FORMACIÓN Y EXPERIENCIA:

The assertion of rights must be distinguished from the emphasis on children’s needs (Roaf and Bines 1989). (It is worth noting that the Code of Practice is mainly about children’s special educational needs, not their rights.) Rights arguably confer more entitlement (ibid). If a child has rights these rights can be unequivocally asserted and the implication is that they must be addressed. However, if a child is characterized as having needs there can be extensive debate about how and the extent to which those needs should be met (ibid). There are also implications for funding. How extensive is the need? What quantity of funding will be required to meet the need? On the other hand, funding becomes less dominant and less debatable in a context of rights. If someone has rights it implies that funding and other resources must then be allocated to realise that entitlement.

If pupils are given rights they are also accorded respect and dignity. This becomes more clear in the context of demands for funding. With rights, the allocation of funding is about pupils getting their due, with needs the

allocation of funding is akin to pleading for a handout (ibid).

The emphasis on rights as opposed to needs has the added advantage of moving the debate outside of education to encompass other groups who are also subject to discrimination. Roaf and Bines (1989) assert:

The developments in relation to special education could do much to move provision and curriculum from traditional deficit-based and

paternalistic approaches towards approaches which would embrace and protect the interests of all minority groups. (quoted on p23 of Thomas and Vaughan, 2004)

The interesting aspect of this quotation is that it also highlights the way that needs implies a deficit-based approach towards the individual whereas the term rights is bold and does not imply that the person is defective (which is

what the deficit approach is about), rather it implies that the person is and should be empowered.

But even rights are not automatically guaranteed. As will be explained later, the case of the four families who went all the way to the European courts to assert their children’s human rights to be taught in their local mainstream school and had their case rejected, proves this.

Theoreticians such as (Mason, 1992) and others from the CSIE (Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education, 1997), as discussed earlier, take the view that pupils with SEN, pathologized and medicalized by so-called experts, are referred by these experts into segregated provision. In this way their ‘special needs’ are used to deny them their human rights. In terms of this view the separation of pupils with SEN into special schools is therefore viewed as against those pupils’ human rights.

Thus, according to this view, the problem with segregation is that pupils are diagnosed, then separated out, and then offered a curriculum designed to ‘normalise’ them (Mason, 1992), without the recognition that their removal from their peers is what created the need for them to be ‘normalised’ in the first place (Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education, 1997).

This is a powerful argument against segregated schooling. It draws parallels with arguments against other forms of compulsory segregation, for example that based on ‘race’ (as in apartheid), to show that all pupils disabled and non-disabled should be taught together just as all people whether ‘black ‘ or ‘white’ should live together (Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education, 1997).

2.6.1 Not all ‘special needs’ are the same: the case of EBD

In a similar way to what happened prior to the Warnock Report (DES 1978), when the categories ‘educationally sub-normal’ and ‘maladjusted’ were in regular use, the Code of Practice introduced different categories such as

‘emotional and behavioural difficulties’, ‘profound learning difficulties’ and ‘specific learning difficulties’ (DfES, 2001c).

According to Ofsted and the Audit Commission the kind of special need which was most problematic for both LEAs and schools was emotional and

behavioural difficulties (OFSTED and Audit Commission 2002, Audit Commission 2002). This suggests that schools and LEAs placed different kinds of special educational needs into an hierarchy.

To illustrate the point, the category physical difficulties and in particular the issue of (physical) access can be used as a basis for comparison. In 2001 in England just 23% of primary schools and 10% of secondary schools were deemed fully accessible (Audit Commission, 2002). This is the same year that the SEN and Disability Act 2001 amended the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, placing a duty on schools not to treat pupils with disabilities ‘less favourably’ than their peers (Audit Commission, 2002). Yet, as the reports cited above illustrates, this did not, in the words of Ofsted, ‘exercise’ LEAs (OFSTED and Audit Commission, 2002) in the same way as the issue of emotional and behavioural difficulties.

Despite the fact that schools could not fulfil the requirements of the new legislation and that therefore parents of pupils with physical difficulties and headteachers agreed that these pupils experienced difficulties with being admitted to the schools of their choice (Audit Commission, 2002), Ofsted reported that this was still not a significant concern for headteachers

(OFSTED and Audit Commission, 2002). What was most problematic about inclusion – indeed integration - was those pupils with ‘behavioural difficulties’ (OFSTED and Audit Commission, 2002).

It is also important to note that when Ofsted referred to pupils with

‘behavioural difficulties’ (OFSTED and Audit Commission, 2002), it was not referring to the whole category which covers both those who display

challenging behaviour and those who could be withdrawn or isolated (DfES 2001c). It was concerned only with those whose behaviour challenged the

order in the classroom (OFSTED and Audit Commission, 2002). This is a reductionist and essentializing argument (See Slee, 1997). The main problem for integration has been reduced to the category EBD and the category EBD has been reduced to those with challenging behaviour.

This trend is in line with the argument that the role of professionals working in ‘special education’ is to control ‘troublesome’ social groups (Tomlinson, 1996). There is no doubt that those pupils who display challenging behaviour are by definition very ‘troublesome’. So whilst those who are ‘troublesome’ are given significant attention, those who are troubled go relatively unnoticed.

An extremely damning critique of the category EBD has been advanced by Thomas and Loxley (2001). It is worth citing their exact words:

‘A search through the last ten years’ issues of five leading national and international journals finds not a single paper which discusses in any detail the provenance, status, robustness, legitimacy or meaning of the term ‘emotional and behavioural difficulties’ (EBD). This surely is cause for concern’ (47)

This is not just a cause for concern. It suggests that the category EBD – and by implication SEN itself – really constitutes a theoretical and conceptual fiction. But the role it plays in a school is surely cause for concern. It shifts the focus away from the school’s inability to control the child and onto the child’s supposed inability to exercise control and conformity.

2.6.2 Social Construction and Deficit Theory

The fact that special education has employed categories such a ‘emotional and behavioural difficulties’ and ‘maladjusted’ has led to the view that these categories are really social constructs used to label such pupils as being negatively different from their peers (Riddell, 1996). The process of labelling is what Skrtic calls ‘pigeonholing’:

As we know, from the structural frame of reference, all

professionals, including teachers, apply their standard programs by pigeonholing a predetermined contingency, or perceived client need, to an existing standard program.

(Skrtic, 1991, 177)

The danger here is that instead of the pupil being treated as an individual, the pupil becomes reduced to a label. In other words the professional acts on the assigned characteristics of the pupil rather than the pupil himself or herself. Thus Daniels (2006) presents evidence of pupils who have complex

difficulties being assigned to the category ADHD (Attention Deficit

Hyperactivity Disorder) to justify the highly questionable use of medication to control their perceived problems.

In contrast to the social construction theory, ‘deficit’ theory holds that

difficulties pupils experience in the classroom can be ascribed to deficits they themselves are subject to (Riddell and Brown, 1994). In other words, when pupils have difficulties one should not ascribe these difficulties to any aspect of the surrounding physical or social environment, including the curriculum. Instead one should view these difficulties as stemming from within the child (Booth et al, 2000).

Consequently the epithet SEN has been used to describe a pupil as having a ‘deficit’ (Booth et al, 2000) and therefore as not being ‘normal’ (Barton 2003, Coard 1971). Such an analysis which narrowly focuses on the individual child has been termed a ‘within-child’ (Troyna and Vincent, 1995) and

‘pathological’ analysis (Slee 1997, Troyna and Vincent 1996).

The very term pathological, because of its medical connotations, suggests that the child needs ‘treatment’ from ‘experts’ who know and understand the ‘problem’. This kind of treatment as applied to disabled people has been referred to as a type of oppression (Abberley, 1987).

This kind of reasoning has led the influential document, the Index for Inclusion (also mentioned earlier), to reject the term special educational needs and instead to refer to ‘barriers to learning and participation’ (Booth et al, 2000). In so doing it is not replacing one term with another. It is calling for a

fundamentally different approach which gives full recognition to the following:

When educational difficulties are attributed to student deficits this may obscure barriers to learning and participation that occur at all levels of the system and those developments in school cultures, policies, and practices that will minimise educational difficulties for all students.

(Booth et al, 2000, 13).

So focusing on the pupils with special educational needs could divert attention and thus make it more difficult to focus on other pupils and even other practices. It is ironic that this very document, the Index for Inclusion (Booth et al, 2000) which rejects official terminology as being problematic was sponsored by the DfES, distributed to every school (Barton, 2003) and even cited favourably in official literature (DfES, 2001b).