Sally Tomlinson

Why Johnny can't read: Critical theory and special education

ABSTRACT This article uses critical theory, developed originally by scholars at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, to question the way in which larger numbers of children are now regarded as being ‘less‐able’ or having special educational needs. It suggests that acquiring such labels and being treated as less‐able, is the result of complex social, economic and political considerations. Through an examination of the levels of explanation offered for failure to learn to read, it is suggested that the expansion of special educational provision can provide a legitimation for the exclusion of large numbers of young people from the labour market. Technologically advanced societies may be using special educational needs provision to reproduce certain social groups, including some ethnic minorities, into powerless social positions and exclude them from work and a subsequent independent life.

Effective schooling for ethnic minorities

Abstract Educational credentials will become increasingly crucial in the urban technological societies of the 1990s, not least for ethnic minorities. Ethnic minority families have been widely perceived as contributing to the reputed under‐achievement of their children, while they themselves have questioned the inability of schools to provide their children with an effective education. This article describes a study carried out in 20 multi‐racial secondary schools between 1981 and 1986. The study suggests that ethnic minority parents were right to focus on schools as the major determinant of their pupils’ achievement level. It was found that some schools are more effective in helping their pupils to progress academically than others and the academic level which is expected of a child depends much more on school policies than on the qualities of the pupils.

Special educational needs: the implementation of the Education Act 1981.

This paper summarizes the major recommendations of the Select Committees report on the implementation of the 1981 Special Education Act. It notes that the committee were unhappy with the implementation of the Act so far, particularly the failure of local education authorities to produce clear, coherent policies on special educational needs. The background to the report, policy recommendations on parental involvement, integration, resources, assessment, provision for under‐fives, over‐sixteens and teacher training for special educational needs are all noted. Evidence from some of the key witnesses suggests that there may now be a retrenchment on the issue of integration, and policies in the area of special education may in the future be more influenced by judicial decisions than hitherto. 1. This article is based on the House of Commons Education, Science and Arts Committee report on Special Education Needs.

The Educational needs of ethnic minority children

The concept of ‘need’ is currently popular in education. It is, as Dearden (1972) has pointed out, an attractive concept for educationalists, because it appears to offer an escape from arguments about values and about power. Those who uncritically accept the doctrine of needs can assume that there are educational experts who can unproblematically decide on needs, which can then be unproblematically catered for. Thus, when ethnic minority children began to arrive in British schools in significant numbers in the early 1960s, it was assumed that the schools—without experience or understanding of other cultures—could make an assessment of the needs of these children.

A major multicultural text (a review article)

Monica J. Taylor with Seamus Hegarty, The Best of Both Worlds?‐A Review of Research into the Education of Pupils of South Asian Origin, NFER‐Nelson, 1985, 610pp., £24 h.b.

A note on the Education of Ethnic Minority Children in Britain

children. Minority group children in significant numbers first began to enter schools in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their parents were immigrants from former colonial countries in various stages of attaining independence?notably the West Indies, the Asian sub-continent, East Africa and Cyprus. Small numbers of Chinese children had been in the school system from the 1930s, and postwar migration of European workers to Britain, notably from Italy, Poland and Spain, added to cultural and linguistic variation. In the early 1970s the expulsion of Asians from Uganda brought more Gujeratispeaking children into schools, and the most recently arrived minority group is the Vietnamese boat children. The majority of ethnic minority children currently in British schools have been born in Britain and are in no sense immigrant, although the term continues to be used as a pejorative term and as a shorthand symbol for non-white. The initial response of educational policy-makers, administrators,