ES
3304: Imagining alternatives to exclusion in and
from education
Week 1: Individualised Support and Labelling in Inclusive Education
Views from national and international policy
Introduction
Views on the causes of the difficulties students experience when learning have been categorised by Ainscow and Hart (1992) into three separate perspectives. The first perspective offers an explanation of difficulties in learning which proceeds from perceived deficiencies within individual students. The second perspective locates the causes of difficulties in the failure to ‘match’ the needs of learners with ‘appropriate’ curricula, teaching methods, resources and services. The third perspective seeks to understand any difficulties students might experience by considering both the nature of educational institutions and the exclusionary pressures that can be placed upon them.
In the first of Ainscow and Hart's (1992) tri-part taxonomy of perspectives on difficulties in learning, complications are understood in terms of deficiencies located within ‘the characteristics of individual pupils’ (Ainscow, 1998: 8). Emerging from this perspective is what Ainscow calls, ‘an individual frame of reference’, which ‘would see support teaching as a means of providing an individual pupil with extra teaching, albeit in the context or framework of regular classroom activities’ (Ainscow, 1998: 9).
The second, in Ainscow and Hart's three categories of perspectives on educational difficulties, is described by Ainscow (1998: 9) as an ‘interactive perspective’. Complications arise in learning, the perspective holds, when there is a disharmony between the identified needs of learners and their educational provision. This view generates a ‘frame of reference … [that] once again focuses attention on individual pupils but this time is concerned with the ways they interact with particular contexts and experiences’ (Ainscow, 1998: 9).
The third of Ainscow and Hart’s (1992) categories of difficulties in learning is described by Ainscow (1998: 9) as a ‘curriculum limitations perspective’. This perspective focuses attention away from perceived limitations within students and onto the potentially debilitating consequences of whole school practices, policies and cultures upon student learning. As Ainscow observes, this view entails ‘the recreation and reinvention of teaching methods and materials in response to the reactions and feedback of children’ (Ainscow, 1998: 11).
For individualised support and labelling in education
In 2001 the New Labour government produced the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice, a development of the Conservative’s Code of Practice on the identification and assessment of special educational needs (DfE, 1994). The 2001 Code introduced two stages of action – Action and Action Plus - in the support of children judged to have special educational needs. Action occurs within an early years or school setting:
When an early education practitioner who works day-to-day with the child, or the SENCO, identifies a child with special educational needs, they should devise interventions that are additional to or different from those provided as part of the setting’s usual curriculum offer and strategies (Early Years Action). (original emphasis, DfES, 2001: 35)
The Code continues:
The Action should enable the very young child with special educational needs to learn and progress to the maximum possible. The key lies in effective individualised arrangements for learning and teaching. (DfES, 2001: 36)
In other words, effective practice is equated to supporting the individual. This is not social action aimed at changing the school or society as a whole, but action aimed at identifying and meeting the specific needs of individual learners.
This is an example of what Ainscow calls ‘an individual frame of reference’ on the causes of difficulties in education (Ainscow, 1998: 9).
An essential part of this Action is the Individual Education Plan:
Strategies employed to enable the child to progress should be recorded within an Individual Education Plan (IEP); this should include information about the short-term targets set for the child, the teaching strategies and the provision to be put in place, when the plan is to be reviewed, and the outcome of the action taken… The IEP should be crisply written and focus on three or four key targets. IEPs should be discussed with parents and the child. (DfES, 2001: 36)
When the SENCO, Early Years specialists and teachers require support from external agencies then a new Action is taken:
Early Years Action Plus is characterised by the involvement of external support services who can help … with advice on new IEPs and targets, provide more specialist assessments, give advice on the use of new or specialist strategies or materials, and in some cases provide support for particular activities. (DfES, 2001: 37).
(Beyond Action and Action Plus, there is statutory assessment to determine the nature of the child’s ‘special need’, resulting in a statement of special need.)
New Labour’s Special Educational Needs Code of Practice asserts:
Pupils with special educational needs should become progressively more involved in setting and evaluating targets within the IEP process. Young people with special educational needs may have low self-esteem and lack confidence. Actively encouraging these pupils to track their own progress and record achievement within a programme of action designed to meet their particular learning or behavioural difficulty will contribute to improved confidence and self-image. (DfES, 2001: 29, 3:14)
Individualised support and the label process is presented here, not something that happens to the child, but rather as process through which the child is liberated by understanding his or her needs:
Children and young people with special educational needs have a unique knowledge of their own needs and circumstances … They should feel confident that they will be listened to and that their views are valued. DfES, 2001: 27, 3:2)
In 2003 the New Labour government produced Green Paper Every Child Matters (DfES, 2003), which was introduced against the backdrop of high profile failures to protect children from harm. The Green Paper asserts that behind ‘each case of a failure to intervene early enough were poor co-ordination; a failure to share information; the absence of anyone with a strong sense of accountability; and frontline workers trying to cope with staff vacancies, poor management and a lack of effective training’ (DfES, 2003: 5).
The focus of the Green Paper is on both protecting and encouraging children through integrated services: ‘The policies set out in the Green Paper are designed both to protect children and maximise their potential’ (DfES, 2003: 27).
In other words, Every Child Matters is an example of what Ainscow (1998: 9) describes as an ‘interactive perspective’ on the difficulties children experience in education and in life generally.
The Green Paper addresses how integrated services can most effectively identify and meet the needs of individual children:
Early identification of learning difficulties or disabilities can be vital to a child’s learning and life chances. In some areas, major breakthroughs have recently been made. In particular, the screening of newborn babies means that deafness and hearing problems can now be diagnosed months or years earlier than in the past. (DfES, 2003: 27)
Here the justification for individualised support and labelling is located within the well-being of individual children.
New Labour’s (DfES, 2004) Removing Barriers to Achievement - The Government’s Strategy for SEN, which promises to ‘build on the proposals for early intervention and integration of children’s services set out in Every Child Matters …’ (DfES, 2004: 25), offers the following definition of inclusive education:
Inclusion is about much more than the type of school that children attend: it is about the quality of their experience; how they are helped to learn, achieve and participate fully in the life of the school… Schools and early years settings still vary enormously in their experience in working with children with SEN, and in the specialist expertise and resources available to them from other schools, local authority education and social services, health, and voluntary organisations. (DfES, 2004: 25)
Here inclusive education is tightly connected to identifying and meeting individual needs. As such, the policy reflects the view of former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who asserted:
The need to differentiate provision to individual aptitudes within schools often took second place. Inclusion too readily became an end in itself, rather than the means to identify and provide better for the talents of each individual pupil. (Blair, 2001)
An individualised perspective on support in education was also evident in the Green Paper Excellence for all children: meeting special educational needs, produced in the first year of New Labour’s governance, which asserts: ‘inclusion must encompass teaching and curriculum appropriate to the child’s needs’ (DfEE, 1997: 44).
The current UK Coalition government’s Green Paper on SEN, Support and Aspiration opens with the following assertion:
Every child deserves a fair start in life, with the very best opportunity to succeed. Currently, life chances for the approximately two million children and young people in England who are identified as having a special educational need (SEN), or who are disabled, are disproportionately poor. (Department for Education, 2011, p. 4)
The Green Paper suggests that a view of inclusive education that demands the closing down of special schools for children with impairments is in itself exclusionary, since it denies parents and their children choices. It is this conception of inclusion that the government rejects. Thus the Paper insists that the government will:
give parents a real choice of school, either a mainstream or special school. We will remove the bias towards inclusion and propose to strengthen parental choice by improving the range and diversity of schools from which parents can choose, making sure they are aware of the options available to them and by changing statutory guidance for local authorities… We will also prevent the unnecessary closure of special schools by giving parents and community groups the power to take them over … (Department for Education, 2011, p. 9)
Underpinning such assertions there is a moral conviction: individual children have a right to have their individual needs identified and supported.
Against individualised support and labelling in education
Although policy documents produced by New Labour seems to offer an unequivocal justification for an individualised view of support and labelling in education, it is possible to see the influence of what Ainscow (1998: 9) names a ‘curriculum limitations perspective’ on difficulties in learning within New Labour’s educational policy. Indeed, the Green Paper Every Child Matters promises to develop
an SEN Action Programme … to promote early identification and intervention for children with SEN, raise expectations and achievement and build the capacity of schools and early years settings, working with health and social care, to provide good teaching and support for all children. Our aim is to ensure that parents have the confidence that their children’s needs will be met quickly and effectively throughout their education without feeling that the only way to achieve this is through a statement. (emphasis added, DfES, 2003: 28)
Notice that focus centres on the individual with impairments and on good teaching and support for all children
And, though it is possible to locate an individualised view of support and an argument for labelling in education in New Labour’s (DfES, 2004) Removing Barriers to Achievement - The Government’s Strategy for SEN, we can also find there a comprehensive statement of wider view of exclusion in education:
Difficulties in learning often arise from an unsuitable environment – inappropriate grouping of pupils, inflexible teaching styles, or inaccessible curriculum materials – as much as from individual children’s physical, sensory or cognitive impairments. (DfES, 2004: 28)
Moreover, in New Labour’s Special Educational Needs Code of Practice it is possible to identify a wider view of exclusion and inclusion in education:
The way in which a school meets the needs of all children has a direct bearing on the nature of the additional help required by children with special educational needs, and on the point at which additional help is required. The key to meeting the needs of all children lies in the teacher’s knowledge of each child’s skills and abilities and the teacher’s ability to match this knowledge to finding ways of providing appropriate access to the curriculum for every child. (original emphasis, DfES, 2001: 30)
The view from international policy
Article 6.1 of the 1990 World Declaration on Education for All, ‘Enhancing the environment for learning’, states:
Learning does not take place in isolation. Societies, therefore, must ensure that all learners receive the nutrition, health care, and general physical and emotional support they need in order to participate actively in and benefit from their education. (UNESCO, 1990, 160)
In other words, if we connect inclusive education to individualised support and labelling in education we overlook the exclusionary pressures, the injustices and the oppression that occur beyond the individual. In short, a focus on what is wrong with the individual blocks us from reflecting upon the wrongs that happen to the individual
(You may wish to consider Oliver’s (1992; 2004) critique of the medical model of disability.)
Beyond an individualised view of exclusion: gender
UNESCO’s (1994) Salamanca Statement insists: ‘It is particularly important to recognize that women have often been doubly disadvantaged, bias based on gender compounding the difficulties caused by their disabilities’ (UNESCO, 1994: 14).
UNESCO’s EFA Global monitoring report of 2002, points to the interconnectedness and complexity of exclusion:
Patterns of exclusion from school are usually not gender-neutral. The commitment to increase girls’ access to education has focused on the identification and elimination of obstacles. In turn, this has revealed that discrimination is often complex, with ethnicity, religion, poverty and gender being intertwined. (UNESCO, 2002: 30)
Beyond an individualised view of exclusion: poverty
At the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal in 2000, a commitment to locating inclusion and exclusion within wider social issues was repeated:
A key challenge is to ensure that the broad vision of Education for All as an inclusive concept is reflected in national government and funding agency policies. Education for All must encompass not only primary education, but also early childhood education, literacy and life-skills programmes. Using both formal and non-formal approaches, it must take account of the needs of the poor and the most disadvantaged, including working children, remote rural dwellers and nomads, and ethnic and linguistic minorities, children, young people and adults affected by conflict, HIV/AIDS, hunger and poor health; and those with special learning needs. (UNESCO, 2000: 14)
UNESCO (2005) Guidelines for inclusion: Ensuring access to Education for All directly links exclusion from education to the charging of school fees:
To advance education at all levels, parents and communities should be able to hold their schools accountable while Governments improve curricula, educational quality and mode of delivery; build human resource and infrastructure capacity, where needed; and institute incentives for bringing vulnerable children to school, including the elimination of user fees. (UNESCO 2005: 14)
The Guidelines assert:
progress is more likely if we recognize that difficulties experienced by pupils result from the ways in which schools are currently organized and from rigid teaching methods. It has been argued that schools need to be reformed and pedagogy needs to be improved in ways that will lead them to respond positively to pupil diversity – seeing individual differences not as problems to be fixed, but as opportunities for enriching learning. (UNESCO, 2005: 9)
The Guidelines identify four elements deemed to be essential for thinking about inclusive education:
§ ‘Inclusion is a process… a never-ending search to find better ways of responding to diversity’ (original emphasis, UNESCO, 2005: 15).
§ ‘Inclusion is concerned with the identification and removal of barriers… It is about using evidence of various kinds to stimulate creativity and problem-solving’ (original emphasis, UNESCO, 2005: 15).
§ ‘Inclusion is about the presence, participation and achievement of all students’ (original emphasis, UNESCO, 2005: 15).
§ ‘Inclusion involves a particular emphasis on those groups of learners who may be at risk of marginalization, exclusion or underachievement’ (original emphasis, UNESCO, 2005: 16).
UNESCO’s (2009) Policy guidelines on inclusion in education echo the connection between inclusive education, Education for All and a non-individualised view of inclusion: ‘Inclusive education is a process of strengthening the capacity of the education system to reach out to all learners and can thus be understood as a key strategy to achieve EFA’ (UNESCO, 2009: 8).
References
Ainscow, M. (1998) Would it work in theory? Arguments for practitioner researcher and theorising in the special needs field, in: C. Clark, A. Dyson & A. Millward (Eds.) Theorising special education (London, Routledge).
Ainscow, M. & Hart, S. (1992) Moving practice forward, Support for Learning, 7(3), 115-120.
DfEE (1997) Excellence for all children: meeting special educational needs. London: Stationery Office. Available:
http://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/downloadableDocs/45_1.pdf
Department for Education and Skills (2001) Special educational needs code of practice. London, DfES Publications. Available:
http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/_doc/3724/SENCodeofPractice.pdf
Department for Education and Skills (2003) Every child matters. London, The Stationary Office. Available:
http://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/downloadableDocs/EveryChildMatters.pdf
Department for Education and Skills (2004) Removing Barriers to Achievement - The Government’s Strategy for SEN (London: Stationery Office). Available:
http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/_doc/5970/removing%20barriers.pdf
Department for Education (2011) Support and aspiration: A new approach to special educational needs and disability. London, The Stationary Office. Available:
https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/Green-Paper-SEN.pdf
HM Government (2010) Coalition: our programme for government. Available:
http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/files/2010/05/coalition-programme.pdf
Oliver, M. (1992) Changing the Social Relations of Research Production, Disability, Handicap & Society, 7(2) 101-114
Oliver, M. (2004) The social model in action: If I had a hammer, in: C. Barnes & G. Mercer (Eds.) Implementing the social model of disability: Theory and research (Leeds, Disability Press)
UNESCO (1990) World declaration on education for all: Meeting basic learning needs, in: UNESCO (2000) Education for all: Meeting our collective commitments: Notes on the Dakar framework for action. Paris, UNESCO. Available:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001211/121147e.pdf
UNESCO (1994) World Conference on Special Needs Education: Access and Quality. Salamanca. Paris, UNESCO. Available:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0009/000984/098427eo.pdf
UNESCO (2000) Education for all: Meeting our collective commitments: Notes on the Dakar framework for action. Paris, UNESCO. Available:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001211/121147e.pdf
UNESCO (2002) EFA Global monitoring report 2002. Education for all: Is the world on track?. Paris, UNESCO. Available:
http://www.unesco.org/en/efareport/reports/2002-efa-on-track/
UNESCO (2005) Guidelines for inclusion: Ensuring access to Education for All. Paris, UNESCO. Available:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001402/140224e.pdf
UNESCO (2009) Policy guidelines on inclusion in education. Paris, UNESCO. Available:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0017/001778/177849e.pdf
