On the estate where I grew up, a father would push his little daughter in her pushchair up and down the road every day, whatever the weather.
If the little girl had a mother, I never saw her, and over the years, she grew, but she always stayed in that pushchair.
Like every child, little Sylvie would get excited each time she saw other children. But the children never spoke to her. They just stared at her from behind their mothers’ coats.
Because Sylvie was different. Sylvie had Down’s syndrome. She didn’t go to school, or if she did, it wasn’t one the children on the street went to.
This was at a time when the local home for people with disabilities was called a crippleage, a time when words such as “retarded” or “educationally subnormal” were in common use and when children like little Sylvie were referred to as mongols.
It’s easy to forget the difference Mary Warnock’s 1978 landmark Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People made to our society, both in how we provide educationally for children with special educational needs and disabilities and in how we talk about them.
“You cannot overestimate how much this report changed education…It marked a fundamental shift in discourse on special needs and disability, and accelerated progress towards inclusive approaches to education,” says Rob Webster, senior researcher at the Centre for Inclusive Education, UCL Institute of Education, in our focus 40 years on (see this week’s issue of Tes magazine).
Unlike Sylvie, Tes columnist Nancy Gedge’s son with Down’s syndrome was able to go to a mainstream primary school and “walked up the road just like everyone else: same uniform, same book bag (same nits!)”.
Cracking inclusion
Baroness Warnock’s vision of education was one of “a road on which children embarked when they first went to school and down which they all walked towards the goals of competence, independence and imaginative pleasure”.
For some children it would be easy, but for others it would be much harder, with “obstacles” that they would need teachers to help them overcome.
But she says there was nothing in her conceptualisation that required all children to be taught in the same classroom and says we need a broader focus in terms of what inclusion should look like.
Forty years on, we still haven’t cracked inclusion and things often feel as though they have gone backwards, with stories of children with SEND being turned away from mainstream schools, of being excluded and offrolled, and of parents desperately struggling to get help for their children.
And the road ahead is about to get tougher. Of the 534,000 extra secondary school students expected by 2026, according to current trends, 58,700 will have SEND and 9,100 will likely have complex needs that qualify for an education, health and care plan.
This demand is not going to be met by special schools, so it is mainstream schools that are going to have to step up. And it will be those same mainstream schools that are forced to fail children with SEND, thanks to punishing accountability pressures.
Yes, there are courageous heads who stand committed to an inclusive intake in the face of such pressures, but - sadly - we don’t have enough of them. What we need, according to Webster, is to use accountability as a force for good, to drive and reward positive behaviour.
In another 40 years’ time, we want to look back and smile as we see the Sylvies in our society walk to school with confidence towards the goals of competence, independence and endless imaginative pleasure.
