Those who think that ‘political correctness’ is no more than a scheme to stop tasteless jokes about people who are perceived as different should think again. In the bleak days of the past children who were born with physical disabilities or learning difficulties were regarded with superstitious hatred and often locked away from the community. Campaigners fought for integrated schooling as the best option for the majority of children with special needs, including those with physical disabilities, and have largely been vindicated. The long struggle to include the rights of all in the rights of the child, irrespective of class, race, gender or ability was adopted and enshrined in the 1994 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) Salamanca Statement which described inclusive education as ‘combating discriminatory attitudes and creating welcoming communities’. Provision for a wide spectrum of children with learning needs was introduced into mainstream schools in the UK.
Rationing the goodwill
Thousands of schools in Britain made real efforts to succeed in becoming ‘welcoming communities’ for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in the spirit of the Salamanca Statement. Increasingly, however, the necessity to ration extra support became imperative for schools that uncovered a vast number of needs, from physical disability to social and emotional needs. Under the Labour government of 1997-2010, targets and impact assessments (value for money) were imposed on every aspect of school life under a smothering managerial blanket. Support for SEND required a ‘statement’, a process where learning requirements are diagnosed and indexed against the available provision. It has been estimated that today only 17% of pupils with learning needs have been provided with a statement and it has become a constant point of tension and conflict between Local Authority schools and parents who want additional help for their children. Schools receive extra funds for statemented pupils because additional teachers and resources are required but at the same time schools that have a large proportion of such pupils are often low in the League Tables. To profit from this process, a massive ‘industry’ of special diagnostic testing, labelling, profiling and monitoring has grown on the fringes of the classroom while thirty pupils per class is still the norm in reception and primary school.
The special needs market place
An unceasing stream of academic enquiry and research has moved the grounds of support from ways of teaching and learning (pedagogy) into the arena of neurological and brain structure analysis. Pharmacological companies saw a new market in the provision of drugs and the number of children given the drug Ritalin for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) rose from 158,000 in 1999 to 661,463 in 2010, with children as young as three being prescribed. This ‘medicalisation’ of children’s lives faces criticism on several grounds. It is a clinical response to social conditions in which children are impoverished materially, culturally or emotionally and is being used as a substitute for improving society. Medication can also have the effect of enforcing conformity, silencing disagreement and denying the right of the child to protest. Every time the bourgeois media uses the term ‘dysfunctional’ we should look at social distress. A quarter of children live below the poverty line in Britain today and the lives of children and families have been oppressed by a bureaucratic regime of testing and rationing benefits. A UNICEF investigation in 2007 that found British schoolchildren children to be ‘the unhappiest’ in the developed world, a conclusion that was confirmed by the latest UN report in 2012.
Back into the special needs ghetto?
Knowing that the current SEN system was deeply troubled, David Cameron announced that he would ‘reverse the bias towards inclusion’. It was obvious that SEN would be an easy target for the £3.5 billion of cuts to the ConDem schools budget. The main proposal in the green paper, Support and Aspiration: a new approach to Special Educational Needs and Disability is the legislation for an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) which will replace ‘statementing’. A statement for an SEND child represented a kind of Holy Grail for families; many had to fight tooth and nail to get one, but at least it opened the door to statutory care and resources for their child. However, for children who fall below the threshold of disability required for the new EHCP, there will now be no agreed or funded programme of support as the previous categories of ‘School Action’ and ‘School Action Plus’ are being abolished.
The EHCP will give parents a personal budget, mainly financed from school budgets for buying in support and therapy. This, like the ‘care packages’ offered to the elderly at home, gives the illusion of ‘choice’ for the needy and creates a market among the helpers. The inclusion of all children into the school community is to be replaced from autumn 2014 by fragmentation and division. And while EHCP extends statutory support for young people with special needs from 16 up to 25 years of age, there is concern amongst some in the disabled community that this will effectively undermine young people’s independence and rights because it is their parents who will retain control of the budget. Schools will have severe limits on the number of pupils who can receive additional help because they will lose the income to pay specialist teachers and teaching assistants for SEN support in the classroom. There is nothing that this capitalist system can touch without corruption and every democratic impulse is smothered.
Susan Rose
