Before you start to read this, do remind yourself what it’s all about.
Click the Post 1. – “We shall explore in some depth why one of the best laid plans has, at least for some, gone badly wrong and why some fine hopes may well have been dashed.”
Click Post 10 – “When, for example, I point to social reformers seeing special educational needs ‘simplistically … projecting what they felt in their gut they would want for themselves for everyone else’ I learnt this myself the hard way in the 1970′s. It is arrogant, egotistical or self indulgent take your pick.”
Click Post 3 – where I suggest the considering individual needs is much more important than planning “outcomes”.
Act Two, Scene 6
DAVID HARDING … Don’t think I don’t realise. It’s just that I’m expected to deliver outcomes as well. It’s not easy.
EILEEN WINTERTON Outcomes, I do hate that word. I’d ban it altogether. It’s so impersonal. Why don’t you use the good old English word ‘objective’? The word “outcomes” gives jargon a bad name. You have to focus on meeting individual needs if you want to get anywhere at all, and there’s no quick fix either.
“Yes, those who have a mandate to govern must do so. But they must be sensitive to individual need. They should certainly not see that, as I suspect some do, as bourgeois self indulgence. That is sick.”
So I ask you to consider here what the children with special educational needs themselves think about Inclusion.
Here I have a small confession to make. I have been guilty of plagiarism, but with mitigating circumstances.
I have already told you that I was the governor of a special school for children with special educational needs for well over ten years, many of them as its chair of governors. For much of that time it was threatened with closure. But it was not one of the 100 special schools actually closed, largely because of the parents’ continuing fight to keep it open. The pupils helped in this too.
Death of a Nightingale is not about that fight, but it draws on my experience of it.
In the course of it, the pupils wrote a letter to the Director of Education urging the Local Education Authority to keep their school open. I have drawn freely on that letter to write the letter that Philippa wrote to the Prime Minister.
Act One Scene 8
Tracy, Philippa, and Harry are talking amongst themselves in the Music Room.
TRACY There some more good news on the school grapevine. Susan’s got into Bristol to read History and David Wilson’s got into the Post Office.
PHILIPPA He can deliver my letter for me.
HARRY What letter?
PHILIPPA To the Prime Minister. Special wheel chair delivery to 10 Downing Street. It’ll make a good picture in your newspaper.
HARRY I wouldn’t waste my time. My dad’s written lots of letters all over the place. Never seemed to get anywhere at all.
PHILIPPA Well I’m writing to the Prime Minister. He said Education, Education, Education and I am taking his word for it
HARRY He could have said rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb so far as this school is concerned.
PHILIPPA That’s the point of my letter. I am telling him he should visit this school and meet us.
HARRY There’s no votes in it.
PHILIPPA There will be soon enough. Do you want to hear what I have written?
HARRY Yea, go on, tell us.
PHILIPPA
“Dear Mr. Prime Minister
I am writing to invite you to visit my school. I am writing to you personally because you should know what pupils like me think about where we should be taught. And you should see for yourself just how much we will lose if this school is closed. My parents told me this could still happen, even though all our parents said that they wanted it kept open.
My childhood was a happy one, but difficult at the same time. When you are in a wheel chair and all your friends have been walking, straight away it clicks you’re different.
I first went to a primary school but I was called “old wheelie bin” there and that was not very pleasant. Some friends of mine were called “spackers.” Then I came here to Brighouse. They gave me real enthusiasm for living. Brighouse does not take or give the easy option. It pushes everyone to the full and then pushes some more. They pushed me academically and physically even though I am in a wheel chair. I’ve competed three times in Great North Runs, and I went to the Athens Para Olympics with two of my friends. I won a Silver medal, and my friend a Gold.
And I am planning to get my GCSE’s and word processing qualifications. And I also play in the Tin Pan Ally Steel Drum Band. We have gigs every week and give a lot of pleasure to a lot of people and especially to ourselves.
Children like me don’t want to be social experiments. We have got one chance and the staff here know just how to make it a real one.
If you could just spare the time to come down to our school, and look into the eyes of the children and ask them where they want to be, I personally guarantee you won’t want us to go anywhere else.
I may not be a voter today. But I soon will be.
Yours sincerely
Philippa Jones,
Pupil Brighouse Special School
Westborough.”
Click Blog 7 – Let me remind you what I said there: “While it may be ‘right’ for children with special needs to go to a mainstream school, they are not necessarily ‘wronged’ if they are not. Human rights lawyers in particular please note.”
I hope that as you read these Posts, something else “clicks”.