and Ainscow, 1998, p244), is that ordinary schools will be able to respond to a diversity of need far greater than that which is currently met within the parameters of mainstream education.
This takes us onto the subversive professionals' agenda, which is dedicated to achieving fundamental shifts of emphasis in mainstream schools. Even the Department for Education and Employment contains professionals who are trying to steer the Government away from the cost-effective mass transmission of decontextualised knowledge and away from enhancing the potential of the vast majority of future citizens to contribute economically by giving them an internationally competitive edge. They want mainstream schools to move further towards teaching and learning situated in meaningful contexts, to eschew competition and concentrate more on the social skills that make knowledge available through communication and interaction with peers and adults.
In our present system, mainstream pupils are expected to "understand the power of linguistic manifestations linguistically" (Bourdieu, 1992, p109), and to generate thoughts by a process of "instrumental rationalism" (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p50). Rogoff, Gauvain and Ellis repudiate such expectations, because for them the purpose of cognition "is not to produce thoughts but to guide intelligent action" (in Light, Sheldon and Woodhead, 1991, p321). Nevertheless, mainstream teachers not only want their pupils to produce thoughts, but also to make them available for scrutiny, as if they were commodities with an exchange value. The use of education to increase pupils' participation in cultural activities is thus diminished:
"The commoditization of learning engenders a fundamental contradiction between the use and exchange values of the outcome of learning, which manifests itself in conflicts between learning to know and learning to display knowledge for evaluation. Testing in schools.…..is perhaps the most pervasive and salient example of a way of establishing the exchange value of knowledge. Test taking then becomes a new parasitic practice, the goal of which is to increase the exchange value of learning independently of its use value" (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p112).
The aggregation of individual pupils' "raw" test scores has been used as a means of ranking schools' performance in league tables. The Government has since realised that "playing the numbers game is not enough" (Estelle Morris MP, in the Times Educational Supplement, 27th June 1997, p5) in respect of identifying the "value added" by schools, but it remains committed to obtaining "baseline assessments" which will make it "possible to measure any pupil's progress through his or her school career, and also compare that pupil with any other individual or group, whether locally or nationally" (White Paper on Excellence in Schools, July 1997, p26).
Tests in mainstream schools are usually applied to what Perkins calls the "person-solo" (1993, pp96-100), and they take no account of what a pupil is able to do when working in co-operation with a teacher to make use of information afforded by their environment. Why do we persist in testing children apart from the "person-plus" context? There is an important educational reason as well as the obvious practical reason where large numbers of mainstream pupils are involved: we generally want to assess not just "learning as increasing participation in communities of practice" (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p49) but individuals' ability to be self-reliant in respect of exercising a higher-order "executive function" of cognition (Perkins, 1993, pp96-100).
Priorities tend to be different in those special schools whose pupils have "pervasive learning difficulties" (Norwich, 1999, p93) or chronic impairments affecting their ability to communicate and interact. Specialist teachers are necessarily flexible about the extent to which pupils become loci of higher-order knowledge, and hence about where executive control over learning resides. When children rely heavily on adults to interpret situations that appear ambiguous, teachers assume greater responsibility for assisting and guiding them, "scaffolding" their participation in activities (Wood, Bruner and Ross, 1976, pp89-100).
Controversy arises if a specialist teacher usurps power as the sole locus of control, setting too many tasks designed to develop automaticity in children with profound and multiple learning difficulties, for example. Libertarians might understandably fear that those children would become over-dependent, passive recipients of others' instructions, vulnerable to neglect or worse forms of abuse. A sense of agency, a share in the ownership of the executive function no matter how it is distributed in a teaching and learning community, is obviously important if children are to feel safe and realise their potential for fulfilment. However, normalisation fanatics among the libertarians remain committed to the abolition of special schools irrespective of whether those institutions empower children and make them safer.
The normalisation fanatics' agenda is derived from Wolf Wolfensberger's philosophy (The Principle of Normalisation in Human Services, 1972), which requires the use of culturally valued means in order to enable people to live culturally valued lives. Proponents of this philosophy argue tautologically that if special schools are not a culturally valued means of education, they are bound to devalue their pupils' lives. Segregation from mainstream schooling is seen by normalisation fanatics as a step towards "death-making," the logical end point of society's desire to distance those it devalues (Hall, 1997).
While academic idealists perceive special education as a profession that emerged to contain the failure of state schooling to educate all children for "full political, economic, and cultural participation in democracy" (Skrtic, 1991), normalisation fanatics accuse specialist teachers of betraying pupils identified as having special educational needs by letting ordinary schools operate a policy of "cleansing" their mainstream population (Hall, 1997). This pejorative use of "cleansing" seems to encompass all pupils outside mainstream schools, from those excluded because they pose the threat of violence to those who have received a multidisciplinary assessment and a statement of entitlement to exceptional provision.
Exclusion is unmistakably the opposite of inclusion, so it does nothing to clutter the notion of inclusive education; but what about withdrawal from mainstream schooling into a freely chosen alternative form of schooling that not only alleviates nuisance factors and solves logistical problems but also adds specific educational benefits? Withdrawal that results in children having improved access to their cultural heritage, optimal learning conditions, and worthwhile community involvement, has an inclusive thrust; even if it precludes inclusion in a local school that serves everyone during childhood.
Unacceptably high levels of exclusion and withdrawal have prompted the Government into publishing a corrective programme of action (Meeting Special Educational Needs, 1998), backed by financial support to help Local Education Authorities (LEAs) with implementation. The Government's Action Plan demands more than the mere integration or reintegration of some of the pupils previously withdrawn or excluded from mainstream schools, however; LEAs must promote "an increasingly inclusive education system." Yet the precise meaning of inclusion is left open to interpretation: "inclusion is a process, not a fixed state."
Some LEAs welcome inclusion as a process that will resolve a troublesome item on their agenda; it will give them peace of mind about working within cash limits by obscuring the disparity between identified special educational needs and the resources available to meet them:
"As local authorities move more towards funding schools in partnership with other agencies.…..in pursuance of a policy of inclusion, so schools will need to place less reliance on identifying individual pupil need and concentrate more on addressing whole school issues that arise out of planning for diversity" (Unpublished seminar contribution from a senior LEA officer, 1999).
By changing the focus of their arrangements for distributing funds, LEAs could render individual pupils' needs invisible. This would be consistent with a radical constructivist's perspective; Gergen, for instance, declares that "what we have traditionally viewed as single individuals can more fruitfully be conceptualized as intersections of an array of relational units" (1990, p585). However, it would be inconsistent with the practice of writing statements that afford single individuals quantified access to specific educational resources.
Fewer statements are likely be written in future; albeit that the Government, sensitive to a surge of public anxiety over possible changes to its Code of Practice on the Identification and Assessment of Special Educational Needs, has promised parents that their access to statutory assessment will not be constrained and that the legal protection offered by statements will not be removed. Notwithstanding the Government's promise, statements will fall in number dramatically if they are henceforward mainly written for children who have "severe, long-term or lifelong complex medical or physical needs" (Meeting Special Educational Needs, 1998).
Special schools are also likely to become relatively scarce; and, although the Government intends that they should continue to play a "vital role" (ibid.), their remit to offer a broad and balanced curriculum could be whittled down to a medically-driven preponderance of caring and nurturing duties. This retrograde step would be a bitterly ironic by-product of inclusion.
Linking medical conditions, such as "damage to a localizable brain structure or pathway," with "particular cognitive deficits" can be misleading (Oliver et al, 2000, p2). Similarly, genetic disorders that affect brain development relatively early "are likely to have wide cascading effects," and those that occur relatively late in brain development "are likely to produce more subtle morphological and information processing consequences" (ibid. p3). Autism is probably not attributable to a specific piece of brain architecture.
Obversely, dyslexia is probably not truly a cognitive problem, "but rather something to do with the speed at which signals are transmitted along nerve fibres" (The Economist, 6th-12th November 1999, p134). Faulty myelin coating around those fibres might slow down the transmission of signals and hamper phoneme analysis by letting them "crowd in on one another"(ibid. p.134), but the neural cause has an uncertain effect on phonological processing ability and it does not necessarily translate into a cognitive deficit.
Given that "in several developmental disorders, such as autism, it has become evident that the causal path from genes to behavioural phenotype is variable and interacts crucially with environmental factors" (Oliver et al, 2000, p3), the Government must not be allowed to forget that the special educational needs of children with severe communication and interaction difficulties are just as valid as medical or physical needs in respect of commanding legally protected access to specialist expertise and withdrawal to an alternative learning environment.
Some autistic children have so many difficulties with communication and interaction that any engagement with mainstream peers, intellectually or socially, could hardly be construed as experience of inclusion. Sensory and emotional hypersensitivity are liable to make their tolerance of all kinds of stimulation low. They may be compulsive, obsessive and prone to acute anxiety attacks, sometimes sinking inward into calming routines and at other times lashing out furiously.
There are also autistic children who can benefit from mainstream schools, "where functional reinforcers are plentiful and good role models exist" (Harrison, 1998). The Government's inclusive education policy should keep individual children's needs in focus and avoid assumptions derived from syndromic categories. It should ignore academic idealists who suggest that special educational needs are redundant "artefacts of the functionalist quest for rationality" (Skrtic, 1991). It should send a message to subversive professionals, telling them to concentrate on practical realities rather than flirting with new paradigm theories that lack "empirical grounding" (Norwich, 1999). It should refuse to condone the travesty of personal dignity perpetrated by normalisation fanatics who want to change the "appearance and social functioning of devalued people" (Hall, 1997).
Those of us in special schools must in turn explain how our pedagogy compares and contrasts with that which prevails in mainstream schools. What appear to be differences in teaching methodology might only be differences in pace and emphasis (Lewis and Norwich, 2000), but they might also be reflections of a fundamentally different pedagogical framework. For example, a special school influenced by the theory of distributed cognitions (Salomon, 1993, ch.4) would be pedagogically distinct from a mainstream school that was almost entirely focussed on individual pupils' achievements.
One last way of clearing the clutter from inclusion would be for the Government to produce fresh guidance on what it wants from special schools. Those that met requisite standards in respect of pedagogy, learning environment, specialist approaches to the curriculum, or whatever the criteria for acceptability might be, could then be taken out of the reckoning as far as the local distribution of resources was concerned.
Instead of LEA maintained community and foundation special schools, there would be centrally funded state schools with pupil places available for purchase, operating in a similar way to non-maintained special schools except in the arrangements for underwriting their annual income. The charge for each place could be the same, irrespective of the cost of meeting individual pupils' needs; so that competing educational priorities were assessed at the point of referral in terms of value for money instead of price differentials.
Regional bodies, including representatives of the LEAs in each region, could periodically review the supply of and demand for special school places, advising the Government of where development grants or cuts might be appropriate. Pilot projects involving various statutory services, voluntary bodies and independent providers were set up in 1998, but early evaluation reports have yet to yield much insight into the way ahead for regional co-ordination.
Meanwhile, those special schools that are liable to be phased out or scaled down must become "much more closely integrated into local patterns of provision," as the Action Plan (1998) says. Perhaps we should clear away euphemisms along with the rest of the clutter surrounding inclusion. Many special schools will be made redundant and their resources will rightly be absorbed into mainstream schools.
The remaining special schools are destined to perform complementary roles in a regional network that will inevitably get too stretched to provide mainstream schools with all of the specialist services they require in order to support inclusive practices. Some special schools have already found partners with whom they can develop their capacity as consultants or training centres; but the Government must encourage much more preparation, lest its inclusive education policy backfires.
References
Booth, T. and Ainscow, M. (eds.), 1998, From Them to Us: an International Study of Inclusion in Education, Routledge: London.
Bourdieu, P., 1991, Language and Symbolic Power, Polity Press: Oxford.
Department for Education and Employment: July 1997, Government White Paper on Excellence in Schools; October 1997, Government Green Paper on Excellence for all children: Meeting Special Educational Needs; 1998, Government Action Plan on Meeting Special Educational Needs.
Economist, The, 6th-12th November 1999, Dyslexia: Go with the flow, p. 134.
Gergen, K.J., in Stigler, Shweder and Herdt (eds.), 1990, Cultural Psychology: essays on comparative human development, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Hall, J., 1997, Social Devaluation and Special Education, Jessica Kingsley Publishers: London.
Lave, J. and Wenger, E., 1991, Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Lewis, A. and Norwich, B., 2000, Is there a distinctive SEN pedagogy, Unpublished version of a paper later submitted to the British Educational Research Journal.
Morris, E., 27th June 1997, Times Educational Supplement.
Norwich, B., 1999, Special or Inclusive Education? Book Review in European Journal of Special Needs Education, Vol.14, No.1, pp. 90-96.
Oliver, A., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., and Pennington, B., 2000, Deviations in the emergence of representations: a neuroconstructivist framework for analysing developmental disorders, in Developmental Science, Vol. 3:1, pp. 1-23.
Perkins, D.N., in Salomon, G. (ed.), 1993, Distributed Cognitions: psychological and educational considerations, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Rogoff, B., Gauvain, M. and Ellis, S., in Light, Sheldon and Woodhead (eds.), 1991, Learning to Think, Routledge: London.
Salomon, G., in Salomon, G. (ed.), 1993, Distributed Cognitions: psychological and educational considerations, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Skrtic, T., 1991, Behind Special Education, Love Publishing: Denver.
Wolfensberger, W., 1972, The Principle of Normalisation in Human Services, National Institute on Mental Retardation: Toronto.
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