During 1999 more LEAs announced policy reviews of special educational provision. Yet despite this trend toward inclusion at policy level, families’ day-to-day struggles continued for properly supported mainstream placements.
Gloucestershire LEA and Sunderland LEA in particular received widespread coverage for their inclusion efforts. Gloucestershire LEA faced opposition from the Special School Protection League but insisted that its plans to move children into mainstream was not a cost cutting exercise and would enhance children’s opportunities. Sunderland LEA brought in an independent consultant to advise them on their proposed special educational needs shake-up after the Government told the Council to rethink their £12 million proposals to integrate disabled children into mainstream. Sunderland South MP, Chris Mullen, said the Government was ‘clearly not satisfied’ that suitable alternative provision was being made for children moving from special to mainstream settings. A Special Needs Tribunal decision backing a parent’s claim of inadequate mainstream support was predicted to be the first of many more to come in the Sunderland area. In Lambeth a security guard had to be called in to protect councillors at a Special Education Committee meeting after chaotic scenes broke out over the proposed closure of eight special schools in the area.
Mainstream support
Several national reports on the high standards in inclusive schools gave encouragement to the struggle for adequate services for disabled children in the mainstream. Yet individual cases of lack of support continued to undermine progress.
A family in Plymouth were not unusual in finding problems with support services in mainstream so bad they felt they had no alternative but to remove their daughter to a separate special school. They reported that difficulties finding cover when classroom assistants were absent meant that their daughter was sent home from school 15 times in five months. However, in Newcastle hopes were raised of better services in future when 115 special needs assistants graduated from a pioneering training course. And able-bodied pupils continued to provide informal support for disabled classmates, including pupils in Cwmbran who designed special vibrating alarms to alert hearing-impaired pupils in case of fire.
According to one commentator, disputes about the education of special needs children formed the single largest category of complaints to the Local Government Ombudsman.
Legislation
In Ireland the Government approved measures to meet special educational needs after the Minister of Education warned improvements were necessary to halt the ‘almost daily’ appeals to the High Court by concerned parents. Campaigners from the Edinburgh-based group Equity criticised the Scottish Government for ignoring the segregation of children in special schools in its new Improvement of Education Bill. The group said placing children in special schools was a form of apartheid which perpetuated discrimination. In England a new Special Educational Needs Bill was promised to provide new rights for disabled children to attend mainstream schools as well as quicker decision making about levels of support and improved conciliation services in cases of dispute.
Family struggles
Reports of twins not being allowed to attend the same school because one child was disabled highlighted the injustice of separate specialist provision. In Manchester school chiefs were persuaded to change their minds about placing an 11-year-old who has cerebral palsy in a different school from his twin brother. And in Kent a local MP complained about the insensitive way 5-year-old twins had been treated by placing one child in a mainstream primary and the other in a special language unit.
The problems faced by Zahrah Manuel in Camden demonstrated how disabled children can be excluded from mainstream schools, even when resources have been made available for inclusion. Twelve-year-old Zahrah was turned away from Whitefield School because she was said to be ‘too disabled’. The school received £750,000 to make it accessible but still claimed that including Zahrah would be a health and safety risk because staff had not been properly trained. The issue of health and safety regulations creating a barrier to inclusion was taken up by a mother in an article in a disability journal. She said regulations had gone too far in trying to reduce risks for staff. The greater risk was of damaging children’s self-esteem and increasing segregation.
In a new survey conducted by the Down’s Syndrome Association, a quarter of parents said they faced opposition from LEAs when they asked for a mainstream school rather than a special school for their children.
