Special or inclusive education?
In ‘Reimagining special education’ (Florian, 2007), I argued
that the positioning of special needs education as both a
problem for and a solution to injustice in education has
highlighted the dilemmas of access and equity inherent in
education systems that rely on different forms of provision
for different types of learners. As many commentators have
pointed out, special needs education is widely seen as one of
the mechanisms by which students who experience difficulties
in learning are both included in and excluded from the
forms of schooling that are otherwise available to children
of similar ages.
For some, the ends have justified the means – access to
different forms of provision where individual needs might
be met is seen as preferable to education in a mainstream
environment for those who have been judged as failing in
that environment, or to no education at all. Others have
rejected this view and have sought new means in the form of
inclusive education as a replacement for special needs education
and its associated problems of marginalisation and
exclusion. Colleagues such as Tony Booth (1998) have
written forcefully about the need to reject special education
and replace it with explorations of the processes of exclusion
and inclusion for all.
However, while research on inclusive education has indeed
embarked on such an exploration, it has not brought about a
rejection of special needs education. While there may be
many reasons for this, one important justification for the
continuation of ‘special’ or ‘additional’ support for some
learners is that, in reality, school systems are utilitarian in
structure and are organised around the discredited but
widely-held idea that intelligence is fixed, measurable and
normally distributed (see Figure 1).