Special Educational Provision in the Context of Inclusion

Policy and Practice in Schools

Janice Wearmouth

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136758737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text traces the development of special educational provision and goes on to concentrate on some of the key issues relevant to professionals currently working in the field. It looks at the recent drive towards inclusion and the implication this has for schools. In the present market-oriented context in education, there are a number of dilemmas facing schools that attempt to include all pupils and at the same time respond to the current focus on academic achievement in a national climate of competition and accountability. The book offers practical examples of ways to resolve these dilemmas at the level of the LEA, the school, the classroom and the individual child. Part One gives an overview of special and inclusive education, current thinking around issues related to equal opportunities, and how this affects schools. It also illustrates how one Local Education Authority has tried to promote a policy of inclusion in its schools. Part Two includes a discussion of the challenges facing teachers in schools who attempt to put current national policies related to inclusion into practice and provides practical examples of whole-school and classroom initiatives to support the learning of groups of pupils and individuals within them. Included are chapters on professional development for teachers of special educational needs, classroom strategies for teacher and pupil support teachers and advice on differentiation, OFSTED and inclusive schools, the SENCO in the secondary school, and equal opportunities for all. This book will appeal to all teachers, SENCOs, head teachers and governors in every sector of the education system, parents, academics and course members on teachers' continuing professional development courses.

Part I

Policy at national and local levels

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

Part 1 addresses the historical context within which current special educational provision can be understood, outlines some of the current debates in the area of special educational needs and inclusive education, discusses policy at national and local levels including the focus on inspection, and describes policy into practice in one inclusive education authority in England.

Chapter 1 traces the historical development of special education in Great Britain to 1978. Warnock comments on the relatively recent origin of special education for those pupils deemed to have difficulties of various sorts. She notes how the first special schools were solely vocational as befitted the societal context where child labour was the norm. She also notes the time lag between provision for various groups: the first ‘special’ group for whom schools were founded were the blind and the deaf, then came schools for pupils with a physical disability, then schools for ‘mentally handicapped’ pupils and, finally, special provision for the ‘maladjusted’ and for those having speech impairments.

The Warnock Report recommended that the concept of ‘special educational needs’ should replace categorisation of handicap. The 1981 Education Act followed on from Warnock’s recommendations. Since Warnock there has been a move away from ‘remedial’ education to a ‘whole-school approach’ that Clark et al. argue constituted the first attempt at a coherent structural merger of special and mainstream education. Recent government initiatives have given mixed messages to schools about provision for all pupils. For example, documents associated with what is often termed the ‘special needs’ area of education, for example the Green Paper, Excellence for All Children (DfEE 1997), together with the Meeting Special Educational Needs: A programme for action (DfEE 1998) which was drawn up following consultation on the Green Paper, and the ‘Inclusion Statement’ in Curriculum 2000 promote an inclusive approach to children’s education. Simultaneously, however, the government reiterates that 20 per cent of the school population is not expected to achieve the same academic level as other pupils.

Additionally, the encouragement of competition between schools and a market-oriented approach to education may help to raise the standard of achievement of some pupils but may militate against the achievement of those who experience difficulties in learning. Where a democratically-elected government has the power to determine the structure of the national system of education and the content of a national curriculum, education itself is bound to be highly politicised. In Chapter 2 Mittler argues that we take for granted the relationship between low achievement and social and economic deprivation and notes that policy makers have conceptualised special educational needs in terms of disability rather than disadvantage. He proposes that special educational needs should be ‘reconceptualised’ so that poverty, marginalisation and social exclusion are seen as ‘the major obstacles to children’s learning’.

One way in which the government has attempted to raise the standard of achievement of all children is through nationally-organised inspection procedures. Any framework for inspection of special educational provision in schools will necessarily have to be based on a view of what constitutes effective provision for both the sum total of pupils as well as the diversity of individual pupils’ needs. There is clearly a dilemma here of whether a national inspection framework should be the same for all schools and the quality of teaching and learning within them, or should be different, depending on the context of the individual school and the diversity of its pupil population. Chapter 3 critiques the OFSTED inspection framework operating in England and Wales which assumes that the extent of all pupils’ achievement can and should be judged on common criteria. It offers pragmatic advice to those working in the area of special educational provision in schools on how to prepare for an inspection.

Policy at any level within the education system should be compatible with the policies operating at any other level in the same domain as well as with general overarching policies in education. Sometimes local education authorities, or Library Boards in Northern Ireland, promote particular initiatives in their own areas which have a strong impact on schools, teachers and individual students. In Chapter 4 Wearmouth describes how the inclusive policies of one local education authority in England were reflected in teachers’ research projects during the course of a postgraduate teachers’ professional development course designed to promote an inclusive approach to curriculum design and planning. It outlines ways in which the teachers felt local authority policy could be developed and its implementation could be improved.

REFERENCES

Clark, C., Dyson, A., Millward, A. J. and Skidmore, D. (1997) New Directions in Special Needs: Innovations in Mainstream Schools. London: Cassell.

Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (1997) Excellence for All Children: Meeting Special Educational Needs. Sudbury: DfEE.

Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (1998) Meeting Special Educational Needs: A programme for action. Sudbury: DfEE.

Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) (2000) Curriculum 2000. London: QCA.

1

The Warnock Report: ‘The Historical Background’

INTRODUCTION

2.1 Special education for the handicapped in Great Britain is of relatively recent origin. The very first schools for the blind and deaf were founded in the life-time of Mozart; those for the physically handicapped awaited the Great Exhibition; day schools for the mentally handicapped and epileptic arrived with the motor-car; whilst special provision for delicate, maladjusted and speech impaired children is younger than living memory. Even so, the early institutions were nothing like the schools we know today and they were available only to the few. As with ordinary education, education for the handicapped began with individual and 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 their disability, received a suitable education. The framework reached its present form only in this decade.

I EARLY DEVELOPMENTS TO 1870

2.2 The first school for the BLIND in Great Britain was established by Henry Dannett in Liverpool in 1791. Named the School of Instruction for the Indigent Blind, it offered training in music and manual crafts for blind children and adults of both sexes. No education as such was given: child labour was the rule and pupils were taught to earn a living. The Liverpool foundation was quickly followed by other private ventures: the Asylum for the Industrious Blind at Edinburgh (1793), the Asylum for the Blind at Bristol (1793), the School for the Indigent Blind in London (1800) and the Asylum and School for the Indigent Blind at Norwich (1805). As at Liverpool, these institutions were solely concerned to provide vocational training for future employment, and relied upon the profits from their workshops.

2.3 The next schools, which came thirty years later, saw the beginnings of a genuinely educational element in the instruction. Thus the Yorkshire School for the Blind (1835) set out to teach arithmetic, reading and writing as part of vocational training; whilst the school established by the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read (1838) regarded general education as the foundation for subsequent training in manual skills. The Society later opened branches in Exeter and Nottingham. The General Institution for the Blind at Birmingham (1847) combined industrial training with a broad curriculum in general subjects: and, following early concentration on training, Henshaw’s Blind Asylum at Manchester (1838) eventually developed a thriving school with educational objectives. Nevertheless by 1870 there were only a dozen or so institutions for the blind, most of them in the nature of training centres; and only a small proportion of the blind benefited from their provision. However the first senior school for the blind had been founded in 1866 at Worcester and named “College for the Blind Sons of Gentlemen”.

2.4 The first school for the DEAF in Great Britain was started by Thomas Braidwood in Edinburgh in the early 1760s. Mr Braidwood’s Academy for the Deaf and Dumb, as it was called, took a handful of selected paying pupils to be taught to speak and read. In 1783 the Academy moved to London, where in 1792 the first English school for the deaf opened with six children under the direction of Braidwood’s nephew. This Asylum for the Support and Education of the Deaf and Dumb Children of the Poor flourished: in 1809 it moved to larger buildings and later opened a branch at Margate. In 1812 another Braidwood School opened in Birmingham. Other schools for the deaf followed in the 1820s at Liverpool, Manchester, Exeter and Doncaster. By 1870 a further six schools had been founded, including the first in Wales at Aberystwyth (1847) and Donaldson’s Hospital (now Donaldson’s School) in Edinburgh. These early institutions for the deaf, no less than those for the blind, were protective places, with little or no contact with the outside world. The education that they provided was limited and subordinated to training. Many of their inmates failed to find employment on leaving and had recourse to begging.

2.5 The first separate educational provision for PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED children was made in 1851, when the Cripples Home and Industrial School for Girls was founded at Marylebone. A training Home for Crippled Boys followed at Kensington in 1865. Both institutions set out to teach a trade, and education as such was rudimentary. The children came mainly from poor homes and contributed to their own support by making goods for sale. Little further was done for the physically handicapped until 1890.

2.6 Before the middle of the nineteenth century so-called MENTALLY DEFECTIVE children who required custodial care were placed in workhouses and infirmaries. The first specific provision made for them was the Asylum for Idiots established at Highgate in 1847. Like the institutions for the blind and deaf, the Asylum took people of all ages. By 1870 there were five asylums, only three of which purported to provide education. Admission was generally by election or payment. In the same year the newly created Metropolitan Asylum Board established all-age asylums at Caterham, Leavesden and Hampstead. The children were later separated from the adults, and those who were considered to be educable followed a programme of simple manual work and formal teaching. The staff were untrained and classes were very large. In Scotland, the first establishment for the education of “imbeciles” was set up at Baldovan in Dundee in 1852 and later became Strathmartine Hospital. An institution for “defectives” was founded later in Edinburgh: it transferred to a site in Larbert in 1863 and is today the Royal Scottish National Hospital. The Lunacy (Scotland) Act of 1862 recognised the needs of the mentally handicapped and authorised the granting of licences to charitable institutions established for the care and training of imbecile children.

II 1870–1902

2.7 The Forster Education Act of 1870 (and the corresponding Education (Scotland) Act of 1872) established school boards to provide elementary education in those areas where there were insufficient places in voluntary schools. The Acts did not specifically include disabled children among those for whom provision was to be made, but in 1874 the London School Board established a class for the DEAF at a public elementary school and later began the training of teachers. By 1888 there were 14 centres attached to ordinary schools, with 373 children.¹ A number of other boards followed suit over the same period, but they were a small minority. Boards generally made no specific provision for the deaf; some had genuine doubts about their legal powers to do so, while others either did not have the money or believed that it was not in any case a proper charge upon the rates. Moreover school districts varied enormously in their size and resources and many of them had no school board.

2.8 It was equally so with the BLIND. Two years after the Scottish Act 50 blind children were being taught in ordinary classes in Scottish schools, and in 1875 the London Board first arranged for the teaching of blind children in its elementary schools. By 1888 there were 23 centres attached to ordinary schools, where 133 children were taught part-time by teachers who were themselves blind. The children received the rest of their education in ordinary classes, where they mixed freely with the other children. These developments were matched by a handful of other boards, including the Cardiff Board, which appointed a blind teacher to visit the ordinary schools attended by blind children.

2.9 Special educational provision for PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY HANDICAPPED children was even slower off the mark. Those who attended elementary schools profited as best they could from the ordinary teaching. The more severely handicapped received care and sometimes education in institutions. However, in 1892 the Leicester School Board established a special class for selected “feeble-minded” pupils, and in the same year the London Board opened a school for the special instruction of physically and mentally defective children who could not be suitably educated by ordinary methods. The emphasis was upon occupational activity rather than formal education. By 1896 there were 24 special schools in London attended by 900 pupils and before the end of the century schools for defective children had been established by six other boards.

2.10 These first, hesitant efforts by a few school boards to cater for some handicapped children owed nothing to educational legislation. The middle of the nineteenth century had seen a stirring of social conscience over the plight of the disabled, especially of the blind, but it was primarily concerned to relieve their distress, not to educate them. Yet as the principle of universal elementary education took root, it could be only a matter of time before the educational needs of handicapped children began to be rec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Professional Development for Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Policy at national and local levels
• Part 2: Policy into practice in schools
• Index