David Towell reviews two books focusing on the development of inclusive education in England.
Review of: The Inclusion Illusion by Rob Webster and Inclusive Education Theory and Policy by Sue Soan and Jeremy Monsen
Reviewed by David Towell
The great British educationalist, Sir Ken Robinson (now sadly departed) was an articulate advocate for the view that education doesn't so much need to be reformed, rather it needs to be transformed if all students are to have the opportunities to discover and develop their own talents and take up their roles as valued citizens. In England, the talents of about 20% of the students in mainstream schools are such that they are identified administratively as having 'special educational needs'. These two books together suggest that whatever is special about them, they are especially in need of this transformation.
The two books are best read together. Their focus is broadly the same: the development of inclusive education in England since the Warnock Committee report in 1978 - which gave currency to the phrase 'special educational needs' - and the impact of resulting policy reforms on the students so labelled. But the approach they take is different and in some respects complementary.
Webster's sub-title is How children with special educational needs experience mainstream schools. He is a researcher with particular expertise in methods described as ‘systematic observation’. His research team made nearly 68,000 discrete observations of classroom behaviour during 1,485 lessons (divided between Year 5, primary and Year 9, secondary). The simple idea was to compare the experience of students designated as having special educational needs (in fact they chose students who had received a formal 'Statement' of such needs or, later an ‘Education, Health and Care Plan’, both of which have legal force and suggest a high level of such needs) with the experience of a comparator sample of what they call ‘typically developing pupils’. I'll call them the S and T students in what follows. (In fact, the study focuses on S students who had been further labelled as either MLD - moderate learning difficulties - or BESD - behavioural, emotional and social difficulties - although these official terms changed during the research period.)
If you are thinking that these methods imply some rather crude assumptions, I would agree but the quantitative data (they had a lot of interviews with participants of a more qualitative nature) also evidence some important differences: indeed they lead to the central conclusion identified in Webster's title: that for the S pupils, inclusion - defined as sharing the same educational experiences as the T pupils - is an illusion.
Soan and Monsen are very experienced practitioners in the English education system. Soan is a teacher who, among other roles has been a SENCo (Special Educational Needs Coordinator). Monsen is an Educational and Child Psychologist overseeing child psychology services in two London boroughs. Drawing on this extensive experience, their book is essentially a critical commentary on policy and practice in inclusive education, leading to a radical agenda for change summarised in their sub-title, Moving from Special Educational Needs to Equity.
Let's look at both in a little more detail. Webster argues that his study data show that schools typically contrive, despite good intentions, to create what amount to two different learning environments for S and T students that amount to what he calls 'structural exclusion' of the former. For example, S students are more likely to be excluded from their school; they are withdrawn on average 1 day each week from their classrooms and therefore their T peers; when students are grouped by attainment (rather than mixed ability), they are usually in the 'bottom' group; and perhaps most important, they spend much more time interacting with the TAs ( teaching assistants, who are not trained as teachers) and, consequently much less time interacting with the class teachers than their peers.
Indeed, the interviews suggest that teachers feel under-prepared for including S students in their classes and are inclined to leave them to the care of the TAs who therefore know these students better. Webster concludes from all this that S students are likely to receive a lower quality 'pedagogical diet' than their peers even though their status implies the need for the opposite.
This is a large study. Clearly there are forces at work that go way beyond the individual schools. This diagnosis suggests, among other things, the need to raise the priority of inclusion in policy and the ways through which schools are held accountable; significantly improve pedagogical skills, rethink the role of TAs and invest in training and support for teachers.
Soan and Monsen would, I think, agree with this diagnosis but having spent most of their professional careers trying to make successive waves of SEN policy work locally, they have reached a more radical conclusion, namely that the SEND system (the D has been added to represent disability) is itself central to the problem. They write:
“It is now way overdue to stop using the SEN and disability... labels altogether... and instead embrace and celebrate all learners and their differences as individuals on their own unique learning journeys.”
Accordingly they set out to formulate an alternative agenda for education policy and practice. Some of this discussion is quite complex (and in my reading, not fully worked out) but I have distilled five key themes in their design for improvement:
While focused on the education system, both books also look outward to the wider society (and political economy) within which education is embedded. For example, recent governments of all persuasions have tried to introduce competition and market incentives into public services. In their attention to curriculum, they have also tended to prioritise 'academic' studies over other disciplines (like art) and emphasised national standards and their assessment through formal examinations. Less explicitly, whatever the declared purpose of education, it clearly has latent functions in serving the economy (perhaps as it was a generation or two earlier) and reproducing existing class inequalities.
It's possible that education as a sector has sufficient autonomy to play its part in countering these pressures in the interests of serving all children and young people better. We should certainly give it a try!
The Inclusion Illusion © Rob Webster 2022 (UCL Press)
Inclusive Education Theory and Policy © Open International Publishing Limited 2023 (Open University Press)
Review: UK Education: Still Awaiting an Inclusive Future © David Towell 2024
children and families, education, Inclusion, Inclusive Education, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Reviews
