Derrick Armstrong

Inclusion: By Choice or by Chance?.

This paper explores the development internationally of the inclusive education perspective. Inclusive education as a late modernity reform project is exemplified in the call for ‘Education for All’. Despite the simplicity of its message, inclusion is highly contestable. We argue in this paper that the key questions raised by the concept of inclusion are not definitional, despite of, or perhaps because of the difficulties of framing a meaningful definition, but are rather questions of practical political power which can only be meaningfully analysed with reference to the wider social relations of our increasingly globalised world. Inclusion is contested within and across educational systems and its implementation is problematic both in the countries of the North and of the South. Some of these contradictions are discussed in this paper, providing an analysis of national and international policy. In the countries of the North, despite the differences in the ways that inclusion is defined, its effectiveness is closely related to managing students by minimising disruption in regular classrooms and by regulating ‘failure’ within the education systems. In the countries of the South, the meaning of inclusive education is situated by post‐colonial social identities and policies for economic development that are frequently generated and financed by international organisations. This paper recognises the contested nature of inclusive education policies and practices in diverse national contexts. It is argued that the meaning of inclusion is significantly framed by different national and international contexts. For this reason the idea of inclusion continues to provide an opportunity in education and society in general, to identify and challenge discrimination and exclusion at an international, national and local level.

A Risky Business? Research, Policy, Governmentality and Youth Offending:

Media hyperbole about children and crime, along with electoral politics, may well reflect a configuration of personal anxieties, competing social values and public policy options. In this article, I will argue that it is a configuration that represents a crisis of governance far more than a crisis of ‘youth’. However, the research community is far from blameless in the propagation of ‘myths’ about children and crime and has shown itself to be far too willing to become yet another mechanism of governmentality rather than maintaining critical distance from the administrative policies of the state and thereby contributing to a wider public debate on policy. This article is divided into four parts. First, it will briefly review recent trends in youth offending and consider the contradiction that seems to be exposed between offending rates and criminal justice policies. Second, it will explore how research on young people and ‘risk’ has contributed to the growth of a crime prevention industry focused on children, the construction of deviance and early intervention policies. Third, this dominant ‘risk factor’ paradigm is critiqued, along with the discourses of crime that are implicit within it. Finally, an alternative approach to researching children and ‘risk’ is proposed.

Reinventing ‘inclusion’: New Labour and the cultural politics of special education

New Labour has placed inclusion at the centre of its educational agenda. Its policies have been characterised by an attempt to include disabled children, together with others identified as having ‘special educational needs’, within the ordinary school system and the shifting of responsibility for meeting their needs to teachers in the ordinary classroom. Policy on inclusion has also been formulated under the wider policy goal of improving educational quality as measured by narrowly conceived performance criteria. Yet, New Labour’s policies have failed to engage with the issue, identified in particular by the disability movement, of the cultural politics of special education and exclusion. In consequence, New Labour’s policy on inclusive education is beset with contradictions and there is little evidence of real change in the system, even in terms of the government’s own ambitions. What is distinctive about New Labour policy on inclusive education is how the language of inclusion has been mobilised as a central normalising discourse of governance. State intervention is advanced in pursuit of technical ‘solutions’ to social exclusion as a moral rather than as a political problem.New Labour has placed inclusion at the centre of its educational agenda. Its policies have been characterised by an attempt to include disabled children, together with others identified as having ‘special educational needs’, within the ordinary school system and the shifting of responsibility for meeting their needs to teachers in the ordinary classroom. Policy on inclusion has also been formulated under the wider policy goal of improving educational quality as measured by narrowly conceived performance criteria. Yet, New Labour’s policies have failed to engage with the issue, identified in particular by the disability movement, of the cultural politics of special education and exclusion. In consequence, New Labour’s policy on inclusive education is beset with contradictions and there is little evidence of real change in the system, even in terms of the government’s own ambitions. What is distinctive about New Labour policy on inclusive education is how the language of inclusion has been mobilised as a ce...

Assessing Special Educational Needs: the child's contribution

Abstract This article is concerned with the role of the child in assessments under the 1981 Education Act. It focuses on the implications of the childs contribution for professional practice. Despite the recommendations of the DES in Circular 22/89 that the feelings and perceptions of the child should be taken into account and that the concept of partnership should be extended to children and young people, in practice the childs contribution is often minimal. The reason for this may in part arise from clinical difficulties in gaining access to childrens thinking. In part, however, it may also arise from constraints which influence the way professionals conceptualize childrens needs. A further issue discussed in this article concerns the effect on childrens behaviour of their “metaperceptions” i.e. their beliefs about the purposes of an assessment and about the role of the professionals involved. It is argued that these may have an impact upon the childs thinking and behaviour, with implications for ...

Becoming criminal: the cultural politics of risk

At the same time as youth crime in the UK is falling, there has been an increase in the numbers of young people in custody together with an explosion of social policy initiatives aimed at young people deemed to be ‘at risk’ of becoming criminal and focused upon the prevention of future offending and inclusion in mainstream society. This paper explores the ideology of preventative programmes with at‐risk youth built upon a ‘taken‐for‐granted’ notion of inclusion. It is argued that attempts to build such policies on the identification of risk factors associated with future offending have the consequences of stigmatizing already marginalized groups and of imposing mechanisms of governmentality upon these groups. It is further argued that genuine policies of ‘inclusion’ must engage with young people based upon democratic principles of participation and commitment to them as citizens.

Inclusion in higher education: issues in university–school partnership

The significant under-representation of people from low socio-economic backgrounds in higher education in Australia has been placed squarely at the front of the Australian Federal Governments higher education agenda. The barriers for students from low socio-economic backgrounds to access higher education are broad and multi-causal. The significance of policies and interventions promoting the theme of ‘inclusive education’, not just in Australia, but also internationally, must be understood within their particular social context and the assumptions which underpin what we say and do unpicked. Both government and universities have begun to address some of the trenchant issues inhibiting the participation in higher education of young people from disadvantaged communities. Government has focused its attention on those levers that it most readily controls – targets and funding. In this article, we will briefly discuss the context within which current higher education policy on social inclusion has developed in Australia. We will then explore the ways in which universities have engaged with this policy framework. In particular, we will examine some of the challenges and opportunities this has created for one Australian research-intensive university whose recent history has been characterised more by its exclusivity than by an agenda of widening participation, as it embarks on a programme of increased engagement with schools and communities and critical reflection of its own practice.

Changes and Exchanges in Marginal Youth Transitions

While some groups of young people may negotiate successful transitions to work, others are unable or unlikely to do so. The concept of ‘fair exchange’ is pertinent to understanding youth transitions in their formative stages through educational experiences. Patterns of disrupted education challenge the education–work nexus not only because failure in education may limit labour market competitiveness but because the perceived false promises of educational exchange, together with the immediate and available rewards of local cultural options, may, from young peoples perspectives, necessitate alternative transitions. The ascendancies of risk management constitute the emergence of binary systems of youth governance in which youth are dichotomised as potential citizen-workers or people in need of control and discipline. The hardening of youth justice and the contraction of welfare constrict the legitimate places of youth participation. Yet marginalised youth do not necessarily give up the ideal of a fair exchange, as their continued efforts in school and orientations towards work show. However, the ‘fair exchange’ within the youth justice system is fundamentally different from exchanges within other systems, warranting consideration of how failure in education together with forms of youth governance are implicated in the questionable, on social justice grounds, alternative transitions through youth justice.

Dreaming our future: Developing democratic professional practice?

This paper addresses issues in relation to recent criticism of teacher education, set in the broader context of political agitation for changes to the purposes, role and outcomes of education within society. The paper raises questions around the purpose of schooling and its role in modern societies and argues for the pedagogical importance of critical dialogue to a democratic conceptualisation of education and promotes the idea of professional education as democratic practice.

Young People’s Relations to Crime: Pathways across Ecologies

This article analyses young people’s accounts of their relations to crime, elucidating microecological factors emphasized in developmental criminological explanations of offending and how macroecological forces emphasized in critical criminology enter their lives. Interrelated victimization, witnessing crime, cultural and societal access routes and institutional interventions including criminalization constitute their relations to crime and are formative of life pathways that include offending. Young people’s accounts suggest the need to consider the effects of distal systems both in the construction of crime as a social problem and their constitutive effects in local ecologies and individual lives.

Historical Voices: Philosophical Idealism and the Methodology of 'Voice' in the History of Education.

Introduction History lives through the forms of its representation. The historical text can engage with the past in ways that legitimize and reify certain perspectives and voices as well as in ways that probe and critique the authority of those voices. In one sense this might be understood as an issue about sources and the technicalities of historical method. On the other hand, the writing of history might be understood in terms of a contested struggle for legitimacy. Certainly, the writings of historians, along with historical documents, are themselves part of a historical record. They speak to the way in which the world is now through constructions of the past as well as to the way in which it was, through constructions of the present. Yet histories of education, with few exceptions, rarely move far beyond the voices of official policy makers. The voices of those who have made policy through government committees and reports and of those professionals who have implemented and sometimes contested these policies tend to dominate. Historical writing rarely engages, for instance, with the inarticulate or the ‘mentally deficient’. The principal aim of this article is to consider what might be termed ‘the problem of voice’ and to examine some of the implications of this for historical methodology. Its particular interest lies in the relationship between the voice of the historian and the experiences of those historical subjects whose lives have been so often marginalized and excluded from the mainstream of historical understanding. A second concern is to take seriously the criticism that discussions of life history, biographical and autobiographical method are frequently: