Current issues in special needs: Special education in the last twenty years: have things really got better?

Abstract

Peter Farrell, Professor of Special Needs and Educational Psychology in the Faculty of Education, University of Manchester, addresses three key themes related to the education of pupils with special educational needs: the role of categories in special education; the impact of legislation on assessment procedures; and developments in inclusive education. His considered view is that progress towards more inclusive practice and an enhanced role for parents have brought about positive developments. He is more cautious about the impact of the revised Code of Practice, which, he suggests, perpetuates some of the procedural and bureaucratic burdens associated with the past.

Getting it right from the start: developing a service delivery model for non‐maintained early years settings

“…As such, schools have a vested interest in not succeeding with a child and moving them upwards through the stages of the Code of Practice, to gain additional funding. This is despite the fact that there is very little evidence that intervention programmes for pupils with statements in mainstream schools are any more effective than those for pupils without statements (Farrell, 2001).…”

When inclusion becomes exclusion

“…The doubts we raise above have not stopped campaigners, such as The Centre for Studies in Inclusive Education, (CSIE), turning the debate into a human rights issue (Farrell, 2001) hearing aids) and extra attention (e.g. specialist teaching) in order to have an equal chance to gain the possible benefits of education.…”

What is Special in Special Education from the Inclusive Perspective?

“…Slee (2014) affirmed that, historically and internationally, "exclusion is an established tradition in the modern invention of schooling" (p.10) and that inclusion is not an evolution of previous models, but rather an entirely new proposal for organizing society (Slee, 2006). Therefore, inclusion is a paradigmatic milestone where societal rather than individual transformations are expected, and in which ideological principles and pragmatic orientation have struggled to find a balance and overcome its contradictions (Croll & Moses, 2000;Farrell, 2001).…”

“…However, school practices do not necessarily follow the speed with which changes in political declarations and paradigmatic concepts happen (Forlin, 2010;Sailor, 2010), resulting in contradictions between new conceptual understandings of school organization and the practices accomplished in reality (Ainscow, Booth & Dyson, 2006;Farrell, 2001). In other words, discussions at the macro political and conceptual research level are not immediately or fully reaching the micro classroom spheres, showing that daily classroom practices seem to be conjugated into the net in which the discourse has been signified (Hujala, 1996;Rutanen, Amorim, Colus & Piattoeva, 2012).…”