‘There are clear signs that schools are finding it harder to be inclusive now than they were at the turn of the decade’, he says, ‘or, to put it more bluntly, it would appear that we may just have a less inclusive education system than we had ten years ago’.
I trained to teach in 2004. Whilst I don’t think I realised it at the time, looking back now I wonder if this represented almost a golden age for inclusion in our schools.
Perhaps this is a slight exaggeration. It’s always easy to look back with rose-tinted spectacles, and of course there’s a real danger in harking back to ‘the good old days’. I’m certainly not going to suggest that everything was perfect or that every school in the land was fully inclusive. However, there was certainly a clear drive from within government, Local Authorities and schools themselves to create a more inclusive education system.
Just three years before I started my training, the 2001 SEN and Disability Act had been published. In many ways this was a landmark piece of legislation – it made it clear that where parents wanted a mainstream place for their child, everything possible should be done to provide it.
Whilst the intention wasn’t that every pupil should be educated in a mainstream school, it was clear that where families felt that was the best option for their child, every effort should be made to achieve that for them; where barriers existed, the challenge was to find ways to overcome them.
For a while, inclusion seemed to be at the heart of educational, and indeed social, reform.