Inclusive Education - Readings and Reflections

Book reviews Inclusive Education – Readings and Reflections Gary Thomas & Mark Vaughan Maidenhead Open University Press 2004 215 pp. ISBN 0335207243 £18.99 I recently asked a member of Royal MENCAP why their organization did not feel able to sign up to the Inclusion Charter organized by the Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education (CSIE), which calls for the long-term closure of Special Schools. It was suggested to me that no organization that represents the parental view could advocate the closure of segregated provision when half the parents linked to the organization were supporters of Special Schools. The argument goes, you cannot deny people their voice if you are meant to represent their views. These issues of parental choice and the closure of special schools have been one of the key points of tension within government education policy over the last couple of decades. Inclusive Education – readings and reflections is very clear about where it sits on the issue of special schools, which is hardly surprising as it is co-written by one of the founders of the CSIE, Mark Vaughan. At least half of its time is spent dismantling the moral, theoretical and practical rationale behind all segregated provision. It does so in a way that is highly readable, thought-provoking and insightful. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to anyone…but then I would say that…I agreed with almost every word I read. Whether it will convince doubters, is less certain. This book spans over 200 years of writing and thinking about the rights of individuals to have access to the opportunities (particularly educational) that others take for granted. Its stated aim is to enable us to chart the progress of inclusion and to recognize some of the most significant literature that has been produced along the way. To achieve this the book is divided into four sections: The Context – Rights, Participation, Social Justice; Arguments and Evidence against Segregation – 1960s to Today; Legislation, Reports, Statements; Inclusion in Action. Each section is in a roughly chronological order, that presents an appropriate ª 2006 BILD Publications, British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 34, 57–61 and effective range of readings to demonstrate the key issues and changes that have occurred along the way. From Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1792) to Christopher and Renz’s (1969) demonstration of why special education is not that special, to an excellent critique of the Warnock Report (Department of Education and Science 1978) and Thomas, Walker and Webb’s (1998) powerful extract about the closure of a Barnardos special school…all are readable and challenging. The historical spread of the book and its use of substantial sections of text means that each reader is likely to find different bells being run, too. I kept being reminded of how we come back to the same issues across the years from slightly different perspectives. One text that I particularly enjoyed was the recommendations by Dessent (1977) in relation to Local Educational Authority funding of schools. Eighteen years ago, he recommended funding being allocated not according to a Statement of Educational Needs, but in three strands – a sum to fund staff to support all pupils identified as having SEN, a sum based on school demographics, and a top-up for the small number of pupils with ‘unique and unpredictable needs’. This rang two bells. First, this is almost exactly the system that West Sussex are now in the process of introducing just when my son begins Primary School with his Down syndrome label attached. Secondly, when I was training to be a teacher I was told that all educational policy is 15 years behind the theory…here was an almost perfect demonstration of the principle. As is made clear in the Preface, the selection of readings is inevitably a personal one, and there are many significant texts that are excluded. One or two are a surprise, for example there is no mention of The Report of the Special Schools Working Group (DfES 2003) that so upset CSIE and many other supporters of Inclusion, nor of Corbett’s (1996) Bad-mouthing – The language of Special Needs, which encouraged many of us to reconsider the language we use when talking about others. But generally the quality of the selections is high. There is a strong UK voice, too, without the essential contribution of North American educators, legislators and campaigners being downplayed. At the heart of the book, however, is a refusal to engage directly with the opposition. There is no room for major 58 Book reviews doubts or challenges. All the counter-positions are presented, of course, but it is in passing. They are contained within articles or links that overpower them and dispel them without giving them room to expand their rationale. There is, for example, no room to consider either the experiences of a child who has been bullied in the mainstream and wants to get back to his safe, segregated setting, or the dilemma facing parents who cannot find a nearby mainstream school where the staff use sign language. One must assume that the authors would not see these as reasons to question the validity of inclusion, but as urgent problems for settings to overcome. The issue for so many opponents of inclusion however is that they or their child only have one shot at their formative education, and if their personal experience is bad then they do not care about the bigger inclusion picture. This book seems to take the moral high ground on such issues, and even though I did not feel uncomfortable with the view from up there, I am sure that many readers will. As a practitioner, I would also be frustrated at the lack of discussion about how to work effectively within a diverse classroom. The fourth section seemed to focus in particular on how organizations can change or be developed, but offered little on how teachers can develop themselves and their practice. It is always difficult to encapsulate ways of teaching in a written text, of course, particularly when constrained by word length, but there are many texts out there that would have given readers pause for thought in this area. Inclusion is very much a partial reality in the UK. It varies enormously from LEA to LEA – special school numbers have hardly dropped at all in the last couple of decades. In many ways, what we have seen is merely a reshuffling of the pack. This book provides us with a fascinating insight into some aspects of this process, but it would be even more effective if it spent some time outlining the thinking behind other policies that work against the achievement of inclusive goals. In some ways, I needed the book to make me ask more directly what I feel education is for. If this had been done, then it might encourage the supporters of the choice, standards, and segregation agendas to re-evaluate their positions, and more directly embrace the advantages of inclusive education, and, with that, the closure of more special schools. Jonathan Rix Open University References Christopher F. & Renz P. (1969) A critical examination of special education programs. Journal of Special Education, 3: 371–9. Department of Education and Science (1978) The Warnock Report: Special Educational Needs, Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People. London: HMSO. Dessent T. (1977) Making the ordinary school special. Children and Society, 4: 279–87. Corbett J. (1996) Bad-mouthing. London, Falmer Press. DfES (2003) The report of the Special Schools Working Group. London, DfES Publications. Planning for Life: Involving Adults with Learning Disabilities in Service Planning Liam Concannon Routledge pp. 211 ISBN 0 415 35156 (hbk) 0 415 35157 (pbk) This book’s title and cover information suggests it will critically address one of the most challenging processes service providers have to manage in contemporary social care, namely effectively involving service users in planning of services, both at a day to day and a future scoping level. And in some respects it does do this. The parts which are based on the author’s own research in two London Boroughs are fresh and enlightening. Unfortunately, for reasons I find hard to fathom, very little of the book is about this. Indeed we wait until Chapter 5, p. 116 of a book which is only 173 pages long (excluding Appendices), to really start to hear about the author’s own work. What precedes this is a sometimes interesting, but often frustratingly vague and partial set of chapters which I can only assume are intended to be background to the main study. These four initial chapters cover the historical and social context, the case for citizenship, barriers to communication, and strategies for implementing normalization and citizenship. As these are subjects which are covered extensively in other excellent publications, I do not intend to dwell on them in this Review, except to reiterate that a strong rationale for the choice of these particular areas as background for the study might have helped this reader appreciate them more. The value of the book is in Chapters 5–7, plus the Appendix on ‘The research design and qualitative methodology’. Chapter 5 is probably the most useful. It takes the interesting topic of how a London Borough interpreted various government strategies including Best Value (for which it was a pilot site), service brokerage, Direct Payments, Partnership working and user involvement. It is, not surprisingly, a messy tale with different staff taking differing stances on the policies they were being expected to operationalize. Local policy statements made bold promises ª 2006 BILD Publications, British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 34, 57–61