Stand on the right, walk on the left: it’s a time-honoured convention on the London Underground’s escalator system. Reserving one side of the escalator for people in a hurry helps process the tube’s five million daily users.
However, there’s evidence that, at some stations, walking lanes actually cause congestion. That’s because the higher the escalator, the fewer people walk.
According to a 2002 study, 70 per cent of passengers are willing to walk up an 18-metre high escalator, but just 30 per cent will hike up one 26 metres tall. The tipping point is around 22 metres. At stations where the escalators are at or over this height, queues to join the standing lane create logjams.
One such station is Holborn (escalator height: 24 metres), where, in 2015, Transport for London (TfL) ran an experiment to improve passenger flow. For three weeks, passengers using one escalator were asked not to walk, but to stand on both sides. Compared with the business-as-usual escalators, optimising stair space in this way eased congestion, and almost halved the average journey time from platform to pavement. A positive outcome all around, you might think.
Many commuters, however, were unconvinced of the benefits of a one-paced escalator system. Researchers reported “a great deal” of head-shaking at TfL staff, and “short, negative feedback”, such as: “This is a stupid idea”; and “You’re making me late”.
This all holds an important message for how we think about supporting special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in mainstream schools. The prevailing sense of passengers being held up “en route” is similar to the enduring perception that including greater numbers of pupils with SEND in mainstream slows the progress of other learners.
Yet results from heavyweight statistical analyses challenge this perception.
How does inclusion affect progress?
In a 2016 meta-analysis, covering almost 4.8 million pupils across 47 studies, Grzegorz Szumski and his colleagues found that, on average, the presence of pupils with SEND in classrooms had a small positive effect on the academic attainment of their peers without SEND.
In a follow-up study, published in 2022, Szumski’s team used longitudinal quantitative data to test the impact of inclusion on the language and mathematics attainment of 1,813 secondary-aged pupils without SEND in 108 classes in Poland. While they didn’t detect a positive effect, there was no evidence that being taught alongside pupils with SEND had a negative influence on the attainment of “typically developing” pupils.
A 2019 study of 1,062 children across 50 primary classrooms in Germany drew the same conclusion.
But what about the effect of inclusion on the academic outcomes of pupils with SEND? Well, a 2015 meta-analysis of 24 studies involving 3,834 pupils, conducted by US-based researchers, found that the majority of pupils with disabilities placed in “more integrated” settings outperformed those in “less integrated” settings on both academic and social outcome measures.
Similarly, a 2021 meta-analysis by a team from Germany, involving 40 studies and 11,987 pupils, found a small-to-medium positive effect on the academic performance of pupils with “general learning difficulties” in inclusive settings, compared with those in segregated settings.
Meanwhile, a 2016 systematic review provides further evidence that inclusion can improve social engagement, peer acceptance, behaviour issues and participation in school and community groups for pupils with SEND, as well as better academic outcomes. And, longer term, a greater proportion of those taught in mainstream settings go on to find employment and live independently, compared with those educated in segregated settings.
Inclusion: an economic argument
For many advocates, inclusion is principally a moral issue - an argument won by narrative, not numbers. But the studies described above tell a persuasive story about the potential gains of having more inclusivity-minded institutions, systems and practices. This research reminds us that an important element of the case for inclusion is economic.
Set the findings above alongside statistics on the long-term, damaging effects of exclusion and of leaving school without qualifications or functional literacy and numeracy skills, and a picture emerges of educational failure feeding into social problems, unemployment and intergenerational poverty - all of which carry a financial cost to the individuals affected and to society more broadly.
Inclusion requires significant investment in retrofitting schools and providing extensive and ongoing staff training. But the upfront costs could, over time, be offset by savings to the exchequer in the form of a reduced welfare bill and less strain on social services and the judicial system.
What’s more, individuals of working age, who in segregated societies are at risk of a lifetime of marginalisation from the employment market, would be more likely to be in a job, getting paid and contributing to general taxation.
Transitioning to a fully inclusive, or at least more inclusive, education system wouldn’t be cheap. Hearts and minds would need to be won with arguments based on the net worth of inclusion, rather than the cost.
On the basis of that, some might say we can’t afford to make our schools more inclusive. Others, however, might point to the numbers and say we can’t afford not to.
Rob Webster is a researcher specialising in SEND and inclusion. His book, The Inclusion Illusion, is free to download via UCL Press
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