Mel Ainscow

Improving schools, developing inclusion

Part 1: What is the Issue? 1. Improving Schools, Developing Inclusion? 2. Inclusive Development and the Policy Context 3. Establishing the Research Network Part 2: What Does Research Tell Us? 4. Manoeuvring Space for Inclusion 5. Winding Up to Inclusion 6. Creating Interruptions Part 3: What are the Overall Implications? 7. Making School Improvement Inclusive 8. Towards an Inclusive Education System

Understanding the Development of Inclusive Schools

The current emphasis on individualised intervention programmes for students with special needs may not only be impractical, but also undesirable. This book compares and contrasts special needs approaches with school effectiveness strategies. The author sets out theories about inclusive schooling that arise out of a detailed scrutiny of practice. The link between theory and practice will be welcomed by many practitioners. With extensive examples from the field to illustrate Ainscows ideas, this is an eminently accessible text.

Developing inclusive education systems: the role of organisational cultures and leadership

Including all children in education is the major challenge facing educational systems around the world, in both developing and developed countries. Drawing on research evidence and ideas from a range of international literature, this paper argues that leadership practice is a crucial element in gearing education systems towards inclusive values and bringing about sustainable change. In so doing, the paper considers the organisational conditions that are needed in order to bring about such developments, focusing in particular on the role of leadership in fostering inclusive cultures.

Understanding and developing inclusive practices in schools: a collaborative action research network

This paper provides an account of the methodological lessons and emerging findings of a collaborative action research network in England. The Network involves teams of researchers from three universities in working alongside school and local education authority practitioners as they explore ways of developing more inclusive practices. The analysis of these experiences throws light on the nature of the tensions between national policies for raising standards, as determined by the aggregation of test and examination scores, and polices for reducing marginalization and exclusion within the English education service. The paper also explains what has been learnt about the potential benefits of partnerships between practitioners and academics.

Inclusion and the standards agenda: negotiating policy pressures in England

This paper reports on some aspects of a collaborative action research project involving teams from 25 schools in England working with researchers from three universities in an attempt to understand how schools can develop more inclusive cultures, policies and practices. Unusually in this field, the schools were not selected because of any exceptional and explicit commitment to ‘inclusion’. A common process of development emerged across the schools, which started with the disturbance of existing practices and was nurtured by a range of institutional and external factors that included ideas about inclusion. The national ‘standards agenda’ was a major force shaping the directions taken by schools. Whilst it constrained inclusive development it also provided that development with a particular focus and led schools to consider issues that might otherwise have been overlooked. The paper concludes that inclusive developments — albeit of a highly ambiguous nature — are possible even in apparently unpromising circumstances and that there may be specific ways in which these developments can be supported. Encouraging such developments may be a necessary complement to the continued radical critique of current educational polices.

Towards Inclusive Schooling

Mel Ainscow, Professor of Special Education at the University of Manchester, is the third of the new professors to articulate his views on the future of special education as the millennium approaches. He speculates on some of the reasons for the apparent lack of overall progress towards a more inclusive school system in order to identify some possible ways forward.

International Developments in Inclusive Schooling: mapping the issues

Abstract This introductory overview attempts to map out the rationale and scope of this edition of the journal, focusing on international developments in inclusive schooling. We describe some of the debate surrounding the search for an appropriate definition of inclusion and clarify the way in which we are using this term. Consideration is given to some of the main issues emerging from the literature on developing inclusive schooling which indicates the recency of this particular field of work and the need to bring together areas such as ‘special needs’, school improvement and teacher development in order to begin to identify the territory that research on inclusion might explore.

Why network? Theoretical perspectives on networking

In recent years, networking and collaboration have become increasingly popular in education. However, there is at present a lack of attention to the theoretical basis of networking, which could illuminate when and when not to network and under what conditions networks are likely to be successful. In this paper, we will attempt to sketch the theoretical background to networking drawing on work in sociology, psychology, and business studies and looking at 4 main theoretical frameworks: constructivism, social capital theory, Durkheimian network theory, and the concept of New Social Movements. We will also explore differences between networks on a number of factors such as goals, activities, density, spread, and power relations.

Making sense of the development of inclusive practices

Schools in England are currently being asked to pay greater attention to the issue of educational inclusion. This paper reports some of the findings of a collaborative action research Network that was set up to address the implications of this trend. The Network involves teams of university researchers in working with practitioners in order to encourage the development of inclusive practices. As a result of this work, it is argued that the development of such practices is not about adopting ‘recipes’ of the sort described in much of the existing literature. Rather, it involves social learning processes that occur within a given workplace. The paper attempts to provide deeper understandings of what these processes involve. To assist in this analysis use is made of the idea of ‘communities of practice’, as developed by Etienne Wenger, focusing specifically on the way he sees learning as a characteristic of practice. It is argued that the development of inclusive practices involves collaborative working arrangements; that they can be encouraged by engagement with various forms of evidence that interrupt ways of thinking; and that the space that is created through such interruptions can enable those involved to recognize overlooked or, indeed, new possibilities for moving practice forward.

Making Sense of the Role of Culture in School Improvement.

Addressing the need to find new ways for examining workplace cultures quickly and effectively in order to facilitate school improvement efforts, this article proposes a technique for carrying out such enquiries. By exploring the nature of school cultures and how they impact upon day-to-day encounters in classrooms, it illustrates how critical incidents can be analysed so as to help those in schools to understand themselves better in terms of those factors that shape their practice. It is argued that the proposed method has the potential to go beyond systems of external monitoring in such a way as to enable schools to develop procedures for self-review.