In her recent pamphlet Special Educational Needs: a new look (2005) Mary Warnock has called for a radical review of special needs education and a substantial reconsideration of the assumptions upon which the current educational framework is based. The latter, she maintains, is hindered by a contradiction between the intention to treat all learners as the same and that of responding adequately to the needs arising from their individual differences. The tension highlighted by Warnock, which is central to the debate in special and inclusive education, is also referred to as the 'dilemma of difference'. This consists in the seemingly unavoidable choice between, on the one hand, identifying children's differences in order to provide for them differentially, with the risk of labelling and dividing, and, on the other, accentuating the 'sameness' and offering common provision, with the risk of not making available what is relevant to, and needed by, individual children. In this paper, I argue that the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen provides an innovative and important perspective for re-examining the dilemma of difference in significant ways. In particular, I maintain that reconceptualising disability and special needs through the capability approach makes possible the overcoming of the tension at the core of the dilemma of difference, whilst at the same time inscribing the debate within an ethical, normative framework based upon justice and equality.

 Emerging from the political activism of disabled people's movements and mainly theorised by the scholar Michael Oliver, the social model of disability is central to current debates in Disability Studies as well as to related perspectives on inclusive education. This article presents a philosophical critique of the social model of disability and outlines some of its theoretical problems. It argues that in conceptualising disability as unilaterally socially caused, the social model presents a partial and, to a certain extent, flawed understanding of the relation between impairment, disability and society, thus setting a framework that needs clarifications and extensions and presents limits to the achievement of its own aim of inclusion.This article concludes by suggesting that, despite its theoretical limits, the social model acts as a powerful and important reminder to face issues of inclusion as fundamental, moral issues.Despite the presence of people with accredited impairments at all times and in all societies, a systematized political and theoretical reflection on impairment and disability by disabled people and scholars has emerged only in the last three decades. This contribution has mainly originated from the disabled people's movements and in opposition to the prevailing analyses based on medical or mainstream sociological frameworks.The social model of disability, theorised principally by the disabled scholar Michael Oliver, is a fundamental contribution not only to the discussion about the complexity of disability, but to our understandings of disability as informed by disabled people's reflection on their own experience. An expression of disabled people's activism, the social model of disability has influenced the political positions of disability movements, both in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in the US. The model has also significantly influenced the field of Disability Studies as well as educational perspectives on inclusion. The social model defines disability as the product of specific social and economic structures and aims at addressing issues of oppression and discrimination of disabled people, caused by institutional forms of exclusion and by cultural attitudes embedded in social practices. This paper, based on political philosophy, is a critical account of the social model of disability. As such, my critique is conducted at a theoretical and political level, and identifies and addresses the conceptual problems of the social model of disability, rather than the experiential ones connected to the personal dimension of disability. In so doing, however, it aims at providing an alternative awareness on conceptual issues, which could inform the reflection on the personal experience of disability. My critique is conducted at two levels, one internal and one external to the social model itself. At the internal level, I address one intrinsic problem of the model, related to its theoretical

This article presents elements of a capability perspective on impairment and disability and develops in connection with it a multidimensional and relational account of disability. It suggests how a capability perspective provides new and fundamental insights into the conceptualization of impairment and disability, and in doing this, resolves the tension between natural and social causal factors evident in current discussions of disability and education. It argues that the capability approach is innovative with respect to the centrality of human diversity in assessing equality, and that the specific understanding of human diversity proposed, the democratic decisional process promoted and the normative account of disability those entail, all have the potential to take educational theory and inclusive education policies in fruitful directions.

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