George Head

Martians in the playground: researching special educational needs

This article offers a critique of what has become known as ‘inclusive education’ under the New Labour administration. The initial impetus for the article was a research project designed to ascertain the impact of the ‘presumption of mainstreaming’ contained in Section 15 of the Standards in Scotland’s Schools etc. Act 2000. This stipulates that the needs of disabled children and others with ‘additional support needs’ should be met in mainstream schools. The authors reflect on the implications of this change in terminology, and examine the consequences of the attendant ‘disappearance of disability’. They also explore how ‘inclusion’ became a largely self‐referential concept that has generally failed to attract critical scrutiny. The authors argue that a highly politicised and ideologically‐charged ‘mission inclusion’ has had the unfortunate effect of tightening the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This, they argue, is demonstrated by the emergence of a significant new ‘‐ism’—disabilism—at a time when inclusion was already firmly embedded in New Labour policy. Take me to the station And put me on a train I’ve got no expectation To pass through here again. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, 1968, from the album Beggars Banquet

Behaviour support in secondary schools: what works for schools?

Abstract Between June 2000 and December 2001 a team from the University of Glasgow evaluated the effectiveness of behaviour support in one education authoritys secondary schools. The context was Scottish Executive incentives to education authorities to develop more inclusive approaches to young people with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. This education authority enabled its 21 secondary schools to shape their own responses, resulting in the emergence of sometimes very different forms of behaviour support across schools. The evaluation project set out to answer four questions: what is working; where are systems not working; what else is needed; and is the initiative providing value for money? Two sets of information collected over the first year of the project were analysed, including exclusions data, school reports on the initiative and case studies relating to 116 pupils receiving behaviour support. The article gives findings from the first year and discusses the implications for informing behaviour support policy and provision.

Inclusion Seen by Student Teachers in Special Education: Differences among Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish Students.

This article describes various views of special teacher students towards inclusion. In order to examine these, we analysed a series of statements made by students in Finland, Norway and Sweden. The specific aims were to see how these views can be seen as supportive or challenging for inclusion in schools. A questionnaire with one closed question and two open-ended questions was used in all countries. The results show that students in similar Nordic countries have different views about inclusion. Norwegian students mostly supported inclusion while Finnish students expressed the most reservations. The arguments about inclusion by Norwegian students were the most pupil-focused; those by Finns were teacher-focused, with Swedes being in between. The results seem to reflect the educational policy in these countries. Discussions, more information, as well as good models of inclusion seem to be needed. The implications of these findings for special and regular teacher education are also discussed.

Developing inclusive practice in Scotland : the National Framework for Inclusion

This paper reports on the collaborative development of a ‘National Framework for Inclusion’ under the auspices of the Scottish Teacher Education Committee by a working party representing each of the Scottish Universities providing initial teacher education. Recent research, international legislation and Scottish education policy have refocused the notion of ‘special educational needs’ based on ideas of individual deficit to support and provision for all learners. As teachers are therefore charged with responsibility for an increasingly diverse population of learners, the National Framework of Inclusion was developed to support both pre-service and qualified teachers to work inclusively to provide fair and meaningful experiences for all learners. The paper examines the underpinning principles of the Framework, describes the collaborative process of its development and provides one innovative example of its use.

Entitlement and adherence in schools

This paper explores the extent to which pupils, through non-attendance, do not take up their full entitlement to schooling. Using statistics from Scotland and elsewhere, this paper explores the nature and extent of the problem, reasons and measures used to address attendance in the UK. This paper also discusses different perspectives of non-adherence to the entitlement of schooling, including that of truancy as a form of ‘opting out’ of the mainstream education system.

Ethics in educational research: Review boards, ethical issues and researcher development

Educational research, and research in the Social Sciences more generally, has experienced a growth in the introduction of ethical review boards since the 1990s. Increasingly, universities have set up ethics review procedures that require researchers to submit applications seeking approval to conduct research. Review boards and the rules and conditions under which they operate have been criticised as obstructive, unnecessarily bureaucratic, and even unethical. At the same time, review boards and their procedures have been acknowledged as contributing to consideration of the ethical conduct of research. This paper explores the issues related to ethical review and examines the wider ethical considerations that may arise during the research process. The paper concludes that a purely administrative process of review is inadequate to ensure the ethical conduct of research, especially qualitative research. Rather, it is argued that ethical research entails the resolution of a potential series of ethical dilemmas as they arise during research. As such, the ethical conduct of research is a matter of researcher formation and development.

Reimagining Schooling as Contexts of Learning and Pedagogy: The Example of Moving Image Education

Recent literature on contexts of learning has challenged how we think about classrooms and the spaces we constitute within and beyond them. In particular, sites of formal and informal learning, non-academic outcomes and forms of mobility will form the basis of the argument in this chapter. Re-imagining places and spaces of learning opens up new opportunities for teachers to reassess their role in children’s and young people’s learning in order to build new and as yet unimagined pedagogies.

'I've taken confidence away from this: The experiences and impact of moving image education with young people who require more choices, more chances

This article provides an overview of Reel to Real, a Moving Image Education project undertaken with groups of young people who require More Choices, More Chances, the overarching policy context in Scotland which aims to provide support for those young people aged 16–19 years who have completed compulsory education but find themselves not in employment, education or training. Supported by Skills Development Scotland, Scottish Screen (now Creative Scotland) and Urban Learning Space, Reel to Real aimed to promote learning with and through digital media. The overall project evaluation was to determine the benefits of learning and preparation for work in such a project as well as the experiences of the participants. This article focuses specifically on the perceptions and experiences of the young people involved in the project in order to understand what they felt they had gained from the project and how they perceived this may have helped them as they prepare to embark on employment. Data were gathered through observation and focus group interviews with groups of young people aged 16–19 years undertaking the Reel to Real project.

From My Heart: Transforming Lives Through Values

in the title of his essay, ‘Chow Mein Kampf’. Not all of the essays are equally well written, but this is a small price to pay for tapping into this rich vein of diverse personal experience. And to those who would dismiss this book out of hand because of its skewed sampling (i.e. all the contributors attended Dartmouth), I would only point out that, for example, Daniel Levinson’s respected theory of adult development was grounded in research on the lives of 40 men, 35 white, 30 from Yale. Mixed is far more limited in scope, although also a timely, important heuristic—an opportunity for anyone to look more deeply at their own experience with self and an increasingly diverse nation of others. Several years ago when our son was in grade school, I made a call to the home of his new friend Anthony to make arrangements for a sleepover. When I got off the phone, I said to Rick, ‘Her voice sounded like Anthony’s mom either is African-American or grew up in the South’. He looked up, reflectively, and said, ‘Well, his dad is white, and his mom is black, and Anthony’s kind of tan’. To our son, Anthony was just Anthony—perhaps signalling the kind of post-racial society that many still hope to be possible, especially in view of the election of the nation’s first African-American President, himself the product of a multiracial marriage. Alas, it has become clear that race is still a potent, often divisive issue in the nation; this book’s 12 essays provide important case material that can help to promote the kind of thoughtful conversation necessary to move us forward as a diverse people.