Micheline Mason and the Struggle for Inclusive Education and Disability Rights

Micheline Mason died of a stroke on Saturday 7th September 2024. Micheline, 73, was a major leader in the Disability Movement and a brilliant thinker, taking our Movement forward, especially the struggle for Inclusive Education, in a series of quantum moves.

This will leave a great hole in the lives of those who loved and worked with her, and a strong feeling of loss across the thousands of people whose life Micheline changed directly and a diminishment of possibility in the lives of millions.

Micheline had been developing her thinking since being born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta (Brittle Bones). Although she felt like everyone else coming from a loving and supportive home, firstly Medical, then Educational and Social authority required her to be hospitalized, isolated and educated at home, later sent to a segregated boarding school. In “An Ordinary Baby: Tales of Childhood Resistance.’ Micheline has powerfully written about her childhood. She excelled academically and went to Art College where she began to liberate herself. She rejected having a commercial art career in favour of activism. Micheline’s thinking developed further through the Re-Evaluation Counselling, the Women’s Movement and the burgeoning Disability Movement.

‘The Liberation Network of Disabled People (LNDP)’ Following their initial meeting at Lower Shore farm, Swindon 1980, they focused on breaking down isolation by finding ways to communicate with each other whether deaf, blind or physically impaired. Many of the ideas were developed by Micheline Mason and others:

“We challenged… ‘internalised oppression,’… the conditioned hatred of ourselves and each other as Disabled people… the desire to assimilate; we challenged the denial of ‘hidden’ disabilities; the fierce competition between us… the inability to champion, appreciate and support each other’s achievements or thinking… the lack of information & understanding about the issues of other oppressed peoples.’’

The LNDP were at the founding meeting of BCODP, leaving, not happy with the male dominance and rigid approach. Many of these activists formed organisations that joined BCODP as it grew. Different in approach to Union of Physically Impaired against Segregation (UPIAS), who became the majority of the leadership. The thinking of LNDP helped form the Alliance for Inclusive Education. The work on self-representation, social model and disability as an oppression was brought together to transform education.’’

To earn a living Micheline had become a Disability Equality Trainer, working with the London Boroughs’ DET Team.

For Micheline “Friendship is key. I would argue for inclusive education as Young people need to be facilitated to make friendships across the barriers that adults have created. That can’t happen unless they’re all together. All the rest of it is secondary. It was certainly the thing missing from my childhood. You never get over it, not really”.

I was introduced to Micheline, when put together with her by the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) to write advice on Disability Equality to the 13 successor Boroughs, after abolition in March 1990. As a Disabled teacher who won my grievance against compulsory redeployment, I had been seconded to work on disability in the curriculum. Margaret Thatcher had abolished ILEA for purely ideological reasons, even though it was highly effective and popular with parents. The parents of Disabled children, through an advisory group in 1989, had demanded that such advice be produced, as unlike Race, Gender and Class none had come from the ILEA.

The core became Parents for Inclusion, who worked with Micheline previously when she’d sought advice on how to ensure her daughter, Lucy, who had the same impairment, could be included in mainstream primary school. They mainly had children with Learning Difficulty and had been struggling to get their children included [at that time called integration].

I had come from a teacher trade union and socialist background and seen my impairments as a personal issue to be overcome. All this changed on the carpet of Micheline’s flat in Tooting, as we argued and sought to reconcile our different views. We met in September 1989. An 80-page document grew and grew, to be ‘Disability Equality in the Classroom: A Human Rights Issue’. Launched by ILEA three weeks before its demise, copies of the 280-page handbook were sent to every school in Inner London and every English Education Authority. Largely due to Micheline’s thinking a uniquely radical approach to the education of Disabled people, covering impairments, curriculum, disability equality, pedagogy and self-representation.

Micheline became a life-long friend and collaborator. The Alliance for Integration was formed following an initial conference. The 2000 remaindered books were delivered to us. Disability Equality in Education was formed to deal with the distribution and training over the next 17 years. Founding the Alliance, Micheline worked with me to develop a constitution that would represent all our allies but have a majority of the Council as Disabled people, so it could be part of the UK Disability Movement. It sounds cumbersome but as the first elected Chair for 12 years, it was very effective, following Micheline’s leadership. We decided the Alliance would be for campaigning and DEE would be for training and distribution of resources as a charity. In the first 12 years ALLFIE supported many parent led local campaigns for inclusion, drafted an Integrated Education Bill for Parliament, adopted Inclusion rather than Integration, changed its name, worked closely with Parents for Inclusion, Education Psychologists for Inclusion, spoke at education and training conferences, set up Young and Powerful. Funded by Platinum Trust and Barrow Cadbury.

In 1995, Save the Children approached the Alliance, concerned at the lack of portrayal of images of Disabled children, to organise a conference of children’s image makers, authors and programme makers. This was the highly successful Invisible Children Conference. Out of this came the 1 in 8 Group which led to real changes both in books, children and adult programming.

Comic Relief were keen to work with us. Micheline became a member of their Board. The change in their images, patronizing approach and their grant giving to DPOs is largely due to Micheline’s tenacity. They could not fund children but were able to commission a pack for training the adult workforce for inclusive education. ‘Altogether Better from ‘Special Needs’ to Equality in Education’ was another collaboration between Micheline and me. We produced a more practical case for inclusive education. With a film from Anthony Minghella – Break down the Wall and Griff Rhys Jones in a head-to-head with a Disabled student from Tottenham, linking film extracts. This was a powerful salvo for inclusive education, selling 10,000 copies and used throughout the country for training education professionals.

Comic Relief funded the first national Disability Equality Trainers Training for Education at the Leicester Holiday Inn,1992. They gave an interest free loan for a second edition of a further 5,000 Disability Equality in the Classroom. In 1998, Comic Relief was able to fund children’s activities, and they funded ‘Young and Powerful’, ‘The Alliance’ and ‘Disability Equality in Education’ (DEE), a small charity based on our work. DEE trained a national network of 100 Disabled Disability Equality Trainers. Its training was received by over 100,000 educationalists in the UK. This developed a more positive view of inclusive education in the Disability Movement. It ended in 2008. Labour had changed their mind and would no longer fund this important work.

Other major achievements: a meeting with David Blunkett MP before 1997 General Election, as future Secretary of State for Education he committed to developing inclusive education; amending the Disability Discrimination Act to bring all Education establishments under it; removing 2 caveats preventing parents wish for mainstream – compulsory segregation); publication of the Inclusion Assistant later taken up by the Government (2007) for Learning Support Assistant training.

However, as David Blunkett said to Lucy at a Young and Powerful meeting: ‘Send Micheline and Richard a message. I could not do what I promised. The forces arrayed against us are too powerful.’  This was an unholy alliance of ‘SEN experts’, politicians led by David Cameron, special school headteachers, some teachers, ill-informed parents, LA bureaucracy. Baroness Warnock, author of the report that led to the 1981 Act, changing her mind about inclusion and a government laisse faire approach, not requiring schools to admit Disabled students. By 2007 Andrew Adonis, Schools’ Minister, told the Education Select Committee ‘that Labour did not have a policy of Inclusive Education’. This led Micheline to speak in public debates on TV.

In 2010, the Conservative/Liberal Government had a policy of countering the ‘Bias to Inclusion’ which was nonsense. Together with austerity it led to an onslaught on the rights Disabled people had gained. Rosa Branson launched her Portrait of the Inclusion Movement, which puts Micheline at the centre of multiple avenues of change.

At UK Disability History Month (UKDHM) 2016 Micheline read two of her poems. Micheline’s poems are powerful. Not Dead Yet (2006) is as relevant now as then, with threats to introduce assisted dying.

I have lived to see another spring

To breathe in the blossom’s perfumed air

To feel again the sun warming my skin

To wonder at the life we share

 

I have another chance to notice

Shining eyes meeting my own

Some with love, some with questions

The hope, fear, pain we have all shown

………

Physical pain I have known plenty

Impairments hold little fear for me

But to feel unwanted, a burden, a weight

Is the intolerable pain I fear

 

The answer cannot lie in murder made easy

In fuelling guilt, complicity and dread

It lies in the courage to create a kinder world

In which no one would choose to be dead

 

Happily, I am not dead yet

I have lived to see another spring

I will use every precious moment I have left

This welcome change to bring

Micheline’s illustrations have often convinced people more than screeds of words.

In 2019 for UKDHM Micheline and myself did an interview on the History of the Alliance for Inclusive Education

In retirement, Micheline was free to write and began to drill down into some of the thought barriers we had come up against, reversing the moves to inclusion. Micheline, always an optimist, strongly believed that we had challenged the status quo of segregation which could not be reversed.

‘Incurably Human’ and ‘Dear Parents’ published by Inclusive Solutions, bear witness to this deeper thinking and both stand as invaluable templates for rekindling the Inclusive Education Movement.

Those of us who worked closely with her will venerate and be thankful for her insights and the challenge she provided, moulding the journey forward. In her memory we must continue. I will never forget her joy and laughter.

As Joe Hill said on his death by firing squad “Don’t Mourn. Organise!”

Richard Rieser friend, collaborator and comrade