The

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liford

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Special needs in the twenty-first century: whereweve been and where were going

Alan Dyson

The need for a historical perspectiveIt is appropriate, in a lecture which honours the work ofProfessor Ron Gulliford, that we give some thought towhat the past of special needs education means for usnow. By us, I refer particularly to the practitioners andpolicy-makers who form the audience for this lecture though let me state at the outset that the issues anddebates I wish to address involve far more than theprofessional community.

The task of taking a long, hard look at our field seems tome particularly urgent. Special needs education so patentlyhas a past and that past like the present is highly fluidand even turbulent. The very term special needs educationis one that only emerged at around the time whenGulliford himself argued for it in the 1970s (Gulliford,1971). It gradually made the older term special education and the structures and practices associated with it seemoutmoded and inappropriate, just as it itself is now beingovertaken by the term inclusive education and the newsorts of practices that this term denotes. This, however, isjust one example. Remedial education, compensatoryeducation, special classes, special treatment, the wholeschool approach, integration, differentiation these andmany more have had their brief heyday in our field andhave, in due course, disappeared into history.

Given this unstable past, one would imagine that somesort of historical perspective would be an integral part ofour field. In reality, however, we are not very good atremembering our past, much less at connecting it with ourpresent. At one level, there is simply a dearth of historicalstudies. More important, our thinking about the past isdominated by perspectives which disconnect us from it far

more than they connect. These perspectives, I believe,take either unduly optimistic or unduly pessimisticstances towards history and offer us inadequate means ofunderstanding how change takes place in the field or whatthe direction of change might be.

The optimistic and pessimistic views of the pastThe optimistic view of history is premised on a notion ofuninterrupted progress. According to this view, practiceand policy in special needs education improve over time.The past, therefore, is a time when things were done lesswell than they are now, or, indeed, a time when entirelythe wrong things were done. Writing a few years beforethe publication of the Warnock Report (DES, 1978),Brennan (1974), for instance, described the progressthat had been made since the 1930s in terms of,

considerable change in social conditions, developmentand improvement in the educational system itself;radical changes in our concepts of intellectualdevelopment and the nature of intelligence, newknowledge and growing experience about theteaching and learning of backward children.

(p.5)

More recently, last years Gulliford lecturer, Mel Ainscow,characterised the development of special education as ahistorical road, stretching from the first, uncoordinatedattempts of nineteenth-century special educators tomake provision for marginalised students, through thedevelopment of state provision, the expansion of provisionin mainstream schools and the integration movement, tothe current emphasis on inclusive education (Ainscow,2000, p.76).

Those who hold these views conceptualise progress in avariety of ways: scientific progress in the understandingof childrens difficulties, technical progress in developingeffective educational responses to those difficulties, moralprogress in terms of changes in prevailing attitudes todifficulty and political progress in terms of the will toimplement change. However, whatever the precise natureof progress might be, the view of the future is rosy eithersome form of progress will continue or nirvana hasalready been reached. At the same time, the view of thepast is that history has very little to offer us beyond,perhaps, the inspiration that can be drawn from itsstruggles. Put simply, we know more, can do more andhave more humane attitudes than our counterparts informer times.

An alternative view of history is somewhat more pessimisticin tone. It stems from powerful critical traditions in the

Alan Dyson, who last year gave the Gulliford lectureon which this article is based, takes a critical look atthe relationship between inclusion and socialinclusion. He bases his analysis on a review of thehistory of special needs education and on some of thethinking which emerges from his work on a currentresearch project, Understanding and developinginclusive practices in schools. This project is fundedby ESRC (L 1392 51005) as part of the Teaching andLearning Research Programme and has beenundertaken in collaboration with colleagues atNewcastle, Christchurch University CollegeCanterbury and the University of Manchester. Thelater parts of this article refer to this project,although the views expressed are Alan Dysonsrather than those of the research team as a whole.

24 British Journal of Special Education Volume 28, No. 1 (March 2001)

sociology and politics of special education which haveuncovered the ways in which vested interests in theeducation system and beyond have conspired to subvertany progress towards more liberal practices and formsof provision. The locus classicus of this view is SallyTomlinsons demonstration of how the benevolent cloakof special education has repeatedly been used to damagethe interests of those children whom it claimed to serveand to further the interests of those professional groupsand others who stood to benefit from maintaining thestatus quo (Tomlinson, 1982; 1985; 1995). In such a view,history up to and including the present takes the formof a Manichaean struggle for inclusive education(Vlachou, 1997) between liberal/radical forces for changeand conservative forces representing the current inequitablesystem. The pessimism arises from a perception of theoverwhelming strength of the latter which means thatchange is always illusory (Jeffs, 1988) and that battleswon in the past have to be re-fought in different formtoday. Once again, however, the past itself has little tooffer beyond a sorry tale of thwarted initiatives andshattered ideals.

An alternative view of the pastIt seems to me that a different view of the past is possible a view that not only enables us to connect morefruitfully with our history, but that enables us to makebetter sense of the present and better projections into thefuture. In recent years, a number of commentators onspecial education have begun to explore the potential ofthe concept of dilemmas as a means of understandingthe field. Brahm Norwich (1994), for instance, hasidentified,

a dilemma in education over how difference is takeninto account whether to recognise differences asrelevant to individual needs by offering differentprovision, but that doing so could reinforce unjustifiedinequalities and is associated with devaluation; or,whether to offer a common and valued provision forall but with the risk of not providing what is relevantto individual needs.

(p.293)

Similarly, the American scholar, Alfredo Artiles (1998),has observed that,

the ways in which we treat difference are problematic.For example, we deal with difference by treatingcertain groups of students differently (e.g. educationalprograms for limited English proficient students) orthe same (e.g. recent university admissions criteriafor ethnic minority groups). Interestingly, bothapproaches to dealing with difference achieve exactlythe same thing: they affirm difference. Thus, itappears that to acknowledge difference in any waycreates a dilemma that poses seemingly insurmountablechoices between similar or preferential treatment,between neutrality or accommodation, or betweenintegration or separation

(p. 32)

What both of these commentators point to is a fundamentalcontradiction within the education systems in the UK andthe USA (and, we might guess, elsewhere in the liberaldemocracies) between an intention to treat all learners asessentially the same and an equal and opposite intentionto treat them as different. All learners are the same intheir essential human characteristics, in the rights andentitlements which are ascribed to them and in theirparticipation within some more-or-less loosely definedprocess of education. At a practical level, therefore, weseek to educate them within common schools, through acommon curriculum and by means of broadly commonpedagogical strategies. All learners are different, however,insofar as they are individuals with distinctive learningstyles, needs and interests. We seek to respond to thesedifferences by placing them in different teaching groups,offering them variations on the common curriculum,developing individual teaching programmes and so on.

Working within this contradiction creates a series ofdilemmas for education professionals and policy-makers. Putsimply, the more their educational responses emphasisewhat learners have in common, the more they tend tooverlook what separates them; and the more they emphasisewhat separates and distinguishes each individual learner,the more they tend to overlook what learners have incommon. It is, of course, special education that hastended to face these dilemmas in their most acute form. Ithas, as Ainscow (2000) points out, served the:

historical purpose of addressing the needs of thoselearners who remain marginalised by existingeducational arrangements.

(p.76)

Dealing, as it does, with those students who are mostobviously different from the majority, it is the part ofthe education system which more than any other has hadto reconcile the dual imperatives of commonality anddifference.

It is this recognition which affords us a new perspectiveon the history of special education. That history need beseen neither as a story of uninterrupted progress, nor asone of a doomed struggle against overwhelming odds.Instead, it can be seen as the product of the contradictorytendencies within the education systems responses todiversity and of the resolutions of the dilemma of differenceto which those tendencies give rise. The Americanscholar, Barry Franklin (1994), for instance, has produceda fascinating account of responses in the USA to childrenwith learning difficulties in these terms:

From the first, the efforts of American school managersto provide for students with learning difficulties havepulled them in contradictory directions. Not certainas to whether they wanted to provide for the individualneeds of these children or to assure the uninterruptedprogress of the regular classroom, these educatorsembraced a recalibrated common school ideal thatresolved the dilemma through curriculum differentiation.

25British Journal of Special Education Volume 28, No. 1 (March 2001)

The result has been the creation of an array of specialprograms to remove these children from regularclassrooms.

(p.153)

It is not difficult to see how a similar account might beconstructed of special education in this country (see, forinstance, Clark, Dyson, Millward & Skidmore, 1997; Dyson& Millward, 2000). On the one hand, the English system(and, to a greater or lesser extent, those in other parts ofthe UK) has, particularly from the 1960s onwards, movedtowards a greater emphasis on what learners have incommon. This has entailed, in particular, the developmentof a common comprehensive school, the formulation ofa common entitlement curriculum and various explorationsof mixed-ability grouping. On the other hand, theseeducation systems have been confronted at every step ofthe way by the substantive differences between learners differences which led to successive recalibrations of thecommon ideal a comprehensive system which retainsselective and private schools, a common curriculum withincreasingly separate pathways through it, a refusal toabandon ability grouping, and so on.

The interplay of these contradictions is particularlyevident in provision for students identified as havingspecial educational needs. The contortions of the specialeducation system that I listed at the start of this articlecan then be seen as attempts to resolve the dilemmascreated by the twin realities of difference and commonality some, like special schooling, favouring the former andothers, like the whole school approach, the latter. Likeschool managers in the US, we have espoused an ideal ofcommon schooling, but we have recalibrated it throughnotions of remedial provision, differentiation, integrationand the rest so that what was common could alsoaccommodate what was different.

Making sense of the presentI regard this view of history as more fruitful than theothers that are on offer because it reconnects us with ourpast. The past is not simply a failed precursor of thepresent; neither is the present simply a recycling of thefailure of the past. Instead, the past is a time in which ourcounterparts and ourselves in our earlier incarnations have faced and responded to precisely the same dilemmasand contradictions which we face now. There are, therefore,things which we can learn from the past. Every resolutionthat has been attempted opens up to us a range of possibleactions and enables us to see the consequences of thoseactions. We can take from the past those things which we findpositive and avoid repeating what we see as its mistakes.

At the same time, the past can also show us the inherentinstability of any resolution of the dilemma of difference.Such resolutions are always attempting to hold contradictorytendencies together. Wherever they pitch themselves betweenthose tendencies, they are always subject to centrifugalforces from both poles. They will always fall foul both ofthe substantive differences that they ignore and of the aspectsof commonality that they fail fully to acknowledge.

There are any number of examples of this process in ourown times. The whole school approach, for instance,which dominated thinking about mainstream provisionfor a decade or so in the 1980s (Dessent, 1987), wasfraught with tensions right from the start (Bines, 1986).Its emphasis on commonality on educating studentswith special needs in ordinary classrooms always paidtoo little attention to the problematic characteristics ofthose students both for mainstream class and subjectteachers and for the reconstructed remedial teachers whocontinued to withdraw them, support them and otherwisemake special provision for them. On the other hand,however, those very concessions to difference compromised we might say, recalibrated the avowed aim ofmaking such students the responsibility of the wholeschool (Dyson, 1990a; 1990b; 1991). Not surprisingly,this apparently definitive resolution has disappeared or,more accurately, fragmented into occasional attempts tomove beyond the whole school approach (Clark et al,1995, Dyson, Millward & Skidmore, 1994) and the morewidespread and difference-oriented resolutions proposedby the SEN Code of Practice (DfE, 1994).

Looking back at the demise of resolutions such as thisought not to make us feel complacent. Rather, it shouldhelp us see the transformations of special education whichcharacterise our own time as similar attempts to resolvethe dilemma of difference attempts which draw on thepast, which may in some respects supersede the past, butwhich will themselves in due course fragment and losetheir hegemony. If we take the current focus on inclusion(as exemplified, for instance, in the recently distributedIndex for Inclusion (Booth, Ainscow, Black-Hawkins,Vaughan & Shaw, 2000) as a case in point, it is evidentthat this is at one and the same time both something thatis new and something that is subject to precisely the sametensions as all past resolutions. Inclusion clearly builds onand extends the technologies of responding to differencethat have been developed in the last half and, particularly,the last quarter of the twentieth century. It has learnedfrom those technologies how to maintain students facingconsiderable difficulties in ordinary classrooms, how todevelop flexible teaching styles and materials, how to deployresources in support of those students, and how toorganise and manage schools so that teachers can supporteach other. To these technologies, moreover, it has addeda distinctive value position, one that is concerned with therights of marginalised students, with building a particularsort of inclusive society and with conceptualisingdifference as an issue in the schooling of all students. Inthis sense, therefore, inclusion is indeed giving rise togenuinely new forms of practice (Ainscow, 1999) andmarks a real advance in (some would say, beyond)special needs education.

However, inclusion, like the whole school approach twodecades ago, is already fraught with tension. The inclusionbacklash, which has been under way in the USA forsome time (Kauffman & Hallahan, 1995) and which isnow beginning to gather pace in this country (Garner &Gains, 2000; Hornby, 1999; Wilson, 1999, 2000), points

26 British Journal of Special Education Volume 28, No. 1 (March 2001)

to some of the contradictions within this project. Inparticular, the powerful emphasis within inclusion onaccess to common placements and participation incommon learning experiences generates enormous practicaland theoretical tensions when set against the realities oflimited teacher skills, exclusionary pressures in schoolsand, above all, substantive differences between learners.The more the inclusion movement pushes towards anemphasis on what learners have in common, the greaterthese tensions become. Not surprisingly, these tensions inmany cases lead to a recalibration of the inclusive ideal.It is no coincidence, therefore, that there are already callsfor responsible inclusion (Garner & Gains, 2000) bywhich is meant something less like inclusion and morelike old-fashioned integration.

Coming to terms with the futureIt is my contention that the inherent instability of thepresent means that it is incumbent on us to look carefullyat what the future might hold. Even as the new resolutionof inclusion struggles to establish its hegemony, weshould, I believe, try to understand how it will ultimatelyfragment and what possibilities might open up foralternative resolutions. Moreover, despite the apparentconservatism of the inclusion backlash, there areindications that those possibilities might consist of morethan a return to the status quo ante. One such possibilityis the emergence of the social inclusion agenda.

In the 1997 SEN Green Paper (DfEE, 1997), DfEE usedthe term inclusion, it seemed, to refer to an extension ofthe process of integration that had been under way forwell over two decades. Since then, however, theGovernment and, in particular, David Blunkett havetended to elide inclusion in this sense with the notion ofsocial inclusion (Blunkett, 1999a; 1999b; 2000). Thislatter term seems to mean something that is allied to, butnot quite synonymous with the former. Blunketts 1999(a)CBI speech, for instance, describes a drive for inclusionin the following terms:

Our Green Paper on special educational needs hasresulted in almost 60m being made available tosupport SEN pupils and improve access to buildings;LEAs now have targets to reduce truancy andexclusions by a third, and the New Deal for 18 24year olds is ensuring that all those who have leftschool without the necessary skills are in work ortraining with charitable or voluntary organisations oremployers, and have advice tailored to their needs.

What is significant here is the way that the notion ofinclusion slips from a classic concern with access forSEN pupils to a new discourse which is to do withtruancy, (disciplinary) exclusion, and progression towork and training. What a more extended reading ofBlunketts speeches reveals, in fact, is that social inclusionis concerned with far more than where children withspecial educational needs receive their education. Rather,social inclusion a key concept in the third way ideology(Giddens, 1998) is about building a cohesive society, by

ensuring that no social groups become alienated from themainstream. This in turn means equipping potentiallymarginalised groups with the capacity to become activecitizens and, crucially, with the skills they will need tosurvive in an increasingly competitive and skills-hungryjob market. The social inclusion agenda, therefore, islinked to the wider standards agenda through which theGovernment ultimately seeks to create a highly skilledworkforce capable of maintaining a high-tech economy.As Blunkett (1999b) puts it elsewhere:

Finding a way of giving people a stake will becritical. The Thatcher era attempted to do thisthrough shareholding but succeeded in excludingthose with few material resources. Our approachmust be more inclusive and it must be two-way. Weneed to recognise that for most people particularlythose who are disadvantaged materially personalinitiative, skills and the ability to capitalise on labourmarket opportunities are now the keys to success andto having a tangible stake in society. Skills andhuman capital are the new forms of wealth andsecurity in which people can share.

Not surprisingly, this new agenda has generated a widerange of initiatives which embrace, but also go wellbeyond issues in special needs education. Some ofthese Sure Start (DfEE, 1999c), say, or the ConnexionsService (DfEE, 2000) are neutral, or even supportive, ofthe inclusion agenda per se. Others, however Excellencein Cities (DfEE, 1999a), with its learning support units,Education Action Zones (DfEE, 1999b), with theiroverwhelming emphasis on targets for raised attainment,or the study support programme, with its overtones ofremedial education seem, at best, little concerned withthe placement of children with special educational needsand may, at worst, be positively inimical to some of theprinciples of participation embodied in, say, the Index forInclusion (Booth et al, 2000). In crude terms, whilst theinclusion agenda focuses on presence and participation,social inclusion focuses much more on educationaloutcomes and, particularly, on the re-engagement ofmarginalised groups with learning, whether or not thatengagement takes place in the context of the commonclassroom, school and curriculum.

We can already see examples of schools which aresocially inclusive in the Governments sense, but whosecommitment to inclusion per se is ambiguous, to saythe least. Elsewhere (Dyson & Millward, 2000), AlanMillward and I have described schools serving areas ofsocial disadvantage which have sought to drive upstandards amongst their lowest attainers and to engagetheir most disaffected students in education not through acommitment to participation in shared learning experienceswith their peers, but through alternative curriculum andprovision perhaps outside school an unrelenting focuson basic skills, a policy of (virtually) zero tolerancetowards disruptive behaviour and so on. Similarly, ourcurrent collaborative research with schools on how theycan develop their responses to the inclusion agenda is

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finding that their concerns are not primarily about thepresence and participation of students with specialeducational needs; they are about issues in social inclusion changing cultural attitudes to schooling in areas ofsocial disadvantage, for instance, or finding ways ofreducing truancy, or improving the writing skills of boys.

What this social inclusion agenda, both at Governmentand at school level, offers us, is an emerging alternativeresolution of what we earlier called the dilemma ofdifference. This resolution pays attention to other aspectsof difference than those which concern inclusion per se.Its focus is on marginalisation, alienation and exclusionfrom employment not on special needs or on disabilityas such. It offers a different view of what it means to beincluded a view which is about acquiring essentialskills, surviving in a competitive labour market and activeengagement with a stakeholder democracy rather thanabout participating as an equally valued member of acommon social institution. And it proposes differentmeans of realising its ideals not individual programmingand cultural change within institutions, but intensivetraining and support, frequently targeted on areas andgroups rather than on individuals, in order to ensure thateveryone has at least some minimum level of skills andresources to enable them to survive in a competitiveenvironment. Given the capacity which Government has toexert pressure on the education system, it seems probablethat it is this version of inclusion that will come todominate the future at least in the medium term.Whether inclusion as it is understood within the specialneeds field will be subsumed within this wider agenda, orwill simply disappear in the face of it, is something whichremains to be seen.

Where do we take our stand?The turbulent view of history that I have proposed raisesa crucial question. If resolutions come and go in rapidsuccession; if, even more, resolutions are characterisedfrom the start by fault lines, tensions and unacknowledgedrealities then how do policy-makers and practitionersever decide upon sensible and ethical courses of action?Put more bluntly, if everything that we do is inherentlyflawed and fated to disappear, why do anything at all?

The answer, I believe, has to lie in the historical perspectiveitself. By understanding the inherently unstable nature ofthe responses to the commonality-difference dilemma, wehave a means of interrogating the resolutions of the pastin terms both of the possibilities they opened up and thecontradictions and tensions that they embodied. Moreover,it is not simply the past which can be interrogated in this

way; it is also the present and the future. Given that forcewith which new resolutions tend to be advocated by interestgroups or imposed by policy-makers, it is incumbent onall of us to subject them to the most rigorous criticalscrutiny. We need to look behind the benefits that areclaimed and the imperatives that are advanced in order tosee what I have called the fault lines in resolutions thatare proposed as though they are faultless.

This need by no means be a purely negative process.Proposed resolutions may have something genuinely newand positive to offer which we should seize willingly. Thisis true of inclusion and, I believe, is also true of socialinclusion: the latter opens up possibilities for addressingeducational disadvantage that have been overlooked byspecial needs education and by the inclusion agenda for far too long (Dyson, 1997). However, if we retain ourcritical stance, it is already possible to see the fault linesin social inclusion as in inclusion a distinctly narrow andinstrumental view of education, a serious underestimationof the structural factors implicated in exclusion and thereal danger of creating a ghetto of students with morecomplex difficulties who have no real part to play in thesort of society it envisages, to name but three.

The point of any interrogation is neither to acceptuncritically nor to reject out of hand, but to put ourselvesin a position to manage the complexities and contradictionswith which we are faced in a more informed way. In orderto do so, however, we have to have solid ground on whichto take our stand solid ground that can only take theform, I suggest, of some carefully thought-through sets ofvalues, principles and perspectives that we are prepared toarticulate and defend. Only in this way can we detect thesilences and unspoken assumptions of what is proposed.Only in this way, too, can we engage in rational debateboth amongst ourselves and with the wider group ofstakeholders outside the professional community.

I fully realise that this is a difficult message to give to anaudience of practitioners and policy-makers who cannotavoid the necessity to act and frequently to act quicklyand decisively in complex situations, with minimalopportunities for reflection and debate. There is aninevitable desire for unequivocal guidance on what todo next a desire that has cheerfully been fostered bysuccessive governments in their pursuit of ever-higherlevels of control over the education system. However, in afield such as ours, which is shot through with ethical andpolitical questions, it seems doubly important to resist thisdesire. If looking at our past enables us to do that, then itwill indeed be a worthwhile exercise.

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Address for correspondenceAlan DysonDepartment of EducationUniversity of Newcastle on TyneSt. Thomas StreetNewcastle on Tyne NE1 7RU

Accepted for publication: December 2000

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