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2.3.1 The standards agenda

The government’s inclusion agenda did not operate in isolation. The standards agenda, thanks to published league tables, had a much higher profile than the inclusion agenda and resulted in schools being in direct and relentless competition with each other (Barton, 2003). The result was that almost every headteacher interviewed by the Audit Commission saw the standards agenda as an obstacle to the inclusion agenda (Audit Commission 2002). Indeed some headteachers were reluctant to admit pupils with SEN into their schools because they feared that this would lower the school’s league table position (ibid). So they perceived that in national tests pupils identified with SEN would not get results in line with their peers.

However, the Audit Commission reported, in the same document, that very ‘little is known about the performance of children with SEN’ (ibid, 48). And that most LEAs were not monitoring these pupil’s achievements (ibid). Thus the reluctance of headteachers to admit such pupils was based on supposition, not real evidence, though in the document this point is not acknowledged (ibid).

It seemed that the competition between the standards agenda and the (special educational needs) inclusion agenda had a predictable result.

According to an Ofsted report special educational needs was regarded as ‘the weakest area of LEA provision’ (OFSTED and Audit Commission, 2002, 5). Surprisingly, and in a direct contradiction of the report mentioned above, it claimed:

So far as pupils with learning difficulties are concerned, however, a certain goodwill can normally be taken for granted, even where headteachers are concerned about league tables.

(OFSTED and Audit Commission 2002, paragraph 36).

This statement can be seen as an attempt to play down the effect of the standards agenda. In so doing it becomes easier to posit the recommendation that a version of league tables, now called ‘value added’ tables (see Audit Commission, 2002) should be used to acknowledge work schools are doing with pupils designated with SEN. The problem with this recommendation is that it fails to acknowledge, as implied in the discussion above, that direct competition between schools is problematic regardless of whether the measure of this competition is academic results or inclusion (however defined).

It is therefore interesting to read in the same section of the same document the Audit Commission’s recommendation that the government ‘should create new systems for recognising and celebrating’ the work schools are doing with

pupils designated as having special educational needs (Audit Commission, 2002).

As is illustrated in the discussion above, the standards agenda reinforced the notion of the education market. If schools were competing against one

another, it meant that parents could compare schools and therefore choose the ‘best’ schools for their children.

2.3.2 Neoliberalism

But the education market was also an economic market. The economic

market schools operated in was reinforced because schools were functioning increasingly as businesses (Puschel and Vormann 2012). This move was encouraged by the provisions of Local Management of Schools (LMS)

introduced by the 1988 Education Act which gave schools the ability to control their own budgets (Lee 1992; Lunt and Evans 1994; Gray 2002). The greater its budget, the better off the school (Lunt and Evans 1994). So apart from the competitive market in which schools had to vie for the ‘best’ pupils to get the ‘best’ judgements from Ofsted, they also had to operate in a financial market to get more money.

One can also see the attraction of the ‘best’ pupils in terms of the movement and application of ‘social capital’. Parents who were well off and privileged would be in the best position to deploy their ‘social capital’, that is their better social position, their better social skills, to move their children into the ‘best’ schools (Apple 2001).

This development, where schools are looking for ‘motivated’ parents and ‘able’ pupils is significant. As Apple (2001) argues:

This represents a subtle, but crucial shift in emphasis—one that is not openly discussed as often as it should be—from student needs to student performance and from what the school does for the student to what the student does for the school. This is also accompanied too

uncomfortably often by a shift of resources away from students who are labelled as having special needs or learning difficulties, with some of these needed resources now being shifted to marketing and public relations. ‘Special needs’ students are not only expensive, but deflate test scores on those all-important league tables (413-414).

So pupils identified with SEN could be less marketable because they have less to offer in the new market conditions in two ways– they have less to offer in terms of student performance and in terms of what they can do for the school.

The creation of a market is all part of the march of neoliberalism, also called globalisation in its neo-liberal form (Apple 2001; Thomas and Loxley 2001; Davies and Bansel 2007; Hall 2011; Lingard and Rawolle 2011; Lall 2012). The state withdraws from the provision of public services, and actively

encourages the market, the private sector, to take over. In this situation there are definite implications for the provision for pupils identified with special needs in schools. The education financial market determines that pupils must not be a drain on the schools’ financial resources. The standards agenda determines that schools have to compete for the ‘best’ pupils. And the two agendas are mutually reinforcing.

In the light of these developments the need to secure sufficient funds for pupils identified with SEN becomes more important. Such pupils, more so than other pupils, could be viewed increasingly as having a price on their heads. They could be admitted provided the school has the requisite funds to meet their ‘needs’, they could also be admitted on the proviso that they do not threaten the school’s performance as measured by school league tables (Apple 2001; Gillborn 2001).

Apple (2001) notes a further effect of marketisation which could have serious implications for pupils identified with SEN. In England as well as elsewhere, like New Zealand, the growth of the market discouraged diversity in the curriculum and pedagogy. This, surely, could have negative consequences

for those identified with SEN who, because of their diversity of difficulties, will require precisely that which the market denies – greater variety in the

curriculum and pedagogy.

Gillborn (2001) is in accord with Apple that pupils with SEN can be denied resources in the education market. He calls this process rationing. His reasoning is:

The pressure to compete and deliver yearly league table improvements provides a powerful (sometimes irresistible) pressure to ration resources in ways that will best influence published scores. (110)

The result, according to Gillborn’s (2001) research and that of Gillborn and Youdell (2000), is that schools divide pupils into two groups, those deserving additional treatment and the hopeless cases, those who did not make the benchmark and therefore for whom spending additional resources would be considered a waste. As Gillborn (2001) goes on to describe, just as in the case of Black pupils and those in receipt of Free School Meals,

Pupils designated as having 'special educational needs' were similarly seen as incapable of achieving the benchmark. They were seen as obvious hopeless cases, sometimes from the moment they entered the school. (109)

That pupils identified with SEN were condemned as early as when they started at the school is quite remarkable.

The reluctance of schools to admit pupils with SEN because of league tables and financial pressures has implications for inclusion because inclusion is also (necessarily but not exclusively) about the integration into mainstream schools of pupils identified with SEN. Under these circumstances special education, the system of education for those excluded by the mainstream or identified as different within the mainstream, becomes more about the accommodation to the market and about a battle for funding than about

resolving pupils’ difficulties. The battle for funding will be discussed later in this chapter