Inclusion and Behaviour Management in Schools

Issues and Challenges

Janice Wearmouth, Ted Glynn, Robin C. Richmond, Mere Berryman

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136605734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Providng an overview of the issues crucial to understanding inclusion and behavior management in schools, this book discusses: Policy at national, local authority and school level; Inclusive practices in mainstream settings and Issues such as race, ethnicity school disciplines and exclusion.

Chapter 1

Issues in inclusion and the management of student behaviour in schools

Janice Wearmouth and Ted Glynn

Introduction

Historically the response to students whose behaviour is perceived as threatening to the social order in schools has been to assume a deficit model of the individual and use medical and/or psychological approaches to assessment to justify the provision of some sort of ‘treatment’ out of the mainstream educational context. The law continues to support a notion of the learner as passive and of behaviour that is difficult to manage as simply an attribute of the individual student. In this chapter we argue that current moves towards inclusive approaches for all students of statutory school age requires a re-conceptualisation of the learner as active agent in his/her own learning, and of both learning and behaviour as situated, dynamic and interactive between students and the learning environment. It also requires a conceptualisation of the learning environment as needing to adapt to the needs of students if they are to become active participants in schools’ communities of learners (Lave and Wenger, 1991; 1999). If this is to occur, teachers need to be able to reflect critically on notions of ‘behaviour difficulties’, inclusion and the values associated with them. Consequently, emphasis in teacher professional development should be given to reflective practice (Schön, 1983; 1987) no less than to training in competencies and the ‘tools’ of the trade.

A historical overview

There are many ways in which a national education system might be structured to provide for the whole diversity of its student population. In recent years many countries have witnessed a move towards a policy of inclusion in mainstream schools for all students, including those whose behaviour is perceived as difficult to manage, or otherwise troubling to the staff within them. This development is a product of its own history as well as of the structure of today’s society. It is important therefore to set within a historical context any understanding of provision for students who may behave in ways that are threatening or challenging to the social order in schools.

Challenging behaviour has a history ‘as long as mass education itself’ (Furlong, 1985). The problem of disruptive, challenging behaviour by students in schools is long-standing. In the seventeenth century in the U.K., for example, students were often armed and occasionally took part in violent mutiny (ibid). There appear to be recorded instances of students destroying all of the most famous public schools at least once (Ogilvie, 1957). There is a record from the late nineteenth century of the schoolteacher in Newchurch Primary School on the Isle of Wight requesting money from the school managers for shin pads for himself because his students hated school so much that every time they came into the classroom they kicked him (Wearmouth, personal communication). They would rather have been earning money working on the land.

Ford et al. (1982) note that, once education became compulsory for all children, the issue of the social control of potentially difficult students, expected to come mostly from the lower classes in society, assumed paramount importance. In England, for example, after the Elementary Education Act of 1870 and the beginning of compulsory state education, policy makers were faced with the fundamental dilemma of how to make educational provision for all students, including those whose presence in the classroom was felt to be holding others back. One solution was the kind of categorisation and segregation of students that resulted from a largely medical and, subsequently, psychological response to the problem. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, students might be assessed as ‘idiots’, ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘imbeciles’ through the expertise of doctors and/or the growing profession of psychologists, and separated off from the rest for the good of the majority. Admission to asylums was considered suitable for those categorised as ‘imbeciles’, the ‘feeble-minded’ were educated in special schools or classes whilst the group labelled ‘idiots’ was not thought to be educable (Department of Education and Science, 1978).

A glance at the history of the rise and demise of the term ‘maladjusted’ within special education illustrates how far categorical notions of student attributes become pervasive and fixed to suit the existing national context. Until 1945 there was no formal category of ‘maladjustment’ enshrined in central government regulations. It had its origins both in early labels of mental deficiency:

The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act created a category of moral imbeciles or defectives, and children who displayed emotionally disturbed or disruptive behaviour came to be associated with both mental defect and moral defect.

(Galloway et al., 1994, p. 110)

in the unstable, nervous child identified in Board of Education Reports in the 1920s, and also in the

‘difficult and maladjusted’ child recommended in the 1929 Board of Education report as in need of child guidance.

(op cit, p. 112)

After 1945 all local education authorities had a responsibility to establish special educational treatment in special or ordinary schools for students defined in this way. The concept was still relatively new when the Underwood Committee was set up in 1950 to enquire into ‘maladjusted’ children’s medical, educational and social problems. The nearest this Committee’s (1955) report could come to a definition read as follows:

In our view, a child may be regarded as maladjusted who is developing in ways that have a bad effect on himself or his fellows and cannot, without help, be remedied by his parents, teachers and other adults in ordinary contact with him.

(Ministry of Education, 1955, p. 22)

‘Maladjustment’ is a vague term. Nevertheless, there is a major problem in that once a category has been ‘invented’ it creates its own discourse:

Discourses are about what can be said and thought, but also about who can speak, when, and with what authority. Discourses embody meaning and social relationships, they constitute both subjectivity and power relations. Discourses are ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak … Discourses are not about objects; they do not identify objects, they constitute them and in the practice of doing so conceal their own invention’ (Foucault 1974: 49).

(Ball, 1990, p. 2)

In his epidemiological study, which attempted to assess the prevalence of specific categories of difficulties in the school student population, Rutter (1970) considers that use of the term may be seen as the justification for special educational provision:

Maladjustment has been defined in a variety of ways but most definitions have included the concept of need for treatment (sometimes specifically educational treatment), and its chief purpose (in the country) has been to provide a label under which special education may be provided according to the Handicapped Students and School Health Service Regulations (Ministry of Education, 1945 and 1959).

(Rutter, 1970, p. 147)

Invent the category, create the student. The category floats around waiting to ‘gobble up’ victims (Mehan, 1996):

… the possibilities for meaning and for definition are preempted through the social and institutional position held by those who use them. Meanings thus arise not from language but from institutional practices, from power relations. Words and concepts change their meanings and their effects as they are deployed within different discourses. Discourses constrain the possibility of thought. They order and combine words in particular ways and exclude or displace other combinations.

(Ball, 1990, p. 2)

Between 1945 and 1960, the numbers of students classified as maladjusted rose from 0 to 1742. By 1975, there were 13,000 ‘maladjusted’ students (Furlong, 1985).

Although many labels once attached to students became unacceptable as a result of the changing social and historical context of provision during the twentieth century, the practice of constructing categories of, and thus reifying, difficulties in learning and behaviour for the purpose of organising and maintaining the education system has been maintained. In England and Wales, of the total number of students, approximately 2% are seen by policy makers and resource-providers as likely to have difficulties which require additional or extra resources to be provided for them (DfE, 1994a, para. 2:2). This figure of 2% is an arbitrary one, drawn from a count of students in special schools in 1944.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, there was a growing concern for equality of opportunity in the education system and social cohesion in society at large. The 1981 Education Act attempted to translate into legislation the (1978) Warnock Report which reaffirmed the principle of integration and introduced the concept of ‘special educational needs’ in place of categorisation of handicap. However, the law in England, as in the whole of the UK, is still based on individually-defined need which must be assessed and quantified for the purpose of resource-allocation. Those thought to have ‘emotional and behavioural difficulties’, a term first introduced by Warnock to apply to students whose behaviour is seen as difficult to manage, have been identified as one group whose problems prevent them from learning in the same way as other students, and who therefore might need special provision. There is considerable confusion surrounding this term, which Gains and Garner (1996) feel is hardly surprising:

given that the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘behaviour’ are amongst the most difficult concepts in the educational lexicon. Moreover, further difficulties arise because definitions of what comprise EBD are closely bound up with the personality and professional experiences of the person who is assessing the student.

(Gains and Garner, 1996, p. 141)

The notion of ‘emotional and behavioural difficulties’ employed by the 1993, now the 1996, Education Act clearly adopts a within-person, deficit model. Circular 9/94, The Education of Children with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, which is associated with the 1996 Education Act, asserts that:

Prevalence (of EBD) varies according to:

• sex – boys rather than girls;

• age – adolescents, rather than younger children;

• health and learning difficulties – rates are higher among children with other difficulties;

• background – rates are higher in inner city areas and socially deprived families.

(DfE, 1994b, para. 5)

Circular 8/94 continues with the theme of the deficit model of difficulty, implying that ‘having EBD’ is a fixed state, that the causes may be family background or sensory impairments and that schools may alleviate or worsen the student’s ‘condition’ by their mode of operation and organisation and by individual teachers’ behaviour:

Causes:

There may be one or many causes:

• Associated factors may be family environments or sensory impairments.

• EBD children always have special educational needs because they are facing barriers which cause them to have significantly greater difficulty in learning than most of their peers.

• EBD is often worsened by the environment, including schools’/teachers’ responses.

• Schools vary widely in the extent to which they help children overcome their difficulties.

(DfE, 1994a, paras 1–9)

The current approach therefore continues to predispose to a reification of the concept ‘special educational needs’ and, therefore, to a reification of categories of need on which funding ultimately depends. Without an objectified category of need, quantifying how a student is special enough to warrant additional or alternative provision is highly problematic.

Current emphasis on inclusion

The law supports a deficit notion of students with behaviour problems. Young people ‘with special educational needs’ that result from difficult behaviour are entitled, in law, to have those needs identified, assessed and then met with appropriate provision guaranteed by their LEA. At the same time, however, for many years, and in some ways in contrast to the letter of the law, in the field there has been a recognition that the source of students’ difficulties in behaviour and learning is not always intrinsic to the learner. These difficulties may also arise as a result of aspects of the learning environment. Hargreaves (1975), exploring the relationship between the student and the learning environment, noted that any disruption or disturbance is representative of a discordance within the system to which the student belongs. This discordance is indicated by a failure to match between the student and the system where the student/system interaction causes disruption (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). If a student belongs to a specific social system, both the responses of that student to the surroundings and the responses of significant adults and peers to that student have to be taken into account when assessing the significance of individual acts. Fulcher (1989) has noted that disaffection in the form of disruptive behaviour can be provoked by the demand for compliance from unwilling students by those in authority seeking to establish control in the classroom:

Classroom order requires docile bodies … Herein lies some of the resistance to integrating those with less docile bodies: … larking about … absence, verbal abuse, etc., all instance the failure to subordinate bodies to the requirements of classroom docility. The control responses to these forms of disruption include … suspension and other sanctioning practices … It may therefore be argued that it is the educational apparatus’s failure to provide an inclusive curriculum … rather than the problems specific disabilities pose, which constructs the ‘problems’ and politics of integration.

(Fulcher, 1989, pp. 53–4)

At the level of the student in the classroom, the effects of classroom peer groups, and individual teachers (Hargreaves, 1982), teacher expectation (Rosenthal and Jacobsen, 1968) and lack of self-esteem of the individual student (Coopersmith, 1968) have been seen to influence students’ attitudes and behaviour.

More recently, the source of difficulties has been described as stemming from the interaction between the characteristics of the learner and those of the context (Wedell, 2000; Mittler, 2000). There is, however, no adequate definition or theorising of the nature of this ‘interaction’ or its implication for a model of learning and the difficulties that are experienced. The learner tends not to be seen as having active agency in his/her learning and there remains a sense that her/his characteristics are static ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Inclusion and behaviour management in schools: issues and challenges
• 1 Issues in inclusion and the management of student behaviour in schools
• Part 1: Policy issues
• Part 2: Practitioner research issues
• Part 3: Cultural issues
• Part 4: Inclusive practices
• Index