The title of this piece is a quote from the report Professor John McBeath of Cambridge Universit co-wrote for the National Union of Teachers. Also the NUT General Secretary Steve Sinnott called for an audit of provisions for Special Needs pupils looking to address “major areas of policy failure
The title of this piece is a quote from the report Professor John McBeath of Cambridge Universit co-wrote for the National Union of Teachers. Also the NUT General Secretary Steve Sinnott called for an audit of provisions for Special Needs pupils looking to address “major areas of policy failure. But ministers said children were taught successfully in a range of settings and Schools Minister Andrew Adonis said: "We put the needs of the child first." The Cambridge report, “The Costs of Inclusion”, said teachers and teaching assistants were often going "beyond the call of duty" to help children with special educational needs (SEN). It cited examples of staff emptying tracheostomy tubes or changing nappies, often lacking the appropriate training. From the child's perspective, unmet needs could result in extreme behaviour. Prof MacBeath told journalists: "Physically sitting in a classroom is not inclusion. Children can be excluded by sitting in a classroom that's not meeting their needs." The typical secondary school timetable - rushing from physics, to history then French, say - was for some children as bewildering as being "on another planet". Shadow education secretary David Willetts said the government should radically rethink its inclusion policy. "The obsession with inclusion is unfair on children with special educational needs, unfair on the rest of the class and unfair on teachers," he said. A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said it would not review the strategy it was currently implementing. But it would take into account the NUT report, along with the Commons education and skills committee report on SEN due to be published in June. The National Autistic Society said most of the 90,000 autistic children had to learn in mainstream schools as there were just 7,500 specialist places. The society's head of education, Mike Collins, said: "When teachers do not know how to best support a child with the disability the whole class is affected, and the child is unable to develop to their full potential." From my own experience and that of colleagues I know that the policy of inclusion can mean that young people with special needs may only get a fraction of the personal help when in mainstream classes they would get in a special school – but special schools had the disadvantage of setting low standards of achievement in some cases. It is certainly true that other children can be disadvantaged by the inclusion of some pupils with Special Needs in their groups – if their behaviour is challenging, or takes a large proportion of teacher time, for example. |