Last Sunday the BBC Programme “The Big Question” returned to the issue of Special Education and asked whether children were being discriminated against by being educated in special schools. But this is the wrong question. Apart from anything else opening a discussion on special educational needs with these words stigmatises special schools.
The right question to have asked is simply whether education meets the needs of children with special needs. Separately you might also ask whether it meets the needs of children fortunate enough not to have special needs.
When you realise that the needs of children are all very different, and certainly not just the same as the needs of your own child, or what you think the needs of children should be in an ideal world, you will begin to find the right answer. Not until.
Visit the Message Board for the feedback on the programme, and read how quite a number of parents and teachers responded to it. Follow this link http://cli.gs/uQQAHmand you will see what I mean.
You may then begin to understand what I am getting at when I wrote in the Prologue to Death of a Nightingale the following:
So, when you talk about the “right” to Inclusive Education you should recognise that some will want to assert it and may succeed and thrive. Some may assert it but be disappointed and wish they hadn’t. Some may want to assert it but be denied it. Finally, some may not want to assert it at all but be forced to accept it with no other realistic choice available, and some may want to assert a different right altogether – the right to go to a special school. Remember that children without special needs have their rights too. This actually summarises how things are.
Social reformers have not always grasped this. I fully appreciate that an international consensus set the wheels in motion, but I suspect that many have looked at this simplistically, seeing it as essentially society’s difficulty not an individual’s and, with the very best of intentions, projecting what they felt in their gut they would want for themselves for everyone else, a not uncommon mistake. Even disability organisations that have done so much to help the disabled may have fallen into the same trap.
That is why they may not always have seen the quite different and varying needs that some children and their parents actually have, and a not always pleasant reality they have to deal with every single day. Very simply, some do not want an open door. What they want is a helping hand and the comfort zone of their own company. For them change is a worry and a threat.
In the BBC Programme, as so often happens, parents projected their own needs and, yes their own frustrations, for everyone else, when they are different, projected what they thought the world should ideally be like without realising it never will be.
Never mind the parents and the teachers. What about the children? What do they make of it all?
Well, I can give you a clue. I admit to something akin to plagiarism in my play. For over 10 years I was chair of governors of a special school faced with the threat of closure. The parents fought a successful campaign to keep it open and that is a different story to the one I tell here. But in the play Tracy is not unlike one of the pupils I knew. The letter that she reads out in the play is based on a letter that her school friends wrote to the Director of Education supporting their parents’ campaign, urging the Local Authority to keep her school open.
ACT Two Scene 2
TRACY I’ve still got the letter that Philippa wrote to the Prime Minister. She shared it with us before she sent it. I offered to make it a special wheelchair delivery to 10 Downing Street, but she just posted it. Johnny said he’d make a news story out of it in the Gazette. It got a little write up there. As I said, I’ve still got a copy.
“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. I know that some love the big challenge of a mainstream school. We think we will be much better off here, learning more and enjoying our school days as well. 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 knows 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,
TRACY She got a long letter back, not from the Prime Minister. We wouldn’t lose out. Our parents would be fully consulted you know, de da, de da, de da. That’s one thing they’re very good at in 10 Downing Street …writing letters.
Special Education is going to provide as good a test as any of the new Government’s intention to get away from top-down solutions in education. It won’t be easy for them.
It wasn’t just New Labour that endorsed the policy of Inclusion. The Tories thought it would save money, and it hasn’t. The Lib Dems thought it was a matter of human rights, and it’s now more a matter of human wrongs!
Will they both acknowledge that the policy was flawed, and is a disaster in the making as Baroness Warnock, one of its greatest advocates, has acknowledged? (Visit Post 13 Lady Warnock, thank you for being so honest)
Will politicians really stop meddling and start trusting the professionals to do the job they have been trained to do? Will Boards of Governors along with their head teachers be trusted to manage their schools and their school budgets not just play out a charade that this is the case? Will they know for a start how much money they have to spend?
Will the pursuit of excellence, and not just academic excellence, transcend the pursuit of equality that all too often in education equates with mediocrity?
In Death of a Nightingale I portray a school not unlike the one I was a governor of. Its excellence had nothing to do with me. It was there when I arrived. I felt privileged to be a part of it. Will the educational establishment stop stigmatising schools like it? That’s the other question that I ask.
Death of a Nightingale is my contribution to that end.
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You raise a problem worth investigating. But on the excellency issue, I think you have been very fortunate to work for a good school. To encourage the struggle for excellency, you need the right academic staff. Now, I met that type of teachers in small, mediocre schools: people that saw a spark and pushed it towards becoming a fire. And I studied in an expensive and fancy university, where one lecturer had a problem with encouraging and supporting excellency. You meet the good, the bad and the evil everywhere you go. But most teachers and professors will only want to do their job according to the guidelines. Full stop.
You also have to bear in mind that either excellency or the excellency radar is not in everyone.
The type of education system that you are envisaging is ideal. And there is no doubt a reform should be designed in the near future. But realistically, students with a disability will always be a minority and people like you will have to strive for them to get the attention they need and deserve.
As for the system to be tailored according to the real needs of the children… it cannot be done. The country needs 10,000 IT specialists, 30.000 finance experts, 100 artists and 400.000 services workers, to give you an example with fictive figures. It will work in this direction. The system need ants, never mind what ants need. Only privileged or lucky ants will get there where you are striving to see all children going.
There is always a problem discussing education. Everyone puts their own experience- good, bad or indifferent – into the middle, but they then go on to generalise from it. You do it. I agree, I do it. But I add something extra, my own work experience. Excellence does not need to be anything like as elusive as you suggest. Take the special school I was involved with. Its pupils were certainly fortunate. The head teacher and his deputy both had vision summed up in the mission statement of the school “Whole School – Whole Child”. They shared this with a small, well trained, dedicated and committed team of teachers and carers. They were supported by the parents and, as the head teacher told me, no-one fights harder for the well-being of their child than the parent of a child with learning difficulties. They were backed up by the local medical profession – consultants, when they were allowed to – visiting their patients in the school. But all of this was in a State school in a predominantly working class community. This school was not unique. There were others like it.
What made it successful was good management. Management can bring out the best or the worst in people. It can make peer group pressure encourage excellence or foster negativity. To understand how peer group pressure can produce excellence and self-discipline read Post 17 “The World’s Greatest Prodigies”, in particular read of El Sistema, the orchestra born out of the back streets of Venezuela.
Anyone can aspire to excellence. I am not talking about an impossible ideal. It is possible in any school and in any workplace. And if it does not happen in every school and in every workplace that cannot be a good reason not to try. In fact it is a very bad reason. That is why I keep repeating that emphasising equality only serves to propagate mediocrity.
Agree. I do not have your work experience, but I felt and still feel on my own skin the side effects of ill management, after having known success under my father’s almost spartan upbringing, which led me to impressive results from first attempts.
But I believe the point I failed to make was that excellence will always be a minority, because most people are not interested in promoting it. I’ll give you an example from the medical world: I know for a fact that patients in Britain suffer from what I call the ping-pong effect: the British medical system is so bureaucratic and staff fear so much to take responsibility for the diagnosis, that they actually teach junior doctors how to delegate responsibility. Often the patient suffers because no one keeps track of their record. And the record is written from the beginning, tracking mostly general investigations, every single time the shift changes. And the patient is always seen by new staff, that repeat the process from the beginning. In Germany, France or, for that matter, in Romania, the same doctor sticks with the patient until the problem is solved, safe the patient’s wish to change doctors. And every day the investigation progresses, closer to the needs of the patient. And in these countries, doctors are educated to assume diagnosis, not to avoid a possible trial. My question to you is why in a rich country like Britain, which invests huge sums in all types of research, where NHS can afford to be free, where you’ve got famous medical universities, doctors refrain from calling a pneumonia by its name and prefer to use a more general description – lung infection, when all signs from the book are present? Is it still management? or is it the human factor?
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information
You have answered your own question. It is, but it does not need to be. More people do need to ask WHY? No one single cause and no one single remedy to put it right. But today on Sky I saw the Youth Orchestra of Venezuela under Gustavo Dudamel playing Leonard Bernstein’s Mambo, the orchestra from the back streets of Venezuela. The excitement, the exuberance and the sheer boundless joy of excellence. Shows what’s possible if you put your mind to it and don’t think that there is a quick fix.
I hope you will keep updating your content constantly as you have one dedicated reader here.
Alan
I read your latest piece with interest and would comment briefly as follows:
The term ‘special needs’ should be ditched. It is far too broad a brush with which to define the needs of children with a whole spectrum of requirements that are outside the norm.
In particular, my own interest focuses (unsurprisingly) on my own child, for whom being SEN statemented might have been a blessing. Unfortunately(?), Will comes from a background that doesn’t encourage him to ‘kick off’ in a classroom when he is bored. The term ‘gifted and talented’ is applied to Will as part of a blanket definition that doesn’t begin to touch on his very special needs, working at the 99th percentile. Will has been involved at A / graduate level maths (at home) since the age of nine. Far from being a boffin, he is very sporty (to a very high standard) but does not think in a way that suits structured academic curricula. He is what I refer to (in my performance psychology role) as ‘a back-brainer’. He can tell you the answer to very complex questions almost instantaneously but fairs less well in less challenging maths tests aimed at his age group that ‘don’t interest him’. We have a perpetual problem with lack of stimulation in maths and ICT at school that then infects his attitude to just about everything else. We withdrew him from junior school for home (me) tutoring (which has just about bankrupt us), took on two LEAs, won early / accelerated transfer, and still cannot provision maths and ICT appropriate to his needs. Of course, we could encourage him to be disruptive in class every time that he’s bored / finished his work ahead of time. Such a move would lead to him being statemented and therefore ‘visible’ to the government’s tick-box sausage machine.
I understand that our dilemma might not appear as acute as that of others. However, when you realise that a country with a Hi-IQ population of 3-5% has a Hi-IQ prison population of around 20%, one has to conclude that any other group displaying such marked tendencies might qualify for special attention. The words of our local Director of Children’s Services still ring in my ears, “Gifted children are excluded from our Inclusion Strategy”.
regards
David
David
Your email confirms my worst fears about Inclusion. It is more interested in social equality than individual excellence which can be very unequal.
And it will also then be unfair to children like your son. Will.
I think you do need an umbrella term like “special needs” to cover all those children who need a special approach to their education. But when you have it you need to understand the range of those individual needs. Too many people neither know nor care.
I have by the way already pointed to another illustration of what you are saying. Money has been cut from programmes to support gifted and talented children to make it available for the disadvantaged! Ugh
Extract from Post 51
Just this week in the “Sunday Times” Chris Woodhead in his regular column wrote “Earlier this year ministers decided to stop funding the gifted and talented programme in order to divert funds to the ‘disadvantaged’. ” It is that sort of attitude that appals me though, no doubt, the campaigners applaud it.