Improving Schools, Developing Inclusion

Mel Ainscow, Tony Booth, Alan Dyson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134193448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

While many books explore the possibilities for developing inclusive practices in schools, and 'inclusion' is widely regarded as a desirable goal, much of the literature on the subject has been narrowly concerned with the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs. This book however, takes the view that marginalisation, exclusion and underachievement take many forms and affect many different kinds of child. As such, a definition of inclusion should also touch upon issues of equity, participation, community, entitlement, compassion, respect for diversity and sustainability.

Here the highly regarded authors focus on:

• barriers to participation and learning experienced by pupils
• the practices that can overcome these barriers
• the extent to which such practices facilitate improved learning outcomes
• how such practices can be encouraged and sustained within schools and LEAs.
  

The book is part of the Improving Learning series, published in partnership with the Teaching and Learning Research Project.

Part I What is the issue?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203967157-2

Chapter 1 Improving schools, developing inclusion?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203967157-3

In this chapter we examine what we brought to the research from our own knowledge and experience, and from examining the thinking of others. In so doing, we explore the ways in which inclusion has been and should be understood before beginning, in the next chapter, the process of analysing the resources for, and barriers to, the development of inclusion within government education policies. Within this overall context, we define the main agenda for the book, namely that of determining ways in which inclusive school development can be encouraged.

The title of this book is intended to provoke thinking about two questions: When and how do improvements in schools become inclusive development? How can inclusive school development be best supported? In so doing, we draw attention to the highly contentious nature of improvement in schools. One person’s view of an improving institution may be another’s vision of educational hell. This means that we cannot understand improvement in education without considering the values underlying the changes we would like to take place. For us, inclusion is fundamentally about the specification of those values and how they can be put into action.

The English educational policy context makes the study of inclusion particularly interesting. Since 1988, both Conservative and Labour governments have introduced a series of policy changes which have encouraged competition and accountability regimes as the means for driving up ‘standards’ in state education (Ball, 2001). Yet since the Labour government came to power in 1997, this agenda has been combined with an unprecedented emphasis on inclusion.

On the face of it, inclusion and the standards agenda are in conflict because they imply different views of what makes an improved school, different ways of thinking about achievements and different routes for raising them. How would schools in this period make sense of such competing pressures? The research we report also attempts to provide some answers to this further question.

Building on experience

The three co-directors of the network brought with them many years of experience in studying the issues of inclusion and exclusion in education. Alan Dyson had previously carried out a series of detailed studies of processes of inclusion in schools. Some of his early work was based on what he has referred to as an ‘optimistic view’, in which radical change to education seemed possible, particularly in terms of overthrowing established and discredited categorical approaches to children who experienced difficulties in schools (Dyson, 1990a, 1990b, 1991). Together with his colleagues, Dyson spent some time working with schools which reconstructed their ‘special educational needs’ systems in favour of more flexible, non-categorical responses to a much wider range of student diversity (Clark et al., 1995a; Dyson et al., 1994). They noted that these schools seemed to be bucking the trend of how schools understood and responded to students who experienced difficulties, to be locating the source of those difficulties in their own systems, structures and practices and, to that extent, to be pointing the way towards an unequivocally more inclusive future. However, as they studied these schools more closely, they came to the conclusion that all was not as it seemed (Clark et al., 1995b, 1997, 1998, 1999; Dyson and Millward, 2000, 2001). Developments in these schools, they concluded, were full of contradictions: the rhetoric of radical approaches was not shared by some – or, in some cases, by most – of their teachers; radical aspects of practice and provision were commonly accompanied by other aspects that were far less radical and some way from being ‘inclusive’; and even the radical policies which they espoused were ambiguous and contradictory.

Much of Mel Ainscow’s previous work, too, had focused on processes of inclusive development within educational systems. This had also shown that such changes are far from straightforward, not least because they challenge so much of existing attitudes and practice, and the current use of resources (Ainscow, 1999). Other research had focused on classroom processes (e.g. Ainscow, 1999, 2000; Ainscow and Brown, 2000), school development (e.g. Ainscow, 1995; Ainscow et al., 1998; Hopkins et al., 1994, 1997a, b), teacher development (e.g. Ainscow, 1994), and systemic change (e.g. Ainscow and Haile-Giorgis, 1999; Ainscow et al., 2000), particularly in respect to the role of LEAs (e.g. Ainscow and Howes, 2001; Ainscow and Tweddle, 2003). Members of the Manchester group had also carried out a series of research reviews in relation to the research described in this book (e.g. Ainscow, Fox and O’Kane, 2003; Howes et al., 2002). Much of their earlier research had been influenced by Kurt Lewin’s dictum that ‘you cannot understand an organisation until you try to change it’ (Lewin, 1946; Schein, 1992), and so it had led the Manchester group to position themselves as agents for development alongside their partners in the field.

Tony Booth came to the research with an involvement in developing ideas about inclusion since the 1970s (Booth, 1981a; Booth and Potts, 1983). While some people now wish to draw a clear line between the meanings of integration and inclusion, Booth and his colleagues always saw the notion of integration as carrying an approach to school and social reform (Booth, 1988, 1999). Views of integration and then inclusion were linked to a notion of comprehensive community education from nursery, through the years of compulsory education to higher or lifelong education (Booth, 1983, 1996a). Inclusion was connected to a principle of equality of value of all students and staff within education (Booth, 1981b). Inclusion was seen to involve schools in recognising and valuing the diversity of their students and thus arranging for them to learn together in mixed collaborating groups. The process of inclusion involved schools in extending this diversity to include all students within their communities and to counter all forms of selection and exclusion (Booth, 1996b, 2003a and 2003b). From early on, accounts were gathered about the implications of an inclusive approach to the development of practice and policy within education systems (Booth and Coulby, 1987; Booth and Swann, 1987; Booth et al., 1987, 1992a, 1992b). Such implications were set out in most precise detail, for schools, and for early years and childcare settings, within versions of the Index for Inclusion (Booth and Ainscow, 2002; Booth et al., 2004). These placed a new emphasis on the role of cultures in creating and sustaining development.

Some previous work had involved the three senior authors in working together. In what turned out to have been a pilot for this book, in the mid-1990s they carried out a series of studies of processes of inclusion and exclusion in an urban secondary school (Ainscow et al., 1999; Booth et al., 1997, 1998; Dyson et al., 1999). The experience of working collaboratively in the context of that school pointed to the benefits of researchers with different points of view exploring a common context. It also drew attention to the value of working in partnership with practitioners in order to make sense of such experiences.

In researching areas in which we had already done a considerable amount of work, there was the obvious danger that we would look for, and then find, only what supported our preconceptions. In the event, we set out to challenge our previous ideas, not least by challenging one other. We added to the theoretical resources available by creating teams of researchers in each of the participating universities, the members of which also brought their own experiences and perspectives. In addition, we were helped considerably by the astute questioning from those with whom we researched in schools and LEAs.

Defining inclusion

Inclusion may be defined in a variety of ways. Often, however, explicit definitions of the term are omitted from publications, leaving readers to infer the meanings it is being given for themselves. Definitions can be descriptive or prescriptive. A descriptive definition of inclusion reports on the variety of ways ‘inclusion’ is used in practice, whereas a prescriptive definition indicates the way we intend to use the concept and would like it to be used by others. Both kinds of definition are important to us.

Experience had taught us that many different views of inclusion exist in the field (Ainscow et al., 2000) and that there is no one perspective on inclusion within a single country or school (Booth, 1995; Booth and Ainscow, 1998). Consequently, we felt it was important within our research to find out more about how policy makers, local authority staff and teachers in schools talked about inclusion. However, in order to be able to assess and comment on the extent to which ‘inclusion’ was occurring in the schools we had to decide how we thought the term should be used.

While we were keen to bring a degree of coherence to our own thinking, we also felt it important to map the complexity of the contexts in which we were to work. In particular, we wanted to be clear about the strands of thinking about inclusion within government policies, not least because we assumed that these influenced schools and LEAs which we set out to understand. Indeed, our previous work had led us to anticipate that such separate strands might in themselves act as barriers to the development of coherent change.

With this in mind, we developed a typology of six ways of ways of thinking about inclusion:

1. Inclusion as a concern with disabled students and others categorised as ‘having special educational needs’.
2. Inclusion as a response to disciplinary exclusion.
3. Inclusion in relation to all groups seen as being vulnerable to exclusion.
4. Inclusion as developing the school for all.
5. Inclusion as ‘Education for All’.
6. Inclusion as a principled approach to education and society.

In what follows we outline these six approaches and offer a commentary on them.

Inclusion as concerned with disability and ‘special educational needs'

There is a common assumption that inclusion is primarily about educating disabled students, or those categorised as ‘having special educational needs’, in mainstream schools. Inevitably many of the participants in the research started out with such an assumption. This is also true of several government documents. Thus, for example, the government’s programme for action on special educational needs referred to inclusion as ‘the keystone’ of its educational policy (DfEE, 1998b). Yet this was a reference not to general educational policy but to policy concerned with children categorised as ‘having special educational needs’:

We want to see more pupils with SEN included within mainstream primary and secondary schools. We support the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Salamanca World Statement on Special Needs Education 1994. This calls on governments to adopt the principle of inclusive education, enrolling all children in regular schools, unless there are compelling reasons for doing otherwise. That implies the progressive extension of the capacity of mainstream schools to provide for children with a wide range of needs.

(DfEE, 1997, p. 44)

We question the usefulness of an approach to inclusion that, in attempting to increase the participation of students, focuses on a ‘disabled’ or ‘special needs’ part of them and ignores all the other ways in which participation for any student may be impeded or enhanced. The Index for Inclusion dispensed with the use of the notion of ‘special educational needs’ to account for educational difficulties. Specifically, it proposed the replacement of notions of ‘special educational need’ and ‘special educational provision’ with those of ‘barriers to learning and participation’ and ‘resources to support learning and participation’. In this context, support was seen as all activities, which increase the capacity of schools to respond to diversity (Booth and Ainscow, 2002). Such a shift complements the ideas of others, such as Susan Hart in her ‘innovative thinking’ (Hart, 1996, 2000), and in ‘learning without limits’ (Hart et al., 2004).

Yet in rejecting a ‘special educational needs’ view of inclusion, we would not wish to deflect attention from the continued segregation of disabled students, or, indeed, students otherwise categorised as ‘having special educational needs’. Inclusion may be seen to involve the assertion of the rights of disabled young people to a local mainstream education, a view propounded vociferously by sections of the disabled people’s movement (see e.g. Lipsky and Gartner, 1997; Peters, 2003). Where people see placement in special schools as a neutral response to ‘need’ they may argue that some children are best served in special settings. However, a rights perspective invalidates such arguments. Thus, compulsory segregation is seen to contribute to the oppression of disabled people (Abberley, 1987), just as other practices marginalise groups on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation (Corbett, 1995).

We are also concer...