Fifty years ago, the UK began a process that transformed how pupils with special needs and disabilities (SEND) are educated.
In November 1973, the education secretary, Margaret Thatcher, launched a comprehensive review of special education. The inquiry, which was led by Baroness Mary Warnock and concluded in 1978, essentially catalysed the process of inclusion.
During Thatcher’s spell as prime minister, “handicapped children” who had previously been educated in segregated specialist settings - if at all - began attending mainstream schools in greater numbers.
Today, the experience of inclusion for many pupils with SEND might be best summed up by a phrase Thatcher’s husband, Denis, used to describe his role as her quiet and discrete consort: “Always present, never there.”
There’s good evidence of patterns of marginalisation that result in the everyday estrangement of pupils with SEND from mainstream teaching and curriculum coverage. They are in the class, but not of the class.
To be clear, what evolved post-Warnock is a marked advance on the de facto segregation and separation that characterised 1970s education. But is it really inclusion?
What is inclusion?
Inclusion is a contested concept, but a sufficiently uncontentious definition is that it’s a model of education where pupils with SEND are taught for all or most of the time in classes alongside their peers in their local mainstream school.
Hardliners would argue that the simple assimilation of pupils with SEND into existing forms of schooling is “integration”, not “inclusion”. They would point to exemplar countries like Italy, which closed its specialist provisions in the 1980s and restructured schools so they respond to all pupils as individuals.
Pragmatists might argue that a cultural revolution of that kind is unlikely - perhaps unworkable - in a context like the UK, which puts a political premium on parents having a choice of school.
Cynics, meanwhile, might suggest that achieving even the modest version of inclusion outlined in the government’s recent SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan is optimistic, given the current starting point: a SEND system haemorrhaging trust, confidence and staff, which even government ministers say is “dysfunctional”.
Perhaps the more immediate question is not resolving what inclusion is - and isn’t - but who gets to contribute to that discussion and decision - and who doesn’t.
A public debate about inclusion that isn’t fully inclusive lacks credibility. There needs to be a plurality of voices, experiences and positions: from full-fat “inclusionistas”, to those who believe that catering for pupils with additional needs dilutes educational quality for others, and see special schools as the best all-round solution.
How do we make schools more inclusive?
This year I’ve been part of a team that delivered the UK’s first public dialogue on school inclusion, and produced a report on our findings.
Our project brought together young people with and without SEND, their parents and some teachers to form a 30-strong “citizens’ panel” (similar to a citizens’ assembly, only smaller).
We asked the panel to address the question: how do we make schools more inclusive for children and young people with SEND?
Insights from our group suggest there’s a workable version of inclusion available that results from making incremental changes that benefit all pupils while offering dignified specialist provision for those with SEND.
Some suggestions, like promoting wellbeing, modifying the curriculum and teaching, and adapting physical spaces, were universal. Others had a SEND-specific component: for example, more SEND training for teachers.
Meaningfully including young people with SEND in discussions that affect their lives is consistent with the principle that disability activists refer to as “nothing about us without us”.
Asking our panel a more practical question about inclusion, rather than the more theoretical one about what inclusion is, helped us to work out how participants who may find it harder to relate to fast-moving conversations and to make themselves heard can take part in deliberative processes.
We learned that involving young people with SEND in the preliminary design phase was key to maximising their comfort, confidence and contribution to the discussion. They told us what we needed to do to manage and mitigate the anxiety of meeting new people in an unfamiliar context.
Some trade-offs meant some other participants said that some parts of the day felt a bit slow. But they recognised that the priority was ensuring that nobody felt left behind or left out.
Public dialogue is an exercise in compromise. It’s not unrelated to coproduction. Understandably, the emphasis in both cases is on the outputs these processes produce. Yet the efficacy of the format - is it internally coherent?; does it prioritise the voice of the person/people most directly affected? - can get overlooked.
When it comes to the drive to improve school inclusion, the process by which debates and consultations on it are designed and delivered reveals a lot about the sincerity of the motive and how successful and sustainable any changes are likely to be.
Rob Webster is a researcher specialising in SEND and inclusion. His book, The Inclusion Illusion, is free to download via UCL Press
