Special Education in Britain after Warnock

John Visser, Graham Upton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138592292
• eBook ISBN: 9780429953866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1988. With the Education Reform Act 1988 firmly in place and impacting upon the education of children and young people with Special Educational Needs, this book examines the issues that arose from its implementation. It aims to promote debate as well as providing a record of the achievements in practice, policy and provision in Britain since the Warnock Committee reported. The challenges which remain or have been created since the introduction of the Education Act 1981 are also discussed.

CHAPTER ONE

A broad, balanced, relevant and differentiated curriculum

John Visser

The Warnock Report was a major benchmark in relation to the education of those children and young people who experience difficulty in ‘entering the world after formal education is over as active participants in society and responsible contributor(s) to it’ (D.E.S. 1978). It was conceived and published during a period when the needs of those in society who are disabled or handicapped were to the fore. The international community expressed concern for the problems faced by these members of society and by the end of the decade the United Nations set up the International Year of the Disabled in 1979. A part of the British reaction to this international concern and pressure was to commission a report on the ‘education of handicapped children and young people’. It was the first comprehensive examination in Britain of the whole field of what was then referred to by educators as ‘special education’.

The Report (D.E.S. 1978) was, as all reports are, a product of its time. As such it concentrated upon issues of definition, the needs of professionals, parents and children and forms of provision. It examined these issues in relation to the prevailing methods and systems used and supported by professionals at that time. In coming to over 200 recommendations it drew upon examples of ‘good’ practice in Britain and around the world. Some of these recommendations found their way into the Education Act 1981. The Report has been very influential in both practice and policy since then. Contributors in this volume have indicated ways in which these recommendations have been incorporated and developed in meeting special educational needs over the past 14 years. However, with the benefit of hindsight, many in the field of special education feel that the Report had weaknesses. Amongst these the issue of teaching and learning and their relationship to the notion of special educational needs is one that this chapter attempts to address.

Examining the definition of special educational needs the Report concluded that three factors could interact to create a special educational need for any one pupil. These were issues of access, the need for an alternative curriculum, and the need for a particular milieu in which to receive education. Using these criteria the Report went on to indicate that ‘one child in six at any time and up to one child in five at some time’ would require ‘special education’. This became accepted in Britain as the percentage of pupils who could be expected to have special educational needs. The majority (some 18%) of these special educational needs were seen as being caused by ‘familial or social’ factors; a minority (approximately 2%) were ascribed to ‘medical’ factors. The Report specifically did not question why so many pupils were perceived to be failing. The notion of 20% of pupils having special educational needs became accepted professional dogma. The ‘solutions’ that the Report concentrated upon focussed upon policies, systems and organisations for meeting this level of need. It failed to address the issues of teaching and learning that could be contributing to — or even causing — such a high percentage of children to be failing in the education system.

Assumptions were made about the quality of curriculum delivery and the learning experienced by pupils. The Report highlighted the paucity of curriculum development in certain areas, in particular moderate learning difficulties. The curriculum for pupils with special educational needs was seen as needing to be different from that provided for ‘normal’ pupils. At the very least, the Report argued, the curriculum for certain pupils such as those with hearing impairment would need to have a different emphasis. The concluding recommendations on curriculum delivery, after a chapter on curricula considerations in relation to special educational needs, amount to five out of over 200 on S.E.N. issues in the Report as a whole. These five cover the need for hearing impaired students to receive support in further and higher education, the need for curriculum development for pupils with moderate learning difficulties, and the need for resources, funds and a special section within the Schools’ Council to concentrate upon special educational needs. With the benefit of hindsight the Report can be criticised for not addressing issues regarding curriculum delivery in terms of a broad and balanced curriculum to be delivered in a differentiated and relevant manner.

Thus in relation to curriculum issues the Report, by giving credence to the notion that 20% of pupils have special educational needs which are largely caused by factors outside school, failed to address issues in the education of pupils which could be contributors to, if not the cause of, the special educational need. This is a little surprising when the Report is one of the few in education to issue a statement upon the goals for education which it regarded as common for all children.

The Report also elucidated a general statement of the aims of education. Paragraph 1.4 goes on to indicate that for some children these aims would need to be approached via smaller gradations of learning than for others and that yet others might never totally achieve the goals, but that this did not mean for ‘these children the goals are different’. The emphasis was upon a common education to which all pupils were entitled. However, as already pointed out, the Report indicated that this common goal could be attained for different pupils via different curricula. This disparity between a common goal and different curricula was and remains an important issue for special education. There is evidence (H.M.I. 1989) that even after the Warnock Report the education received by those pupils deemed to have special educational needs was not common even in relation to goals. Reports by H.M.I. (1989; D.E.S. 1989) and others (Montgomery 1990; Harland et al 1988) indicated that pupils deemed to have special educational needs in both special and mainstream schools received a curriculum which lacked breadth and balance and was seldom delivered in a differentiated and relevant manner with progression and continuity not being experienced by the pupils (see also Chapter 6 by Tricia Barthorpe and Chapter 7 by Norman Butt).

With the Education Reform Act 1988 Britain for the first time introduced a curriculum to which all pupils are entitled. This shifted the emphasis from defining special education in terms of needing a ‘special or modified curriculum’ (D.E.S. 1978) towards further examination of the problems incurred by pupils in accessing the curriculum. Access here means more than the provision of ‘special equipment, facilities or resources, modification of the physical environment’; it includes the teaching methods that the teacher uses. This entitlement to a curriculum is one of the major steps forward that have been taken since the Report was published, underscoring the teachers’ responsibility to ensure that all pupils have access to their entitlement. It is now the professional task of the teacher to ensure that all pupils have ‘access’ to the subject they teach and can make progress in it.

Currently the Report is being reassessed in terms of its underlying assumptions and the recommendations which followed. Warnock has herself criticised what was put in place in the Education Act 1981 following the publication of the Report (see the Foreword and Bovair in this volume). However this reassessment is in danger both of failing to acknowledge the ‘good’ that was achieved by the Report and of not recognising its fundamental weakness. By concentrating upon the problems caused by the over-bureaucratisation of special educational needs (particularly in relation to obtaining a statutory assessment leading to a statement of need), the criticisms relating to the delivery of the curriculum as outlined above continue to be missed.

Since the publication of the Report, three strands of development have begun to address the issue of curriculum. The first is legislation. Since 1978 there have been four major Education Acts and a further one is due in 1993. There has been also the Children Act of 1989. This weight of legislation has brought about immense changes at a very fast pace. After the Education Act 1981 the Education Reform Act 1988 impinged most upon special educational needs. Starting from a universal entitlement curriculum it went on to lay down what the government decided was to be a broad and balanced curriculum. (The reader should be clear that this curriculum is only enforced in England and Wales and then only in state-funded schools). Despite a widespread and well-informed debate about the nature of what could constitute a broad and balanced curriculum (see H.M.I. 1985, 1988), the legislation took a narrow view and some would say an archaic form, by pursuing a subject format which would not have been unfamiliar in a nineteenth century school. It set up ten subjects for secondary schools, nine for primary (no modern language) and eleven in Wales, where Welsh is taken. Pupils also have religious education as well as studying various cross-curicula themes. This broad and balanced curriculum has largely been imposed because educators failed previously to ensure breadth and balance in their curricula. This was especially true of special education, both in mainstream and special schools. However special educators have, in concert with mainstream colleagues, embraced this curriculum with vigour and invested professional time and energy in its implementation (D.E.S. 1992). As a result there has been increasing questioning of pedagogical skills and how these may be enhanced to enable pupils to gain access to their entitlement. That is not to say that there have not been, and are not, problems with a common national curriculum of this breadth and balance for pupils who have learning difficulties. Indeed by linking ages to stages within the National Curriculum the legislation stands in danger of increasing the number of pupils requiring a statement of special educational need (Visser 1991).

The second strand relates to research on the effective school. Research associated with special education up to the publication of the Report concentrated upon studies to establish factors associated with failure in school, for example the National Child Development Study (Davie et al 1972) and the Isle of Wight study (Rutter et al 1970). These studies reinforced the notion that failure was associated with social and familial issues outside the school. The inference was that there was little that the school or class teacher could do beyond the provision of remedial work and life skills programmes, mainly in segregated provision in either withdrawal groups, special classes or schools. This effectively deskilled mainstream teachers as they either were told or felt that they could not teach these pupils. It also meant that much of the ‘remedial’ work with pupils was delivered outside the context in which the original learning problem had been identified. This was particularly the case as these pupils got older and the ‘alternative’ curriculum they received became more obvious to them. Shortly after the publication of the Warnock Report research appeared (Rutter et al 1979; Reynolds 1985) showing that schools and teachers could in fact make a difference. Their findings showed there are factors in the provision of education which can have a profound impact upon the achievements of pupils including those thought of as having special educational needs. Teachers can no longer hide behind ‘familial or social’ difficulties as the sole reason why pupils find learning difficult (see the chapter by Butt in this volume). This perspective on the causes of special educational needs led to a general under-expectation of what these pupils can achieve. Whilst these factors undoubtedly have an effect on learning difficulties the evidence now points to school factors being able to mitigate, if not eradicate them (see Ainscow in this volume; Reynolds and Cuttance 1992).

The third strand was the move away from segregation of provision towards a more inclusive approach. Segregation in terms of a separate curriculum has now been legislated against in the Education Reform Act, 1988. In mainstream schools separate ‘special classes’ have in recent times almost ceased and in-class support or collaborative teaching has become more the ‘norm’ for pupils with SEN. (Dyson’s chapter outlines this development and takes the ideas further foreseeing the end of the special educational needs teacher. Bovair outlines some of the changes in integration developed by special schools.) These changes in roles developed partly out of the notion contained within the Warnock Report that all teachers are teachers of pupils with special educational needs.

The Warnock Report argued that since there were 20% of pupils with special educational needs all teachers needed to have some training in this area. Unfortunately this ‘training’ was to concentrate more upon what constituted a special educational need than on what teachers could do to prevent ‘special educational needs’ from occurring in the first instance. With the introduction of an entitlement curriculum a pupil can no longer be denied access to any particular subject in the curriculum. This ensures that all pupils should be taught all subjects by their teachers and draws attention to the need for training which will enable them to achieve this.

Others (Barton, Bowers, Mittler) within this volume have raised a number of criticisms of D.f.E. and government pronouncements and legislation over the past fourteen years in relation to special educational needs. Though these criticism have been substantiated (and this writer would concur with most of them) sight should not be lost of the fact that these changes were brought about initially out of a concern for those pupils in our schools who appeared to failing — the bottom 40% (Joseph 1984). The aim was to raise standards and levels of achievement for all pupils but particularly for those for whom learning appeared to be difficult. This is an ideal that few would question, but one which has not been easy to achieve, given the overall changes that the legislation has put in place.

It was in this context that the words breadth, balance, differentiation and relevance in relation to the curriculum were introduced by various bodies (H.M.I. 1985; D.E.S. 1986; Joseph 1984; N.C.C. 1989) Breadth and balance have become enshrined in the Education Reform Act 1988. Differentiation and relevance are to be found in guidance documents issued by the National Curriculum Council and others.

But the debate on whether or not it is the correct balance and breadth has gone silent. Teachers have spent the last four years grappling with the introduction of this curriculum and still have until 2003 before any one pupil will have experienced it in its entirety. Some revision of attainment targets and programmes of study has been carried out but the subject areas have not been altered. The content to be studied within the subjects has become more prescriptive. At the time of writing the recently published anthology of books recommended for study in English is an example of this trend. However to date there has not been any legislation relating to the way this content is to be taught. It is within this context that differentiation and relevance should be placed. If the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of the curriculum has been set out then, to date, the ‘how’ has been left in the hands of schools and teachers. Differentiation and relevance are connected to the ‘how’ of teaching. The Warnock Report failed to address this issue, concentrating more on questions of ‘what’ and ‘when’ and considering that mainly in terms of national policies and physical provision.

The professional debate as to what constitutes breadth and balance may be on the back boiler (if not dead), but the debate must not be allowed to go cold in relation to differentiation and relevance. There are indications as this volume goes to press that there are some, from the Secretary of State downwards, who would wish to move more overtly into this professional area of ‘how’ to teach. Differentiation, the ‘how’ of teaching, is the process whereby teachers match their teaching skills with pupils’ learning strategies to maximise the achievement of pupils. Teachers, in particular teachers of those who find learning difficult, need to ensure that ‘how’ pupils are taught remains within the professionals’ domain.

The Warnock Report underscored the individuality of pupils in relation to their learning. It echoed the statements in educational documents over the years that pupils learn best sometimes in whole class groups, sometimes in small groups and sometimes in one to one teaching; and that the strategies they use for learning vary (Board of Education 1944). Whilst there is now a curriculum which, as Warnock argued, is a common one this should not lead to a view that all children are the same or can be grouped into neat homogeneous ‘lots’. Special Education has led the teaching profession in keeping to the fore the fact that all children are different. The Task Group on Assessment and Training (T.G.A.T. 1988) amongst others highlighted some of these differences by expecting a spread of levels ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 A Broad, Balanced, Relevant and Differentiated Curriculum?
• Chapter 2 Special Needs at the Crossroads
• Chapter 3 Labels, Markets and Inclusive Education
• Chapter 4 Has ‘Special Educational Needs’ Outlived its Usefulness?
• Chapter 5 Funding Special Education
• Chapter 6 Support Services — Value for Money
• Chapter 7 The S.E.N. Coordinator in Secondary Schools
• Chapter 8 Do We Need Special Needs Coordinators?
• Chapter 9 A Role for the Special School
• Chapter 10 What Happens After School?
• Chapter 11 Implementing Warnock’s Multi-Professional Approach
• Chapter 12 Enhancing the Quality of Provision
• Chapter 13 Beyond Special Education: Some Ways Forward