Rule one. Don’t gloat about success.
Earlier this year, a law firm retained by local authorities to represent them at special needs appeal tribunals provoked anger by gloating on Twitter about their successes. One typical tweet read: “Crikey, had a great ‘win’ last week which sent some parents into a storm!”
Eventually, reminded that at the heart of this world of “wins” and “defeats” were real children and anxious parents, the firm took its tweets down and made a charitable donation, but the mental and emotional disconnect on show here was frankly outrageous. How on earth did we reach the position where well-meaning people find themselves in conflict with each other over the wellbeing of children?
At least part of the answer, it seems to me, lies in the persistent assumption that schooling is necessarily divided into a “mainstream”, within which the majority of children can more or less successfully function, and a “special” sector (various names and structures have been used) for those who have trouble keeping up.
It’s important to recognise that this way of running education, far from being somehow part of the natural order of things, emerged as the only workable response to the huge expansion of elementary education after the 1870 Education Act.
During the following years, there emerged a previously hidden cohort of several million unschooled, poor children, many of whom were plainly ill-equipped for the conventions of the Victorian classroom. Add to that the pressure of the “Revised Code” (Payment by Results) and class sizes of 50 or more, and it is not surprising the chosen way forward was to sort children into those “normal” enough to cope, and those who were in some way deficient (a word which gathered some troubling associations).
That dichotomy has bowed and bent to cultural and psychological corrections over time, but the basic principle survives, together with the urge to place children on a graph of “normality”. Inevitably, as a result there has always been a never-ending stream of questions about definitions, destinations, interventions, rights and responsibilities, a steady undercurrent that we now see being played out in the legal arena.
“But wait!” you might say. “Special schools have largely disappeared, and we now have inclusion, which will ultimately provide a level playing field.”
Really? Then why are the terms “mainstream” and “special” still in constant and unchallenged use?
Indeed, have we not had, in recent years, a proliferation of “special” categories: ASD, ADHD, SLD, MLD, SLCN – the list goes on? Why are they still called “difficulties”, or “disorders”? And, hand on heart, is there never a tendency to make the label wholly or partly a substitute for paying attention to individual needs?
Whatever the good intentions of inclusion, then, I’d say we have not, in any real sense, given up on the idea that there are children who can keep up and a wide range of “others” who cannot.
It follows that parents of children who are in any sense regarded as “other” will strive to keep them in as close touch with the mainstream of schooling as possible, seeking access to whatever facilities, “treatments”, courses, programmes, classes, are available, with the reasonable expectation that government, at some level, will foot any bills as part of their overall duty of care.
There is equal certainty, of course, that the purse-holders, faced with proliferating demands and shrinking budgets, will steel themselves to argue that the special care is already available; that the technique demanded is unproven; that, as with medical interventions, there are many equally urgent demands on the available cash.
This kind of ding-dong, surely, is demeaning for a 21st century democracy, a desperate, regressive and entirely outmoded way of dealing with our children, everyone of them precious, with individual gifts to offer.
No, what we need is true inclusion, accepting that every child has individual needs, and should be valued and enabled to grow without being labelled and categorised as this, that or the other. After all, we are a wealthy nation by global standards. We have access to amazing technology that can transform teaching and learning, superb teacher training institutions, imaginative designers and architects, and teachers eager to deploy their skills unfettered by bureaucracy, political expediency and mean-spirited, data-driven “accountability” which is the modern version of the Revised Code.
Our political and business leaders are talking much just now about “infrastructure”, by which they mean roads, ports, and buildings. That’s fine, but if they miss what is surely the richest and most precious resource of all, which is the potential within every single one of our children, then their plans are surely doomed.
One final, personal, thought. A close relative of mine is said to be “Asperger’s”. If I use the term about him to anyone else, they invariably jump to one or more preconceptions, none of which come close to describing him.
And so, as he has grown to adulthood I have gradually realised that the most important gift we can bestow upon this amazing young man is to affirm to him and all who are around him that he is who he is, and that any dealings with him must start from that point.
Most importantly of all, and this applies to many children who start life carrying labels, everyone has to know that there is not some other, “mainstream”, version of him lurking inside waiting to be freed by a magic potion.
- Gerald Haigh was a teacher in primary, secondary and special schools for 30 years, 11 of them in headship. You can find him on Twitter @geraldhaigh1. His previous blogs and articles for SecEd can be found via http://bit.ly/1UojJ5B