Inclusion in education: a challenge to make rhetoric a reality Essay

During the last decade the efforts to provide a more equitable and all-embracing educational system aimed at meeting the needs of all children have mended their pace in the United Kingdom. The noble intention to ensure a more just societal environment which gives every growing person an opportunity to participate in full measure in all aspects of life of society has been a locomotive power behind most developments in the field of special education (Rose 2003, p.12). In particular, New Labour government has been actively promoting an agenda of inclusion and participation for pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream education (Atkinson et al. 2002, p. 4; Armstrong 2005, p. 135). This agenda of inclusion has not been limited to school placement but extends to the curriculum. Inclusion has been recognised by New Labour an important aspect of the call for high standards for all learners (Mittler 2000, p. 2). Although the process of steady development of the integration of children with physical and sensory disabilities from special to mainstream schools has been carried out in the UK since the early 1980s involving various spheres of social life and gaining extensive publicity, even to date for many lay observers of the educational context, the image of children in wheelchairs coming from the special school sector into the mainstream is what they imagine such integration to be (Corbett 2001, p. 16). Such interpretation of inclusion simplifies and emasculates its essence and purposes. At the same time, as Ainscow et al. (2006) so soundly remind us, the idea of inclusion cannot refer to just some students and not others. To be inclusive requires that society strives to identify and remove all barriers to learning for all children. This means that society must attend to increasing participation not just for disabled students but for all those experiencing disadvantage, whether this results from poverty, sexuality, minority ethnic status, or other characteristics assigned significance by the dominant culture in their society. To achieve this, as Booth and Ainscow (1998) argue, while working to understand inclusion society and responsible governmental bodies must give equal attention to understanding and removing the pressures for exclusion that exist within the cultures of both the schools and society. Thus, there is no surprising that recently policies of New Labour Government aimed at inclusive education have been subjected to sharp criticism as being superficial and inadequate to meet the real requirements of children with SEN (Corbett 2001, p. 39). In particular, Armstrong (2005, p. 149) argues that these policies â€Å"go no further than to redress the traditional deficit-driven discourse of special educational needs in the fashionable but illusionary language of inclusion†. Such criticism testifies that the issue of effectiveness of inclusion in education and in-depth substance of inclusive education is contentious and complicated one. The purpose of this study is to analyze the arguments by Armstrong and other critics of recent New Labour’s governmental policies, and to evaluate their relevance. Toward this end we will discuss existing legislative instruments and New Labour government’s initiatives on inclusive education, scrutinize the meaning of inclusion and its various interpretations, examine advantages and shortcomings of inclusive policies in force, and make the conclusion. A Concept of Inclusion in Education and Its Interpretations. Both among scholars and in society there are different views on what inclusion in education is, which suggest, as we mentioned above, that complex influences are at work in the development of this field (Armstrong 2005, p. 136). Some researchers view inclusive education as an ongoing development of special education (Farrell 2006, p. 24). Others believe that what is referred to as inclusion is, and should be, derived from mainstream approaches to instruction and school organization, creating an alternative to special education knowledge and practices (Skrtic 1995, p.194). From this latter perspective the idea of inclusion as a merger of special and regular education is seen as problematic because such an amalgamation appears likely to maintain a medical, curative model of education (which we will discuss in our study later) that excludes those labelled as children with SEN from the curriculum and from other experiences available to non-labelled students (Thomas & Loxley 2001, p.4). Mittler (2000, p. 2) in a very comprehensive manner defines inclusion in the field of education as the concept which involves: a process of reform and restructuring of the school as a whole, with the aim of ensuring that all pupils can have access to the whole range of educational and social opportunities offered by the school; [and which] [†¦ ] include the curriculum on offer, the assessment, recording and reporting of pupils’ achievements, the decisions that are taken on the grouping of pupils within schools or classrooms, pedagogy and classroom practice, sport and leisure and recreational opportunities. At the same time, application of the notion of inclusion to everything from school effectiveness to civil rights to political manifestos, which we witness recently, renders it vacuous and susceptible to those critiques which accuse it of masking inadequacies (Booth & Ainscow 1998). For example, Armstrong (2005, p. 136) admits that the statistics on academic achievements of children with SEN for the period, when New Labour government is in office actively promoting inclusion in every sphere of social life, do not demonstrate any â€Å"radical transformation of the social practices of inclusion/exclusion†. Besides, for the cynics, inclusive education means abandoning labelling and special resourcing for individual needs in order to cut costs in the name of equality. They emphatically ask the quality assurance questions of what it offers to enhance learning, how to measure its quality, and which strategies are selected as of proven value (Thomas & Vaughan 2004, p. 25). Addressing these types of questions is the current responsibility of any school which purports to be inclusive (Skrtic 1995, p. 206). The way in which inclusive education, or in its earlier incarnation – integration, has been researched over the last few years is an indicator of the political nature of research in any area in which ethical issues are paramount (Clough & Corbett 2000, p. 162). The shift of emphasis has been sequential albeit often complementary: from psychological and medical child-deficit models of integrating individual children; to a sociological critique of labelling and segregation; to inclusion being an integral element of school effectiveness; to a social model of disability, placing the onus on institutions to remove barriers which limit participation (Thomas & Loxley 2001). These tendencies demonstrate that inclusive education is an evolving and so to say ‘alive’ area influenced by prevailing educational trends, such as initiatives to reduce exclusions, and by the impact of external assessment measures and competition between schools (Clough & Corbett 2000, p. 152).