Where next for inclusive education?

The last three decades have seen major international efforts to encourage educational improvements. The importance of these developments being inclusive was emphasised in the UNESCO Salamanca Statement, published 30 years ago.

In a much-quoted extract, the Salamanca Statement concluded that:

Regular schools with [an] inclusive orientation are the most effective means of combating discriminatory attitudes, creating welcoming communities, building an inclusive society and achieving education for all; moreover, they provide an effective education to the majority of children and improve the efficiency and ultimately the cost-effectiveness of the entire education system.                                                  

As this key passage indicates, moves towards inclusive schools can be justified on a number of grounds. There is an educational justification: the requirement for schools to educate all children together means that they have to develop ways of teaching that respond to individual differences and that therefore benefit all students; a social justification: inclusive schools are able to change attitudes to difference by educating all children together, and form the basis for a just and non-discriminatory society; and an economic justification: it is likely to be less costly to establish and maintain schools which educate all children together.

A reform agenda

The tendency in many countries is to think of inclusive education as being concerned with Disabled students and others categorised as having special educational needs. Furthermore, inclusion is often seen as simply involving the movement of students from special to mainstream contexts, with the implication that they are ‘included’ once they are there.

In contrast, I see inclusion as an educational reform strategy. As such, it involves a never-ending process, rather than a simple change of state, and as dependent on continuous developments within schools. This is concerned with overcoming contextual barriers that may be experienced by any student. The implication is that every school is inclusive to some extent and that all schools have to continue a never-ending process of finding ways of reaching new students who bring with them new challenges.

The aim of inclusive education must be to eliminate social exclusion that is a consequence of attitudes and responses to diversity in race, social class, ethnicity, religion, gender and ability. It represents a challenge to existing thinking regarding the development of education systems. Such a change is difficult to introduce, however, not least because traditional perspectives and practices associated with the field of special education continue to dominate thinking in the field, encouraged by what Oxford researcher Sally Tomlinson refers to as ‘an expanded and expensive SEN industry’.

Moving forward

The approach to promoting inclusive education I propose has emerged from our research in many countries. It demands an effective implementation strategy. In particular, it requires an emphasis on the following factors:

• Policies based on clear and widely understood definitions of what the term inclusion means;
• Strategies informed by evidence regarding the impact of current practices on the presence, participation and achievement of all students;
• An emphasis on whole-school approaches in which teachers are supported in developing inclusive practices;
• The use of approaches that draw on the experience and expertise of everybody who has an involvement in the lives of students, including children themselves; and
• Education departments at the national and local area levels providing leadership in the promotion of inclusion as a principle that guides the work of teachers in all schools

Recently I have seen how reforms based on these ideas are working effectively during visits to Italy, Norway and Portugal. In these countries the principle of inclusion guides the development of national education policies.

Labels

In relating this reform agenda to England, a worrying factor is the expansion of labels that situate problems of educational progress within children, not least through the adoption of the term ‘special educational needs and disability’. This has led to the widespread use of the unfortunate shorthand label ‘SEND children’.

Alongside the pressures on English schools created by market forces, this unquestioned emphasis on student deficits has led to a massive expansion in the number of learners being labelled in order to attract additional resources to support their education. This, in turn, is placing additional pressures on local authority budgets that are already stretched. And, of course, it is creating further barriers to the promotion of inclusive education.

This reminds me of the ground-breaking research of Gillian Fulcher who described how, in Victoria, Australia during the 1980s, a new policy led some students in regular schools to be labelled as ‘integration children’. She explains how over 3,000 children came to be seen as being in this category, which had not existed prior to 1984, and that often schools would argue that these students, who were already there in local mainstream schools, could not be taught unless extra resources were made available. The implication is that policies for integration can lead to more segregation.

Conclusion

So, thirty years on from the publication of the Salamanca Statement, and despite the strong lead of international organisations such as UNESCO, the struggle to achieve inclusion in schools and equity across education systems continues. The transformative approach I am suggesting is radical and will take time to implement, particularly here in England where the emphasis of policies based on competition results in winners and losers. Therefore, progress will require major changes at all levels of the education system and a collective will to make them happen.

Mel Ainscow is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Manchester. His new book ‘Developing Inclusive Schools: Pathways to Success’ is published by Routledge