“That isn’t choice; that is actually putting barriers up for parents who want their children to be part of their local community” says London parent Jonathan Bartley, speaking about the rhetoric of parental choice without the political will to enable the choice of mainstream for all.
Mr Bartley has described how he was on his way to a hospital appointment with his son Samuel, who was in his wheelchair wearing his local school uniform. They were approached by a Conservative Party official asking if they would like to meet David Cameron, who was talking nearby, and accepted the invitation. They were then positioned in an appropriate place, the photographers gathered around them and soon David Cameron appeared and was introduced to them. Did Conservative Party officials see a disabled child and assume his parent would welcome Tory support for segregated education? Not this parent.
The two men, although sharing the experience of being father of a disabled son (Mr Cameron’s son Ivan died last year), spoke with passion about their opposing views on education priorities for disabled children or those said to have special needs. See how the BBC and Sky News reported their exchange.
Mr Bartley voiced a strong concern about Tory plans to end “the bias towards the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream schools”, as expressed in the Conservative Party Manifesto, and spoke of his family’s two-year struggle to get a place for Samuel in his local mainstream school. “His two sisters go there, it’s our local school, we have had to struggle for two years and in the end the Secretary of State had to intervene. There is a bias against inclusion and you are saying there’s a bias for it.”
Mr Cameron said that his Party wants to give a choice to all parents. With his hand on his heart, he added: “I absolutely promise you I’ll never do anything to make it more difficult for children to go to mainstream school.” He went on to say: “At the moment, people don’t get what they want. You didn’t get what you wanted, I didn’t get what I wanted. We both had to fight. We are going to make it easier by making sure that statements [of special educational needs] are not provided by local education authorities, they are provided by someone separate.”
Reflecting on the experience later, London parent Jonathan Bartley said “I don’t know what they were hoping for, maybe a good photo opportunity. But I hope actually this has put special needs firmly on the election agenda because it hasn’t been discussed so far.” He also explained more about his position: “Actually, you need a bias towards inclusion. You have to make it happen. The problem, the failure I think of this [current] government has been that it’s talked about inclusion but it hasn’t actually pushed to make it happen. You’ve got to resource mainstream schools. You’ve got to provide a culture of inclusion. You’ve got to invest in the training and the support and that actually hasn’t always happened. And so now to say because that hasn’t worked and a lot of parents have been let down and now want to send their children to special schools, now to say they are going to reverse what’s been going on, which is already a bad situation, will make it worse. That isn’t choice; that is actually putting barriers up for parents who want their children to be part of their local community.”
The Conservative Party is not alone in talking the talk of “parental choice”. The three main political parties maintain that mainstream education is a matter of parental choice. At the same time, a number of practitioners still believe that mainstream education is not possible for some children. The contradiction has not yet been acknowledged and a minority of children continues to be consistently excluded from their local community. Many mainstream schools operate in ways which rule out the presence, participation and achievement of children perceived to have most complex needs. Despite the rhetoric of “parental choice”, schools that turn disabled children away are neither challenged nor encouraged to develop more inclusive provision for all. CSIE has questioned the DCSF about this and constantly seeks ways to address this discrepancy. We invite our readers to keep asking the question: how will the government enable the choice of mainstream for parents who are told that, in their local authority, there is no suitable mainstream provision for their child?
