Special Educational Needs Policy in the 1990s

Warnock in the Market Place

Sheila Riddell, Sally Brown

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138590052
• eBook ISBN: 9780429957192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book, first published in 1994, explores the impact which changes in thinking and policy at national and local level have had upon the educational experiences of children and young people with special needs in England, Scotland and Wales. Two major factors are discussed. Firstly, there is the thinking of the late 1970s which emerges in documents such as the Warnock report and the legislation which followed it. Secondly, the authors examine the educational policy and legislation of the 1980s and early 1990s which aimed to encourage the operation of market forces. Through the various articles in this collection, the contributors discuss both the common themes and the tensions created by these changes, and assess the effect these have had on special needs education in practice.

Chapter 1

Special educational needs provision in the United Kingdom - the policy context

Sheila Riddell and Sally Brown

INTRODUCTION

This book aims to explore the impact of national and local policy on the educational experiences of children and young people with special educational needs, focusing on England and Wales and on Scotland. It traces the impact of Conservative policymaking of the 1980s and 1990s on the thinking of the 1970s and looks forward to future developments in the twenty-first century.

Two broad factors have influenced the development of policy and provision in this area. First, attempts were made throughout the 1970s to reconceptualise learning difficulties not as intrinsic to the child but as arising in the context of interaction between the child and his or her environment. This thinking was reflected in documents such as the Warnock Report (DES, 1978) and the report on learning difficulties by Scottish HMI (SED, 1978). Both reports had implications for the way in which children with special needs should be educated, with learning support in mainstream classes regarded as the preferable option for a wider group of children. The second major influence derives from educational policy and legislation of the 1980s and early 1990s, which established centralised control over the curriculum and assessment, increased competition between schools through the vehicle of parental choice and weakened the power base of local authorities.

The chapters in this book begin to unravel the effect of these influences and to identify both continuities and discontinuities. To some extent, it is possible to trace common themes through policies with different ideological pedigrees; for instance, both Warnock and more recent policy developments affirm the right of parents to an increased say in the education of their children, although Warnock’s emphasis on partnership has been replaced by the notion of the parent as critical consumer. There is also evidence of tension in the development of policy, for instance, the acceptance of the benevolent discretion of professionals which tended to characterise special needs provision in the pre-and post-Warnock era does not sit easily alongside the more recent emphasis on choice and accountability of the 1980s and 1990s. In addition, although a number of central principles may be identified in recent government policy, disjunctions are also apparent. For example, the increase in schools’ control of finance and pupil selection may be at variance with the principle of parental choice of school. In so far as parents of children with special educational needs opt in large numbers to have their children educated in mainstream schools, special schools will suffer from falling rolls, become less cost-effective and eventually face the possibility of closure. In this sense, the exercise of choice may have the effect of reducing diversity of provision and hence foreclosing on possible avenues of choice in the future. Our contributors have assessed the extent to which policies, perhaps formulated with prime regard to the mainstream majority, have the potential to benefit children with special educational needs by emphasising their common entitlement, or may disenfranchise them further by forcing them to fit into an inappropriate regime. Within this context, the complex processes of policy-making and implementation and the relationship between central policy and local practice must inevitably be addressed.

A central, and perhaps unusual, feature of this book is that it draws on papers based on policy and practice in both Scotland and England and Wales. Summarising the key differences in the two systems, Munn (1991) commented that

the emphasis on parents as a mechanism for school quality control flows from a U.K. policy agenda, yet that policy has found rather different expression north and south of the border. For example, the 1981 Education (Scotland) Act introduced a much more radical notion of parental choice than the 1980 Education Act for England and Wales. In contrast, the 1988 Education Act gives far more extensive powers to school governing bodies than the 1988 School Boards Act, and Scotland has had a separate Act, the oddly named Self-Governing Schools etc. (Scotland) Act, 1989, to introduce the right of schools to opt out of local authority control. We may note in passing that Scottish curriculum and assessment reforms have been introduced via guidelines rather than by statute and that a comparative study of education policy north and south of the border deserves greater research attention than it has hitherto attracted.

(Munn, 1991: 173)

In this chapter and the conclusion we endeavour to point up some of the contrasts between Scotland and England and Wales. We argue that these differences provide important insights into the diverse ways in which central policies may be translated into practice, reflecting not only the different legal frameworks, but also the distinctive political and social contexts.

In this introduction we begin by outlining some of the features of the literature on policy-making in education generally and special educational needs more particularly. We then provide a brief account of key elements in the two phases of policy-making which have profoundly affected provision for children with special educational needs: first, the Warnock and the Scottish HMI reports and the accompanying legislation and, secondly, certain aspects of Conservative government policy since 1979. In particular, we consider the issue of continuity and disjunction between the conceptual position adopted by Warnock and more recent policy. Finally we provide an overview of the papers, focusing on the twin themes of the limits of entitlement and tensions within and between policies.

EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEED

Literature on policy-making in education

Until the start of the 1980s, there was comparatively little literature on educational policy, despite the fact that other major areas of public spending, such as health and social services, had been analysed extensively. Commenting on this absence, Ball (1990) argued that even those who had written about educational policy had often failed to make their theoretical perspective explicit. He suggested that the lack of social policy literature in the field of education is partly due to the fact that until the late 1970s it was assumed that post-war educational provision represented a consensus of the various political, cultural and ideological perspectives. Texts such as Unpopular Education (CCCS, 1981) challenged the uncritical acceptance of notions of consensus, demonstrating that the post-war settlement should be seen as the outcome of contest and struggle between a range of social factions. Since the victory of the Conservative Party in the General Election of 1979, the positioning of education at the centre of the political agenda has led to a marked growth in policy analysis.

The dearth of policy literature in the field of special educational needs has been particularly marked. Tomlinson (1982) argued that both research and policy analysis tended to explain the pattern of provision as reflecting the growth of humanitarian concern for children with special needs. Such uncritical explanations, she suggested, concealed other important factors such as the desire to exclude certain groups of children from mainstream schools and the vested interests of professional groups in promoting career structures in special education. Oliver (1985) maintained that the Warnock Report tended to reflect the ‘march of progress’ view of special needs provision rather than its social control function, citing the following excerpt:

As with ordinary education, education for the handicapped began with individual charitable enterprise. There followed in time the intervention of government, first to support voluntary effort and make good deficiencies through state provision, and finally to create a national framework in which public and voluntary agencies could act in partnership to see that all children, whatever the disability, received a suitable education. The framework reached its present form only in this decade.

(DES, 1978: 8, para 2.1)

In Barton’s (1986) view, a far more critical perspective was required, holding in question the assumed disinterest and altruism of those providing services for children with special educational needs.

What sociologists have argued is the view that concern for the handicapped has developed as a result of progress, enlightenment and humanitarian interests, is totally unacceptable. The experience of this particular disadvantaged group has generally been one of exploitation, exclusion, dehumanisation and regulation.

(Barton, 1986: 276)

The work of Tomlinson and Barton has been criticised by others, however. Croll and Moses (1985), for instance, suggested that it ignored the very real needs of children with learning difficulties, and the humanitarian concerns of their teachers. Such accounts

fail to do justice to the very real difficulties experienced by some children... the fact that standardised testing procedures inevitably force some children to be bottom does not mean that these children do not have considerable difficulties. Similarly, the fact that categories of special needs are socially created and that the application of them to particular children is imperfect does not mean that the difficulties to which they refer are not real.

(Croll and Moses, 1985: 20)

Clearly, there is a danger inherent in conflict theory that any action may be interpreted as upholding the interests of privileged groups, and all developments thus become suspect. The problems which this may raise for practitioners are discussed by Oliver (1985). Whilst in general favouring the use of critical perspectives in the analysis of special needs education, he argued that if economic, political and social forces are seen as all-powerful, then practitioners may feel unable to effect change; as Willis (1977) has put it:

If we have nothing to say about what we do on Monday morning everything is yielded to a purist, structuralist, immobilising, relativist tautology. Nothing can be done until the basic structures of society are changed but structures prevent us from making any changes.

(Willis, 1977: 89)

We would argue that whilst a rigidly determinist model is unhelpful, nonetheless critical perspectives are essential to alert us to the economic and political context in which special educational needs are construed, and the power struggles surrounding policy. None of our contributors adopts the view that recent developments in the area of special needs are automatically in the best interests of the children, but their assessment of these changes varies widely. For example, Wolfendale (this volume) comments:

There is a consensus that the thrust of recent legislation is benign and enabling, reflecting a caring society, despite enduring professional concerns about the imprecision of terminology and consequent difficulty of agreeing criteria and thresholds for assessing special educational needs.

By way of contrast, Corbett (Chapter 4, this volume) emphasises the inhospitable political climate in which inclusive education in Newham is struggling to survive.

A further common theme in this collection is that although politicians might hope that legislation and policy directives would be implemented in a smooth and uncontested manner, the reality may be far removed from this, as policies are interpreted and possibly subverted at all stages. Fulcher (1989), for example, has argued that the distinction between policy and implementation served political purposes since ‘it occludes the real politics involved and presents bureaucrats as merely “administrators”: it constitutes a discourse of persuasion, of maintaining the view that only politicians hold real power’ (Fulcher, 1989: 6).

Hill and Bramley (1986), writing in the context of social policy more generally, also pointed out that the distinction between policy-making and implementation was based upon an important assumption in democratic government that policy is made by a group of politicians who are answerable to the electorate. However, they maintained that

There is a great deal of empirical evidence to suggest: (a) that ‘policies’ leave that part of the political system still highly uncertain or ambiguous, or indeed even sometimes containing contradictions; and (b) that actors in the part of the system concerned with implementation frequently operate in ways which create or transform or subvert what might have been regarded as the ‘policies’ handed down to them.

(Hill and Bramley, 1986: 139)

All the chapters in this book attempt to provide insight into the process of policy formation and implementation. They suggest that even though policies emanating from central government act as a powerful constraint, nonetheless there is still space for the creative responses of individuals and institutions.

The Warnock Report, the Progress Report of Scottish HMI and the 1981 Education Acts for Scotland, England and Wales

We turn now to a brief consideration of the significance of key policy developments in the late 1970s: the policy recommendations of Warnock and Scottish HMI and their translation into statute.

A major theme of the Warnock Report was the need to reconceptualise the position of children with learning difficulties in the school system, recognising them not as a discrete group entirely separate from the rest of the school population, but as part of a broad continuum ranging from those with severe and enduring difficulties to those whose problems were mild and perhaps temporary. Warnock noted that the source of a child’s learning difficulties might be his or her social and cultural environment rather than an intrinsic condition. In the light of what was seen as an educationally unhelpful and socially stigmatising system of categorisation, Warnock made the following recommendation:

We believe that the basis for decisions about the type of educational provision which is required should be not a single label ‘handicapped’ but rather a detailed description of special educational need. We therefore recommend that statutory categorisation of handicapped pupils should be abolished.

(DES, 1978: 43, para 3.25)

In the committee’s view, a system should be put in place to record the educational needs of children

who, on the basis of a detailed profile of their needs prepared by a multi-professional team, are judged by their local education authority to require special educational provision not generally available in ordinary schools.

(DES, 1978: 45, para 3.31)

Warnock envisaged that an increasing number of children with learning difficulties would be educated in mainstream rather than special schools, but at the same time was convinced that there would continue to be a role for special schools. Citing evidence from the Inner London Education Authority, the report noted that ‘in many respects, the special school represents a highly developed technique of positive discrimination’ (DES, 1978: 121, para 8.1).

A further major theme of the report was the central role to be played by parents in the identification, assessment and education of their children and their need for continuing co-operative support in the form of information, advice and political help. This support, it was argued,

must be seen as taking place within a partnership between parents and the members of different services. To the extent that it enables parents more effectively to help their children at home and at school the support should be an integral part of the provision made for children with special educational needs, which parents have a right to expect.

(DES, 1978: 161, para 9.40)

In Scotland, the legislation was also influenced by the Progress Report of Scottish HMI entitled The Education of Pupils with Learning Difficulties in Primary and Secondary Schools in Scotland (SED, 1978). This report focused on children with learning difficulties in mainstream schools and the role of the remedial teacher and underlined the value of a curriculum-deficit rather than a child-deficit model. According to HMI, all pupils should follow essentially the same curriculum, differentiated in an appropriate manner. Segregating pupils in separate remedial classes or withdrawing them for individual tuition was likely to exacerbate their problems rather than cure them, since they were likely to lose contact with their peers, lack the stimulation of the mainstream curriculum and become increasingly demotivated. Responsibility for meeting the needs of children with learning difficulties was placed firmly on the shoulders of the class or subject teacher. Even if extra assistance was required from the learning support teacher, this does not reduce the class or subject teacher’s responsibility for the pupils, or absolve him from continuing his own endeavours (SED, 1978: 25, para 4.11). HMI also proposed a new role for the remedial teacher. Criticising the trend towards separate remedial departments...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Special Educational Needs Provision in the United Kingdom - the Policy Context
• 2 Dilemmas in Special Educational Needs: Some Effects of Local Management of Schools
• 3 Policy and Provision for Children with Special Educational Needs in the Early Years
• 4 Challenges in a Competitive Culture: A Policy for Inclusive Education in Newham
• 5 Clusters: A Collaborative Approach to Meeting Special Educational Needs
• 6 Conflicts of Policies and Models: The Case of Specific Learning Difficulties
• 7 Learning Difficulties and Mathematics
• 8 Integration in the United Kingdom
• 9 Special Educational Needs and Problem Behaviour: Making Policy in the Classroom
• 10 The Role of the Learning Support Teacher in Scottish Primary and Secondary Classrooms
• 11 The Impact of Policy on Practice and Thinking
• Index