Must Inclusion be Special?

Rethinking educational support within a community of provision

Jonathan Rix

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317498919
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Must Inclusion be Special? examines the discord between special and inclusive education and why this discord can only be resolved when wider inequalities within mainstream education are confronted. It calls for a shift in our approach to provision, from seeing it as a conglomeration of individualised needs to identifying it as a conglomeration of collective needs.

The author examines the political, medical and cultural tendency of current times to focus upon the individual and contrasts this with the necessity to focus on context. This book distinguishes the theoretical perspectives that are often associated with special or inclusive education and the broad range of interests which depend upon their ongoing development. This examination leads to a problematisation of mainstream education provision, our understanding of why social inequities emerge and how additional support can overcome these inequities.

Further chapters explore the underlying challenges which emerge from our use and understanding of the notions of special and inclusive, outlining an alternative approach based upon a community of provision. This approach recognises the interconnectedness of services and the significance of context, and it encapsulates the aspiration of much international legislation for participation and inclusion for all. But it also assumes that we tend towards diffuse practices, services, policies, settings and roles, spread across provision which is variously inclusive and exclusionary. In seeking to create equitable participation for all, support needs to shift its focus from the individual to this diffuse network of contexts.

Must Inclusion be Special? emerges from the research base which problematises inclusion and special education, drawing upon examples from many countries. It also refers to the author's research into pedagogy, language and policy, and his experiences as a teacher and the parent of a child identified with special educational needs.

Part I
Inclusive and special

1
Why do we Need Special and Inclusive Education?

I begin with an idea from Tom Robbins (2002). In his novel, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Robbins talks about trying to escape the Killer B’s. These are behaviour, belief and belonging. If you do not belong you are either the enemy or inferior or both. To belong you must share others’ beliefs and behave as they do (though even then you may not be accepted). Religions, political parties, towns, schools, countries, racial groups – you must believe, belong, behave or face damnation. Sadly, I cannot use an exact quote from Tom Robbins’ novel though. I am still awaiting permission beyond the UK, Europe and Commonwealth. I may not believe, but I behave … so that I may belong.

Starting with some local issues

In carrying out a review of special educational provision across 50 countries (Rix, Sheehy, Fletcher-Campbell, Crisp & Harper, 2013a) the only unifying factors which we could say applied across all administrations and countries were that:

• Children are marginalised within all education systems.¹ (Who they are and why they are marginalised varies between systems.)
• Provision referred to as special involves time and space additional to that provided typically.

Subsequently, we wrote a paper discussing this lack of unity and submitted it to various esteemed journals. The reviewers kept rejecting it. They recognised the value of the research and the data we had collected but felt that the lack of patterns and groupings undermined its usefulness. The research, they suggested, would be more powerful if it was able to say ‘these countries are Type A’ and ‘these countries are Type B’ … and so forth.

Our problem was twofold. First, we could put countries into groups for an aspect of their provision but two countries within one group would not be together in many of the other groupings. So for example, Italy and Norway could be put in one group because they claimed to have closed their special schools, but they would be in different groups in relation to assessment and use of labels, since Italy still required a psycho-medical assessment to achieve additional funding, whilst Norway did not. Second, what was claimed in national documents and aspired to in policy was not what actually happened on the ground. So when we visited Italy and Norway we found that there were special schools and special classes in existence with varying degrees of official support at different levels within the system. In addition, some administrations in Italy were trying to provide additional funding without psycho-medical assessment, whilst in Norway psycho-medical labels were in everyday use as part of local funding distribution processes. This is not to suggest that this kind of discordance was only evident in Italy and Norway. As a research team we came to recognise that it was a factor across and between all education systems. Identifying patterns and putting countries into groupings gives a false sense of unity, implying a commonality which is actually undermined by all the other variables at play.

So let us go back to what everyone we spoke to did agree about. Education systems marginalise children; and special provision is time and space additional to that provided typically. This is not to say that:

• All additional time and space is referred to as special.
• Additional time and space is always provided with the intention of counterbalancing marginalisation.
• Special cannot mean more than this to some people.
• All people agree that some pupils should be provided with additional time and space.

But it does provide a point of agreement about what we have now. It provides us with a starting point. If we wish to understand marginalisation and additionality within any school or education system we must have a firm understanding of the aims and practices associated with the majority of children, young people and practitioners. To understand what is special we must understand the local processes of marginalisation and the nature of the provision which other provision is additional to.

But just as special is a localised phenomenon, so is inclusion. As much as inclusion is a matter of being rather than doing (Corbett, 1999) and about “community values” (p. 59), the nature of education systems means it is a process of a person or group of people being included within something. They are to be included within its processes, structures and everyday typical experiences. The nature of that inclusion will depend upon how people interpret, understand and enact the nature of the something and being within it. In Norway, for example, a key aspect of the something was an adaptive curriculum. The curriculum was meant to be adapted to meet the needs of each individual. As a consequence of this generic commitment to the individual, children with support could study a completely different curriculum to their peers in the same class or within a different part of the school. For example, in a primary lesson, we observed a boy learning English while his peers studied Norwegian; in a secondary school, a boy with profound and multiple emotional and physical needs was taken skiing, climbing, swimming and cycling on a daily basis but never spent any time with his peers; and in a strengthened school (they did not call them special), each child was taught in separate rooms despite management asking staff to open up their classes. Evidently, a commitment to inclusion within a system which is committed to individualisation can rapidly lead to marginalisation. But of course such a consequence cannot be generalised to any other school or education system … it can only serve as a warning, a possibility to be discussed locally.

Our starting point, then, for understanding both special and inclusive education is the system which is intended for all learners. If we wish to explore the underlying challenges which frame our understanding of the notions of special and inclusive, we have to begin with our understanding of what it is that this overall system is trying to achieve.

Understanding why we are here

Education has emerged for different reasons in different forms across different societies. This is an inevitable reflection of the cultural divergence within those societies. Despite this, many people speak of education as if it has some universally understood and agreed values. It is situated as part of international conventions, and the full range of legislation associated with gender, disability, race, equality, rights and “the exasperated etc” (Butler, 1990, p. 143).

The reasons for providing all the world’s children with high-quality primary and secondary education are numerous and compelling. Education provides economic benefits and improves health. Education is a widely accepted humanitarian obligation and an internationally mandated human right. These claims are neither controversial nor new.

(Cohen, Bloom & Malin, 2006 p. v)

Yet, the egalitarian function of education is neither universal nor historically significant. It is also frequently contradicted by a range of other functions.

In their analysis of global educational expansion Benavot, Resnik and Corrales (2006) draw upon a broad literature to reveal the diverse motivations underpinning the development of education systems. Educational expansion has been an uneven process. Vested political interests had to create educational wholes out of “diverse, semi-related, and often non-existent parts” (p. 4). These social, political and economic processes created administrations which brought together competing interests and loyalties. These frequently involved religious authorities and leading figures from local communities and businesses. The impact of respected educational thinkers was far less influential in initiating education than broader social, political and economic pressures. The result was new social pacts and relationships. But the diversity of priorities and interests meant that the focus of these processes was often not primarily upon educational targets. Emerging policies,² structures and types of schooling³ subsequently established and reinforced inequalities of participation and access.

Developing compulsion

Before compulsory education, frequently the role of schooling was to develop an elite class who could govern the state, run the administration and organise the faith. It provided a select number with the key skills, knowledge and social manners required for leadership within the fields of warfare, religion, politics and diplomacy. For the vast majority of other people, education was primarily an apprenticeship into a set of skills relevant to rural living or to a craft. Education therefore played an essential role in reinforcing clear social structures. It was committed to the status quo. Schooling of this kind was evident within ancient civilisations such as China, Egypt, Rome and Greece, as well as in pre-reformation Europe and countries associated with the European and Ottoman empires. It was not simply a matter of teaching the sons of the rich and powerful, though. For instance, in England some of the earliest schools (which were to become the elite’s fee-paying ‘Public’ schools) were charitable institutions established with a clear duty to provide education for children from ‘humble’ backgrounds.

Within other regional contexts (North American, Scandinavian and Germanic states for example) social norms also emerged which required parents to educate their children, with a particular emphasis upon religion, morals and text-based literacy. In Islamic cultures, large networks of Qur’anic schools played (as they still do) a key role in socialisation, establishing regional and community identities. Their role was particularly evident in the early stages of learning, providing a focus upon literacy and religious texts. In many places education was not just a matter of individual development either. In Mexico literate adults were a communal resource supporting religious and bureaucratic functions; for example, to be a self-governing township required having a certain number of literate members (Rockwell, 2002).

In North America and North Europe, from the seventeenth century onwards, compulsory forms of education emerged out of the protestant reformation, leading to the development of localised education for many. However, the shift to a model of mass schooling within a nation state did not begin to emerge until the nineteenth century. There are seemingly practical reasons for this emergence. As a ‘modern’ society develops, so too does production and service. There is a concurrent development of specialised skills. The value of particular skills rises, whilst the capacity of the family or small local community to sustain and develop the required skills decreases (MacInnes & Diaz, 2009).

The reasons for the development of compulsory education are not just a practical and linear response to a changing economy, though. A narrative which emerged in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe can be seen to be replicated across nations. As an industrialised society emerged, there was an enforced shift in land ownership and agricultural patterns. This created new pressures and population changes which drove people from the land and into urban environments (Hart, 2011). Education became a key tool in moving people from the thinking and lifestyles of their traditional and indigenous cultures. New kinds of work benefited from a literate society. Workers could have technical processes explained to them using a common industrial language, involving more explicit and precise communication than previously. This fuelled advances in technology and drove educational development as well as single, national, languages. In turn this became the means to create and transmit a communal culture. The coming together of universal education and a common culture and language was by necessity controlled, co-ordinated and driven by the state. Through them the ‘nation’ emerged (Rieffer, 2003; Gellner, 1983).

Competing interests

As people struggled to create unifying national systems and educational identities, the nature of the relationships and social pacts which developed varied between countries. It was not merely an emergent process. It had multiple and fundamentally political motivations which varied between contexts and across the years. For example, in many countries, the development of secular education was itself part of a wider battle to weaken the influence of the dominant religious culture. Compulsion to attend provided a means of directing the children towards non-religious learning goals. The focus on literacy, numeracy and appropriate behaviour could be linked to a developing economy and nation rather than an understanding of religious text. In broad terms, the economically dominant minority-world nations saw education as a way to consolidate the state. They could establish a sense of nationhood and drive economic change. In contrast, within the postcolonial majority-world,⁴ education systems were seen as a way to break away from colonial legacies. They could rebalance economies and create a unifying national identity which might overcome ethnic divisions that had emerged from or been encouraged by colonial structures.

The existence of competing interests underpinning the introduction of compulsory education is evident when we look across nations. Benavot et al. (2006) cite a range of studies which suggest many different driving forces (see Table 1.1).

This is not to say that these were the only motivations in these countries. Different interests are also evident between writers and researchers. So for example, Benavot et al. pointed to studies suggesting that the focus of some US states was the future development of territory; in contrast, Richardson and Johanningmeier (1997) identified personal growth and individualism as priorities pre-1780. After this they saw an increasing focus on literacy and the use of education to create rational decision-making citizens, preserving order, productivity and social compliance. For them the common school and universal education emerged from this aspiration.

The legislative moves towards compulsory education also need to be measured against potentially contradictory impulses, such as issues of funding and

Table 1.1 Examples of some driving forces of compulsory education

Country/region	Some of the driving forces
France	Trying to control a powerful Catholic church
Prussia	Supporting the development of the Protestant faith
Scandinavia	Supporting the development of the Protestant faith
Japan	Developing industrial and military competitiveness; reorganising national institutions; creating national solidarity, a central bureaucracy, a skilled labour force and a future elite
Soviet Russia	Developing a literate nation; establishing meritocracy and the basis for industrial development
Ecuador	Overcoming parental disinterest and colonial gender bias
Arab states	Aiming to redress gender disparities
Spain	Aiming to unify geographically and culturally distinct regions
Sri Lanka	Aiming to reduce child labour
India	Aiming to build the nation

national income (Weiner, 1991 in Benavot et al.). In India, early attempts at compulsory education were possibly undermined by a middle-class concern with the disruption of the social order. Similarly, in England there was a concern that public education would encourage revolution, whilst in Spain the very regional disparities which compulsion sort to overcome were reinforced by the official language of education. In many countries there emerged not only a tension between secular and religious provision but also between public and private providers, and centralised and decentralised systems of control. These tensions produced varying responses within countries across the years, for example:

• Religious schools became part of national systems with a secularised curriculum.
• Private providers were publically funded.
• Decentralised systems were funded and directed through centralised curricula or centralised training or centralised standards.

Additionally, people frequently turned to pre-existing organisations as ways of thinking about schools and the problems associated with them. There was a particular link to the military, business and industry (Dorn & Johanningmeier, 1999). For example, in parts of nineteenth-century Europe, drill (based upon military training) was a basic physical activity included in the school day (McCrone, 1984). This made use of limited time, space and money. Importantly for militarised nations, it instilled disc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Inclusive and special
• Part II Developing a community of provision
• Bibliography
• Index