Developing Inclusive Schools

Review of: Developing Inclusive Schools by Mel Ainscow

Reviewed by David Towell

Lessons from a lifetime of efforts to promote quality education for all

Over the first quarter of this Century, the main work of my Centre for Inclusive Futures has focused on the development of inclusive education, especially in Latin America. There is a substantial literature in this field but, among UK authors, I have found Ken Robinson and Mel Ainscow most inspiring.

Sadly Robinson died in 2020 but, partly thanks to his daughter Kate who completed this work, he left us with a beautiful essay, Imagine If - Creating a future for us all (Penguin, 2022) that draws together lessons from his life's work. I'll come back to this later. Fortunately, Mel Ainscow - now in his early 80s - is still going strong. He has been a prolific writer and his latest book has something of the same function: Developing Inclusive Schools describes and reflects on more than 40 years of engaged scholarship, in the UK and internationally, to explore what is involved in advancing equity and inclusion in education.

I discovered Ainscow's work through the Index for Inclusion, written with Tony Booth (first published in 2000, subsequently revised and now available in several languages). This offers a detailed values-based approach to 'developing learning and participation in schools'. The Index framework has informed a lot of Ainscow's applied research that in Britain has included large scale initiatives (in London, Manchester, Scotland, Wales etc.) to improve schooling, especially for the most disadvantaged students. He has done similar work in many other countries and become especially influential through his consultant role, also over many years, to UNESCO. He tells us that he helped plan the historic conference in Salamanca, Spain, whose 30th anniversary was celebrated last year, as well as subsequent global events that advanced the Salamanca agenda.

He has also been the lead author on a series of UNESCO publications, most useful of which is the excellent 'workbook' for change leaders Reaching Out To All Learners (second edition, 2022).

Ideas about promoting education for all have evolved over 40 years and a strength of Ainscow's longevity is that he is able to comment on how his own thinking has changed in this time. In an early part of his career his interest was special education and then, as in the Salamanca Statement, attention to serving children with disabilities in general education. That widened to an emphasis on welcoming diversity among all learners and a move away from assessing the characteristics of individual learners to analysing the barriers to learning in different contexts and the resources available to address these. And then, from trying to improve individual schools to the strategies required for whole system reform.

Accordingly, Developing Inclusive Schools starts from offering a contemporary understanding of inclusion and equity before looking at pathways to school improvement, providing 'nitty-gritty' accounts of the change processes drawn from many different initiatives and places. Ainscow gives particular attention to an approach to action research developed with colleagues that he calls collaborative inquiry. This brings us to the nature of the leadership required to make schools into more autonomous learning organisations and the implications of all this for large scale change, including at the policy level.

There is a wealth of details here. Any review needs to be selective. In what follows I explore Ainscow's developing conceptualisation of school improvement and the nature of his preferred methodology. I then offer some reflections on these approaches and what may be required to achieve more success in the years to come.

Let's start from the basic concepts. Ainscow suggests that inclusion in education should be defined in terms of three elements: a continuing process of seeking better ways of responding to diversity through identifying and removing barriers to learning; aiming to improve the presence, participation and achievement of all students; and paying particular attention to groups of learners at risk of underachievement or exclusion.

Equity is defined rather more succinctly by an UNESCO slogan: Every learner matters and matters equally. It's a good slogan but 'mattering equally' is a rather abstract idea, needing further definition. Perhaps he can be forgiven this since his previous book (with Christopher Chapman, 2022) Educational Equity, (also sub-titled) Pathways to Success, goes much deeper.

These core ideas provide the framework for the action research process. Some versions of action research involve (academic) researchers doing the research and seeking to engage with the policy and practice system to explore implications for the latter. Ainscow and his colleagues do some of this. But their preferred methodology - collaborative inquiry - encourages system participants, including students, to themselves become researchers so as to bring different stakeholder perspectives directly into the research process and encourage especially (but not only) teachers to become evidence-based reflective practitioners. (In fact Ainscow is very sceptical about approaches to school improvement that seek to 'import' good practices from elsewhere without either proper attention to different contexts or the opportunity for teachers and others to learn for themselves through collaboration and experimentation.)

Accordingly, while the initiatives he describes are on different scales (e.g. in the number of schools involved), most follow a common inquiry strategy. Research teams seek to agree a common framework that highlights equity and inclusion and participating schools each establish a relevant group to plan further work. This may start from statistical analysis of contextual issues, school performance and possible barriers but this is complemented by some form of peer investigation (e.g. teachers engaging in mutual classroom observation, students offering feedback on their experience through school photographs) designed to illuminate current practice and perhaps 'interrupt' existing assumptions. In this process differences among students are seen as opportunities for learning rather than problems to be fixed. Wider discussions offer opportunities for different stakeholders (i.e. in a process of 'social learning') to make sense of this evidence and work together to identify priorities for school improvement, seeking a leadership mandate for proposed changes. And this process continues, both within each school and across networks of schools, in the bigger initiatives. Clearly this kind of collaborative inquiry requires a school climate within which critical reflection is encouraged and the schools have sufficient autonomy in the wider education system to experiment.

This whole book is a testimony to the usefulness of these ideas and methods. But Ainscow would be the first to say that, after 40 years, the agenda for school improvement is still evolving. There are three issues that particularly need further development.

First, quality education. The fourth of the very important global Sustainable Development Goals addresses education, Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. It's very welcome that Ainscow makes inclusion and equity central to improving education, but quality and more specifically quality education are much less well defined. Yet it is difficult to discuss 'success', 'progress and 'achievement' in education without attending to the purposes of education as well as how these purposes are to be realised.

Ken Robinson can help us here. He offers a succinct one sentence definition of the purposes of education, Education must enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active compassionate citizens. His proposition is that to achieve this goal for all students requires not just reform but rather the transformation of education (including curricula, assessment, pedagogy, etc.) so that today's students have the understanding, resilience and creativity to meet the challenges of the next part of the 21st Century and learn to live in harmony with themselves, other people and the natural world of which we are a part. I am reminded of a distinction made by the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing: being 'out of formation' is not the same as being 'off course'. We want students to be fairly included in education that is taking all students in the right direction.

Second, pedagogy. Pedagogical theory and practice are critical to these aims. Robinson's focus here is on human creativity. His most famous 'Ted talk', down-loaded more than 40 million times, is entitled, 'Do schools kill creativity?' But Ainscow makes no reference to Robinson's work, or to the 20th Century authors who laid the foundations for modern pedagogy, like Dewey, Vygotsky and Bruner - and coming up-to-date, I found only one footnoted reference to the body of work now called Universal Design for Learning that inclusive teachers I know find especially helpful. There is a gap to be filled here.

Third, transforming whole systems. Ainscow fully understands the importance of 'context' in efforts to improve schooling. In education, schools are many small cogs in a much larger enterprise that, looking upwards, may include local education authorities and certainly national government. Of course schools are also embedded in the wider society and economy. School improvement can be facilitated or restricted by the characteristics of these wider systems.

As we have seen, Ainscow and his collaborators have a very well developed methodology for engaging with schools, teachers and classroom practice: collaborative inquiry. But achieving quality education for all requires a methodology for, in the management jargon, 'working whole systems'. This is much less developed here (and indeed in Reaching Out To All Learners).

Traditionally, public administration tends to see policy implementation as a 'top down' process led by elected politicians and their civil servants, although there is copious evidence in the relevant literature as to why this model is inadequate (more on this at Implementing Public Policy). Ainscow favours a 'bottom up' model in which the results of grass roots inquiry are used to improve practice and draw lessons about the wider conditions required for sustained success. Accordingly, especially in the larger initiatives, the researchers are very keen to be 'at the table' when policy decisions are debated.

But neither 'top down' or 'bottom up' approaches are adequate to the challenge of whole system transformation. Rather we need methods that establish the whole of education as a learning system and seek the judicious combination of both these and other levers (for example, relating to the continuous professional development of teachers and positive incentives for schools), driven by a clear sense of purpose. (More on this at A short guide for transformational leaders.) There is a powerful example of what this might involve in the major Scottish initiative described in Educational Equity, where the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change (in the University of Glasgow) takes on the role of a learning exchange for national reform, not only sharing knowledge across schools but also enabling 'vertical' exchange of insights and experience between national policy-makers and schools. We need ways of taking these whole system methods further.

Ainscow concludes this book with an assessment of the current context (it was written towards the end of the last Conservative government) for progress in England. At the macro level inequality is increasing and public services as a whole in decline. Education policy has narrowed the curriculum and 'improvement' has become dependent on market pressures and standardised examinations. Local coordination across schools has been fragmented by the rapid expansion of 'academies'. Special education (and what he calls the 'SEND industry') still cast a long shadow over efforts to promote genuine inclusion. None of this is very encouraging.

Fortunately we have the accumulated wisdom provided by this lifetime of work to both inform and energise the struggles to come!

The Publisher is Routledge.

Developing Inclusive Schools: Pathways to Success © Mel Ainscow 2024

Review: Developing Inclusive Schools © David Towell 2025