The Making of the Inclusive School

Gary Thomas, David Walker, Julie Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415155601
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134731466
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Inclusion is a buzzword of the 1990s. Politicians now stress their commitment to inclusion and social justice - not competition. For schools, inclusion means accepting and educating all children, irrespective of their difficulties.
The new inclusive mood is about including everyone in society's institutions. It has created a growing demand for schools to find effective ways of including and teaching all children - even those who at one time would have been sent to special schools.
The book combines a theoretical examination of inclusion and its rationale with the story of a group of schools in which teachers, assistants and children have striven to make inclusion happen.
This new book
* explores the arguments for inclusive schools
* examines the international evidence about children's well-being and academic progress in inclusive schools
* describes how the pioneers have developed their practice for inclusion
* presents the findings of an in-depth 18 month study of a group of schools which have striven to make inclusion happen

Part I
INCLUSION IN SCHOOLS

Inclusion is a buzzword of the 1990s. Politicians now stress their commitment to inclusion and social justice – not competition. The new inclusive mood has created a growing demand for mainstream schools to find ways of including and teaching all children – even those who at one time would certainly have been sent to special schools. In the first part of this book we examine the arguments for inclusive schools and the evidence for the success of inclusion; in Part II we proceed to examine ways of making inclusion happen, based on the experience of a group of schools which have – in the Somerset Inclusion Project – embraced the inclusive ideal.

This first part of the book looks at society’s readiness for inclusive institutions and notes the coincidence of this readiness with the accumulation of more and more evidence about the ineffectiveness of special education. It is odd that although the arguments for inclusive schools seem overwhelming, ethically and empirically, the move to inclusion has been painfully slow. We examine reasons for this slow move to inclusion and look at what is needed to make inclusion happen. We also examine the international evidence about children’s progress in inclusive schools.

After examining the provenance of inclusion as an ideal and the rationale for it in today’s schools, Part I proceeds to look at a number of issues in detail. These include the way support is provided by assistants and teachers in the inclusive classroom; the ways in which the curriculum can be adapted to enable true inclusion; the challenge to produce a congenial social environment for children in moves to inclusion; and, particularly where children have physical disabilities, the logistic and physical challenges that confront an inclusion project. Throughout, we have tried to distil the lessons of the Somerset Inclusion Project and other projects where these have been reported in the literature.

1
INCLUSIVE EDUCATION
The ideals and the practice

FROM SEGREGATION TO INCLUSION

Inclusion is not a new idea. Although recent concern about inclusion can be traced to the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the ideals behind inclusive education have much deeper roots in liberal and progressive thought. If we research the shaping of the current school system a century earlier, we can see that two avenues were then open. One was inclusive, the other segregative.

A significant body of opinion at the turn of the century – perhaps exemplified best in the work of the child welfare pioneer Elizabeth Burgwin – saw neither purpose nor virtue in segregation. Those who shared these views did not even seriously consider segregated schooling. Instead, in thinking about the needs of children with disabilities, they thought automatically of adaptations that could be made to ordinary schools. It is quite possible that this inclusive thought might have prospered and provided the philosophical and organisational foundation for the school system of the twentieth century.

Another body of opinion, however, considered that children could be categorised according to their difficulties and suggested that different, ‘special’ schools be established to cater for children who, in the words of the School Board for London (1904), could not be taught ‘in ordinary standards or by ordinary methods’. (The origins of the special system are discussed in detail by Potts, 1982; Tomlinson, 1982; Copeland, 1995; Copeland, 1996; and Scott, 1996.)

It is possible that this segregative body of opinion might have lost the argument against the progressive opinion of the day. However, the segregative conviction was reinforced greatly by the burgeoning ‘science’ of psychometrics and associated ideas on eugenics. These suggested that ‘misfits’ should be removed from the genetic pool; it needed only a minor extension of this logic to propose that defectives and degenerates be removed from society’s mainstream institutions, notably schools. When Cyril Burt was appointed the first psychologist for London in 1911 further momentum was added to this body of opinion. His growing reputation, his fondness for psychometrics and his commitment to the idea that intelligence was inherited and more or less immutable all combined to give great stimulus to a segregative education system based on the categorisation of the child. This was especially so as Burt was one of the principal architects of the 1944 Education Act insofar as it related to special education. The 1944 Act constructed a highly segregative post-war education system with its ten categories of handicap for which special schools would cater.

It became received opinion that special schools provided a sensible way of meeting the needs of a minority of children, at the same time as safeguarding the efficient education of the majority in the mainstream. Indeed, it seemed more than just sensible: it was self-evident fact that special schools were appropriate. Pijl and Meijer (1994) go so far as to suggest that the system of special schools was widely accepted throughout western Europe. They even suggest that it was one of which society as a whole was proud. Since the facts as to its utility were plain, evidence to support it was unnecessary. This orthodoxy became so firmly embedded in the individual and institutional consciousness that no serious challenges were made to the idea until the mid-1960s.

It took the world-wide push for civil rights to begin to challenge this orthodoxy. The changing world-view liberated people with disabilities to give voice to their anger about the stigma, degradation and curricular and social limits imposed by the segregated education to which they had been subjected. Simultaneously, evidence about the surprising lack of success of the segregated system (surprising, that is, given the generous resources allocated to it)¹ began to accumulate with such consistency that it could not be ignored (e.g. Christophos and Renz, 1969; Galloway and Goodwin, 1979; Lipsky and Gartner, 1987; Reynolds et al., 1987; Reynolds, 1988; Anderson and Pellicer, 1990). All this built on evidence (e.g. Dunn, 1968; Birch et al., 1970; Mercer, 1970) which showed that the special system selected disproportionately children from ethnic minorities and children from lower socio-economic groups. Moral arguments and empirical evidence came together to result, towards the end of the twentieth century, in a consensus which sees inclusion as an appropriate philosophy and a relevant framework for restructuring education.

Looking back on this history, however, one realises that the seeds of an integrative philosophy existed many years ago. The segregated system, which a few years ago seemed so manifestly right (and still seems natural to some), can be seen as simply one possible method of organising the education system. It succeeded in providing the blueprint for the school system for the great part of this century because of the psychometric and eugenic views that prevailed before the Second World War. However, it is now recognised that segregation by no means offers a common-sense or natural way of organising education.

An inclusive philosophy has ultimately risen again and prospered. It has been able to succeed because it chimes with the philosophy of a liberal political system and a pluralistic culture – one that celebrates diversity and promotes fraternity and equality of opportunity. Inclusion must be at the heart of any society which cherishes these values and at the heart of a truly comprehensive education system.

EVIDENCE FOR INCLUSION?

So, although inclusion has won partly because of evidence from educational research showing that special schools are not as effective as one would expect or wish, it has won mainly because it is right that it should have done so. Arguments for inclusion are principled ones, stemming from concern for human rights. As Fulcher (1993) points out, these principles drive policy. Now, this creates problems for evaluation, for values cannot be evaluated. Fulcher goes on to say that value-driven policy ‘cannot be evaluated by an ecological-systems model, nor by rich databases, nor by looking at the interdependence of elements of the system’ (1993: 128).

Newman and Roberts (1996) support Fulcher’s case. They point out that many pioneering developments in welfare for children (such as the shipping of children to Australia for a ‘new life’ at the turn of the century) seemed right and proper at the time. However, it is now recognised that these were often disastrous in their consequences. There are indeed several contemporary detractors who pick up this theme and warn that an inclusive philosophy is an inappropriate and misleading one to follow. Within the deaf community, for example, Mason (1994) suggests that inclusive dialogue has stressed political, economic, bureaucratic, professional and administrative issues, rather than the effects of inclusive education on individual children.² Gerber argues that special education should be valued because it has always been subversive. It has ever striven, he suggests, to accommodate children with ‘extreme individual differences’ (1996: 156) within a wider educational system which tacitly seeks to exclude them entirely. And Dorn et al. (1996) warn that by focusing on inclusion the positive action accumulated over decades in favour of children with disabilities and learning difficulties may evaporate.

They have a point. The move to inclusion must be monitored to ensure continuity of services. Special provision in special schools has always been made on the axiom that resources should be provided in direct ratio to need, heeding (albeit unconsciously) Rawls’s (1971) advice on the redistribution of resources to achieve social justice. But a gradual attrition of provision is possible if the critical mass of the special school does not exist to ensure the survival of advantageous provision. And if principles cannot be evaluated for their veracity nor ethics for their truth, it is crucial that the consequences of the principled policy decision to provide inclusive education are rigorously monitored, especially as recent evidence concerning the academic, social and emotional benefits of integrative programmes are nowhere near as clear-cut as earlier evidence promised. For instance, Hegarty, in summarising a major international review of the literature on integration for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), suggests that ‘research has failed to establish a clear-cut advantage in either direction’ (1994: 197), partly due to the methodological problems of comparing non-comparable groups receiving different kinds of education. He emphasises that integration and segregation are not sharply defined and that integration can take numerous forms, some of them overlapping with segregation. These problems in definition make comparison extremely difficult. Moreover, there are important differences between organisational structures of schools and integration schemes which exaggerate the difficulties of comparative research. Further, any matching of variables in the comparisons of groups do not (presumably because of the small numbers generally involved) extend beyond age, sex and IQ. The corollary of all this, Hegarty says, is that ‘the body of research comparing integration and segregation has a limited validity’ (ibid.).

Steinberg and Tovey (1996), reporting mainly on American research, concur with Hegarty, pointing to the heterogeneity of disabling conditions which make matching difficult or impossible for control grouping. They also emphasise the difficulty of comparing outcomes of inclusion versus special education where there is bound to be selection bias – that is, the tendency to select ‘harder to teach’ children for special class placement and ‘easier’ children for inclusion programmes. Despite the difficulties of comparison, many researchers feel able to offer their findings. Baker et al. (1995), for instance, report from three meta-analyses that there is a small-to-moderate beneficial effect of inclusive education on social and academic outcomes of students with special needs. And Lipsky and Gartner (1996) summarise over twenty recent studies which report academic and social benefits arising from inclusion.

The problems of selection bias do, however, remain and are even present in the largest longitudinal study of outcomes for students placed in mainstream schools (the US National Longitudinal Transition Study of Special Education Students), which is tracking the post-school progress of 8000 young people. This shows that students with physical disabilities who had received mainstream education were 43 per cent more likely to be employed post-school than counterparts who had attended special placements. Although selection bias must have existed, it is reassuring to note that children with different disabilities were separated in the analysis and that the analysis was sensitive enough to show better outcomes for certain of these groups, notably those with physical disabilities (see Woronov, 1996, for a report).

As Hegarty concludes from the existing research, ‘While [the inadequacies of comparative research] means that any inferences drawn must be tentative, the absence of a clear-cut balance of advantage supports integration’ (Hegarty, 1993b: 198). Hegarty appears to be saying that unless evidence relating to children’s progress and happiness at school is unequivocally unsupportive of integration, then the principles we have used to guide the current practice toward inclusion should be used to determine the direction of policy.

More than this, given that the move to inclusion is a principled one, it is important also that research should focus on ways of making inclusion work. It should illuminate good practice and investigate problems in such a way that obstacles can be recognised and overcome. This is what the research reported in Part II of this book is about.

INCLUSION IN SOCIETY

Most educational discussion on inclusion concentrates on curriculum, pastoral systems, attitudes and teaching methods, but there is a further dimension to inclusion which goes beyond these narrowly school-based considerations. It is the wider notion of inclusion in society – for the notion of inclusion is not unique to education. Indeed, the recent popularity of inclusion as an idea in education probably rests at least in part on its consonance with this wider notion of inclusivity in society – of a society in which each member has a stake. Commentators (e.g. Hutton, 1995; Kay, 1996; Plender, 1997a) have begun to discuss the meaning of this new inclusiveness. There is an interesting notion of reciprocity in their discussion – a recognition of mutual obligations and expectations between the community and institutions such as schools, in such a way that these institutions are reminded of their responsibilities and public duties.

To illustrate the point, Kay notes from etymological research that many ideas which seem unrelated to us now – for example the notions of owing and owning – share a root which reveals that there was once a bond between the notions. The bond between owe and own rests in an expectation of duty, sharing and a concern for others who are weaker. Thus, owning always carried with it some implication of owing – some bearing of obligations. Only relatively recent usage has separated the two. The ethic of a stakeholding, inclusive society implies a renewed bonding of these ideas.

Now, while Kay draws this distinction in the context of large companies and their obligations to their employees and their customers, the lessons learned from this analysis are surely valid also in relation to schools in their willingness to become inclusive. For there is an injunction in the inclusive, stakeholding ethic, says Plender (1997b), to take account of social costs and benefits that are not explicitly priced in the market. In this process the role of state and individual are downplayed while the role of intermediate institutions (companies, unions, schools, etc.) is reinforced. In an inclusive society, entrustment to governors and headteachers of large amounts of capital and the futures of many children must be accompanied by an...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PART I: INCLUSION IN SCHOOLS
• PART II: FROM SPECIAL SCHOOLS TO INCLUSION SERVICES
• APPENDIX: MORE INFORMATION ON INCLUSION: ADDRESSES AND WEBSITES
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY