Alan Hodkinson

Pre‐service teacher training and special educational needs in England 1970–2008: is government learning the lessons of the past or is it experiencing a groundhog day?

The paper outlines the findings from a literature review of the English government’s response to the issue of training pre‐service teachers in the delivery of effective special educational needs support. The review’s findings detail that although educational practice in mainstream classrooms has changed considerably since the 1970s the training of pre‐service teachers with regards to special educational needs has seemingly changed very little. The paper argues that the government needs to re‐think radically its policy of inclusion to ensure that a coherent plan is formulated which enables higher education institutions’ initial teacher training programmes to train students who are competent and confident in their abilities to work with children with special educational needs and/or disabilities.

Conceptions and Misconceptions of Inclusive Education--One Year on: A Critical Analysis of Newly Qualified Teachers' Knowledge and Understanding of Inclusion.

The latter part of the twentieth century observed the development of inclusive educational practice within the English educational system (Hodkinson, 2005). It may be argued that the emergence of inclusive education, within State schools, began with the election of New Labour in 1997. The government, upon taking office, acted swiftly, and through the Green Paper Excellence for all Children: Meeting Special Educational Needs (DfEE, 1997) and the subsequent Programme of Action (DfEE, 1998) set the tone for the central thrust of educational reform through the last decade of the twentieth century (Judge, 2003). This government further developed its inclusion policy by introducing a revised curriculum. Curriculum 2000 (DfEE, 1999), as it became known, was formulated upon three core inclusionary principles, these being: setting suitable learning challenges, responding to pupils’ diverse needs and overcoming potential barriers to learning and assessment for individuals and groups of children. The beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the evolution of inclusive practices being supported by a raft of governmental policies, initiatives and legislation (see Hodkinson, 2005, for a fuller discussion). It became quite clear to observers that government had placed inclusion firmly on the political agenda and that it was a policy that was not going to go away (Hodkinson, 2006a).

Inclusive Education and the Cultural Representation of Disability and Disabled People: Recipe for Disaster or Catalyst of Change? an Examination of Non-Disabled Primary School Children's Attitudes to Children with Disabilities

56 The election of New Labour in 1997, under the banner of ‘Education, Education, Education’, heralded an evolution of inclusive practices within schools and early years settings (Hodkinson, 2005). The beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the evolution of inclusive education being supported by a raft of governmental policies, initiatives and legislation, not least the Special Educational Needs (SEN) and Disability Act, which have ostensibly strived to make inclusion the norm within the English educational system (Hodkinson, 2006). Most recently, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has outlined the government’s strategy for special educational needs (DfES, 2004) and it is apparent that current policy is to be dominated by the principle of inclusion. This development of governmental inclusion policy has led to a wide-ranging debate, among professionals within the United Kingdom, as to the relative educational and social merit of ‘mainstreaming’ children with special educational needs and disabilities. However, it seems very apparent that current educational policy is to be dominated by the belief that ‘All children wherever they are educated need to be able to learn, play and develop alongside each other, within their local community of schools’ (DfES, 2004, p. 21). It would seem that, unlike previous governmental policies of integration, the present government believes that inclusion relates not only to the location of children with special educational needs within the mainstream, but also to the ‘quality of their experience and how far they are helped to learn, achieve and participate fully in the life of the school’ (DfES, 2004, p. 12). For this government a key success target for inclusive education is that parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities will have the confidence that ‘in choosing a local mainstream school, their child will receive a good education and be a valued member of the school community’ (DfES, 2004, p. 13). Interestingly, whilst the government rightly outlines that it wants to improve teachers’ skills and the multi-agency partnerships, with which to work with children with special educational needs and disabilities, its strategy seemingly fails to appreciate the important effect that the attitudes Inclusive education and the cultural representation of disability and Disabled people: recipe for disaster or catalyst of change?

All Present and Correct? Exclusionary Inclusion within the English Educational System.

This paper critically analyses discourses of educational inclusion in England through the lens of Derridean deconstruction. Linking Derrida’s thesis on writing and speech to presence and absence, the paper contends that inclusion acts as a suppléance to previous policies of integration. The paper suggests that, for many teachers, inclusion is grounded upon the forced absence of children rather than upon any notions of equality or justice.

Career Entry Development Profiles and the statutory induction arrangements in England: a model of effective practice for the professional development of newly qualified teachers?

This paper provides a critical evaluation of the model of professional development elucidated within the Career Entry Development Profile and induction arrangements for newly qualified teachers (NQTs) in England. In addition, it outlines the findings from a small‐scale study of NQTs’ professional development during their first year of teaching. The findings of the study, while accepting that, in theory, the CEDP and induction arrangements provide an effective model of professional development, questions whether, in practice, beginning teachers are being facilitated with high‐quality personalised in‐service training.

The usage of subjective temporal phrases within the national curriculum for history and its schemes of work

This article critically considers the National Curriculum for History and its Schemes of Works usage of subjective and conventional temporal phrases. In light of the findings from a current research study it examines whether the employment ofsubjective temporal phrases as a replacement for conventional dating systems misses a valuable opportunity to develop primary aged childrens concepts of historical time.

The Social Context of Learning and the Assimilation of Historical Time Concepts: An Indicator of Academic Performance or an Unreliable Metric?

T study critically considers the relationship between the social context of learning and the educational attainment of pupils in primary history. Using data gained from one component of a Ph.D. research study (Hodkinson, 2003a), I will demonstrate that previous measures of the social context of learning do not reveal themselves to be an effective determinant of educational performance within the development of historical time concepts. I contend that, within this area of conceptual development, it is a combination of internal and external social contextual factors that act as a catalyst to advanced educational attainment. On the basis of this premise I explain the need for a new metric – one which is seemingly more effective in detecting how the commonly applied social contextual factors affect the attainment of primary-aged school children.

Colonization, Disability, and the Intranet: The Ethnic Cleansing of Space?

The article analyzes teacher’s emplacement of the image of disability within school’s intranet sites in England. The image unearthed within such sites was problematic as it did not display a positive or realistic image of disability or disabled people. Within the article historical archaeology and colonialism are employed as theoretic framework to interpret this artifact of disability. The article also provides an ethnographic subscript to the creation of a space of possibilities and how this became striated by missionary teachers who colonized this brave new intranet world. Deciphering of the organization and representation of the disabled indigene, through this theoretical framework, unearthed a cartography inscribed by the scalpel of old world geometry.

Inclusion: A Defining Definition?

Within this article the definition of inclusion is critically explored in relation to the previous New Labour governments educational policy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This exploration demonstrates that inclusion rather than being located in terms of equality should actually be observed as a complex ideological construct which legitimised the process of the subordination and domination of vulnerable groups in our society. In the article it is argued that whilst supposing to ensure the presence of all children, on their terms, in mainstream schools, inclusion in this guise only insinuated itself in-the-place-of integration and thereby operated as a continuous and homogeneous reparation and modification of presence in the representation of children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. The article concludes therefore that inclusion became located as a ‘guise of truth’ which employed a cultural cloak of equality to create double binds where performativity was pitched against presence, standards against segregation and ablism against absence.

The 2014 special educational needs and disability code of practice: old ideology into new policy contexts?

Abstract This article reveals the Foucauldian docile body manufactured within the Department for Education’s special educational needs and disability code of practice 2014 through employment of a theoretical lens of embodiment and an analytical focus on only three words. In problematizing the concepts of support, employment and independence, we seek to upend this docile body juxtaposing such against the active ‘non-productive’ disabled body. We conclude that the Code is riven with ideological assumptions which act as a constraint to the location, form and function of the body. Everybody’s body is sorted and graded according to its ability to fulfil a Conservative work ethic and contribute positively to a society in which bodies are not equally valued. The authors suggest that critical discourse analysis, informed by the outlined conceptualisation of embodiment, could be usefully applied in the critiquing of many policy and guidance documents.