Inclusive and Supportive Education Congress International Special Education Conference Inclusion: Celebrating Diversity? 1st - 4th August 2005. Glasgow, Scotland

home about the conference programme registration accommodation contact

Understandings of Inclusion:
The Perceptions of Teachers and Teaching Assistants

Dr Hazel Lawson
University of Plymouth, Douglas Avenue, Exmouth, Devon, UK EX8 2AT
h.lawson@plymouth.ac.uk

Maureen Parker, University of Plymouth and Dr Pat Sikes, University of Sheffield

Introduction

 The rhetoric and discourse of inclusion as promoted by and articulated in governmental policy and publications in England could be described as ambitious, visionary and somewhat vague. For example:

Inclusion can be used to mean many things including: the placement with pupils with SEN in mainstream schools: the participation of all pupils in the curriculum and social life of mainstream schools; the participation of all pupils in learning which leads to the highest possible level of achievement; and the participation of young people in the full range of social experiences and opportunities once they have left school. (DfEE, 1998, p. 23)

Inclusive education is a human right, it’s good education and it makes good social sense. (CSIE, 2002)

Inclusion is about equal opportunities for all pupils, whatever their age, gender, ethnicity, attainment and background. (OFSTED, 2001, p. 4)

Inclusion is much more than the type of school that children attend: it is about the quality of their experience; how they are helped to learn, achieve and participate fully in the life of the school. (DfES, 2004)

This vagueness has translated into practice, as Elias Avramidis, Phil Bayliss and Robert Burden note when they comment that, ‘inclusion is a bewildering concept which can have a variety of interpretations and applications’ (2002, p. 158). In recent times inclusion has also, as Gary Thomas and Andrew Loxley (2001) suggest, become something of a cliché that has been ‘evacuated of meaning’ (Benjamin, 2002).

So what does inclusion mean to the people working in schools who are charged with enacting it? Robert Bullough muses that ‘when seeking to understand why something happened in a classroom, increasingly the road to understanding takes a biographical turn, not a detour…… to understand all educational events, one must confront biography’ (1998, pp. 19 – 24). We agree with this view and believe that understandings and actions are mediated by personal, subjective and emotional experiences rooted in the things that have happened to people. With this as our starting point we embarked upon research which took an auto/biographical and narrative approach in order to investigate how and to what extent, the rhetoric of inclusion contained in such documents as those cited earlier, has impacted on the understandings and interpretations of inclusion of teachers and teaching assistants working in mainstream schools.

Thus, over the course of the 2003/2004 academic year, we made three visits to one primary and one secondary school, chosen because they had no special inclusion brief or expertise. Conversations were held with teachers and teaching assistants who volunteered to talk and who were invited to discuss what inclusion meant to them and to share stories about inclusive practice, both positive and negative, from their personal experiences. These conversations, in total 60, were recorded and transcribed.

Whilst each account was unique and idiosyncratic, in every case it was possible to make an interpretation that pointed to a tension between the systemic and personal elements (or, in other terms, the structural and agentic) in people’s understandings and experiences of inclusion. We found that the concept of inclusion was variously defined and often seemed to accord with at least some aspects of government rhetoric. The stories about inclusive practice, however, frequently focused on the human and personal aspects of day to day involvement with individual pupils (the therapeutic discourse of ‘care and support’ referred to by Avramidis, Bayliss and Burden (2002)) within the context of specific institutions. Rhetoric and ‘reality’ were tenuously linked.

In this paper we have chosen to present extracts from six of our conversations in the form of a performance text because we feel that this allows us to re-present what our informants said in a way which retains/depicts/conveys an impression of at least some of the texture, complexity, messiness and emotionality that was there in the original saying (see Denzin, 2003, Wolcott, 2002). Ideally, the three of us would ‘perform’ the paper but that is clearly not possible when the audience can only access the work in its written form. When we have been able to present the paper as performance we recognise that, of course, we are not the people who originally said these things. We have not, therefore, tried to re-produce accents and timbres or to ‘act’ out the accounts to resemble their original telling. Our aim has not been to attempt to (accurately) re-produce what happened in the interviews. That is clearly impossible. We do think, however, that a verbal rendition does have a special potential to encourage an audience to engage with and hear what was said in an immediate and intimate fashion - providing the audience is ‘hearing’ -  and this is a point that needs making, particularly in a piece that deals with inclusion. Speech offers and creates a different relationship with words than does written text.

Researchers usually have to make editorial and creative decisions about what to include in their research accounts, which means omissions usually have to be made, not least in order to meet word limits. Inclusions and omissions inevitably result in a particular slant, in one specific story, rather than another, being told. We wanted to show what we felt was a general range of perspectives. But we take no responsibility for the omissions made by the people who spoke with us. Thus, no-one mentioned inclusion of lesbian, gay and bi-sexual students and teachers, only two people referred to inclusion as relating to girls and boys and there were only three passing references to ethnicity. We should also note that there were no Black or Asian teachers in the schools we visited.

Given the centrality of the concern, we have sought to give some insights into interactions between personal agency and biography and structural force and to illustrate what we have called the ‘Yes Buts’ of inclusion: Yes, inclusion is a good thing. But the money isn’t there. Yes, inclusion is a good thing. But the curriculum is inappropriate. Yes, inclusion is a good thing. But the teachers don’t have the training.

So we have chosen to re-present the accounts of:

Sally - because she herself had a child who had been in danger of inclusion and this had, inevitably, coloured her own perspectives;

Timothy - because he talked about finance and the National Curriculum as barriers to inclusion;

Louise – because she spoke about the impact of inclusion on all the children in a class;

Theresa – because she voiced extreme opinions that other people may well share but wouldn’t necessarily feel able to express; because she articulated the view that including children with special needs teaches other kids compassion; because she suggested that inclusion does not provide the specialist help and environment that some youngsters need;

Rose – because she reflected on how different teachers have different approaches to inclusion; because, as a teaching assistant, she questioned her ‘right’ to have a view on inclusion;

Ruth – because her words illustrated the tension between rhetoric and reality.

Within the extracts we have chosen there is minimal editing, mainly of the order of removing our responses. Other than that, the accounts are, more or less, direct transcriptions.

SALLY

My thoughts will never change on inclusion. I’m a Teaching Assistant and I work with six year old autistic twins that have got speech problems and one of them is dyspraxic, so I will never change my opinions about inclusion. Definitely not. I think that sometimes we've got to be very careful because, obviously, with some of the children, it may be some of their problems are too extreme to be included in a mainstream school. Sometimes there could be a question mark when you think may be they shouldn't be here, but at the end of the day where else do they go if they can't go in here? So, you know they have a right to be educated so if you haven't got special schools then they come in here, and we do the best that we can. But I think that if you've got a child that's probably a little bit testing you need to have somebody that really is trained up so they can actually work with that child and support it to the best of the ability. Don't give it to someone that 's just walked off the street 'Oh I fancy being a TA,' because I don't think that's fair on anybody, most of all the child.

We've got a big year five group that have got special needs and they've all got different issues. We're having to look at them now and the transition man down at the secondary school said to me 'Well it might be that some of them will have to be channelled off into a different school where their needs will be met better.' Well to me, they have the right to go their local secondary school so I'm determined that they’re going to be included down there as part of their...you know...as part of their natural progression. Why should they have a special school? You know they’re not that bad. They're still here - they haven't been excluded from here so...you know...

It's children's education that's at stake and if we don't get it right from day one, it jeopardises their secondary education and I feel that's not a nice way to go. My...I've got a son whose normal, but he was labelled quite early as a...you know...a cocky git and teachers don't like it and yeah he had...he didn't have very good memories of secondary school. And you sort of think when you go through it with a child. He was re-tracked - that’s a system where parents become involved and you talk. David had an allocated teacher, which we eventually had to change because she didn't particularly like him and we changed to a man and this man turned my son around completely. It's about spending time with the parents, talking to the parents, how we can help at home and things like that. And my husband is a man that works away a lot so it just made him realise that he needed to come in a bit more and become more a part of his education and be more of a part of his education and what we did with him. And it just made David realise as well. And he had to get books signed to say he'd been in lessons and how he'd been in lessons. It just makes you realise that behaviour doesn't actually work. You get more praise and you actually achieve more if you're good. He’s an apprentice mechanic now. And I had a teacher tell me that he would end up in prison. So when I've somebody like that to work with, yes I become bolshy because I feel no way is any teacher going to speak to a child like that and get away with it and then say he's going to end up in prison and I've got a son that's four years down.. you know...in his forth year of an apprenticeship so yeah he's done OK.

TIMOTHY

I’m a Head of Year and I see Inclusion as a way of keeping children involved who would be otherwise lost to the system in a sense and trying to find suitable courses that will keep them interested – which requires money – and capitation’s been chopped for that effectively. So we haven’t got the facilities (I don’t think) to operate certain courses that can keep them and maintain the interest of some of these youngsters who become disaffected and give us problems and the National Curriculum doesn’t necessarily have the same relevance to some of them.

I think that’s probably the way most staff would see inclusion, we try to keep all the youngsters motivated, regardless of where they feature in terms of their ability and I think the biggest problem is really finding a curriculum that suits all and I don’t think it’s available with the funding that we’ve currently got – I’m taking youngsters into year 10 at the moment, where we’re trying to offer extra courses for those who find languages difficult and have really got no hope of continuing on any level, so we’re looking for alternatives, maybe as a provision there, but which we wouldn’t normally have outside the lesser academically demanding courses so we’re mainly offering courses as day-out courses that we can fund, but where’s that money to come from? I don’t think it’s readily available within the budget, for the sort of numbers which it could be useful to, that’s the thing.

LOUISE

To me it just means everybody, give everybody a fair chance including, you know physically handicapped. But I do have a problem with it. I mean I have been a teaching assistant for fifteen years and I have watched things change very gradually, and I really do feel that a lot of the class...basically because we are trying to include children who have all sorts of different problems, you know whether it is their own backgrounds, whether it’s because they're emotionally disturbed. You know it’s not their fault, I just think that there are lots and lots of other children suffering because of it. I mean I have been in a class, a year 2 class here with someone with emotional, you know he ended up being excluded, but before he was excluded we tried everything to include him and so many of the other children suffered. You know he would punch and kick and disrupt the class, and there was very little we could do. He isn't meant to be here and now he isn't, but how many children have suffered while we were going through all that you know? I do find it all very difficult, so I'm not totally for it.

Well its good for the school isn't it because they will take anybody from anywhere really. And it helps with money you know. And if you've got a policy whereby you have enough spaces where you can take people.

I mean we've had a lot of children that have come in from other schools. But it is constantly changing the dynamics of this school. You know, you get a nice little class and then you get someone that has problems somewhere else and really they create problems here. I think that just perhaps I am being old fashioned. It didn't used to be like this that’s all.

THERESA

When I heard you were interested in hearing people’s thoughts on inclusion I really wanted to take the opportunity to come and tell you mine. I teach drama here now three times a week, lower school drama.   I used to work in a Special School in London, the first school that I taught in – it was deemed delicate but that might mean they’d had an asthma attack once before. And there were some seriously ill children but often there were children who couldn’t actually integrate within mainstream education; of course there were some children who even 20 years ago we were trying to integrate and it seemed like a good idea, but it’s just gone too far in my view.  

There’s one child here - I’m probably not allowed to mention names.   This poor child, Sean, one of 7, is completely mad, he’s violent.   We’re putting him in a failing situation.   It’s such a shame for these kids, yes we shouldn’t put handicapped people in institutions and think they don’t have brains, but I think it’s just so wrong to have these children I think.   It’s almost like you put everybody into a school and, ‘let’s just see how they cope’. And the devastation it causes to the rest of that class and their education.   And in the case of this one particular kid, he’s not going to make it.   And the time of the staff that’s taken up.   He just reminds me of the children in the Special School who you know, any sort of change was difficult, you know, all those things that special needs children find very hard to cope with.   And in drama you have to work in groups and pairs and listen and co-operate, he can’t do that.   He needs to be in a smaller environment where there is much more one to one where people can help him.   So we are putting these children in a failing situation.

Now there’s another student here, Dan, who’s a bit of a wooden top, you know he’s a bit strange. And the kids know that he’s handicapped and that’s different.   You know what I’m saying, it’s different to ‘off the wall’ children; who are constantly just failing, every single lesson is a failing experience for them.   It’s just there, all day everyday.   It’s pretty sad, I think anyway.   Inclusion is good for some things.   It’s quite interesting because the kids, with Dan in particular, in drama, show compassion.   And even though he may say things that are a bit naïve and innocent and sweet, I think that in many ways, does help the children develop, it brings out a side of compassion in them.  But when it’s a child like Sean who is a behavioural nightmare and off the wall, there’s something seriously wrong with this child.  

We’ve got a child in year 8 who’s unbelievably immature, Rachel, she has a mental age of about 7 or 8.   Unbelievably immature in her social ways – socially she’s about 7 or 8 and she’s a bit strange.   The other day one of the big tough boys laughed at her when she was showing her piece and of course she looks up nervously because she knows somebody’s going to ridicule her.   He was sitting next to me and I just said to him, ‘you know that’s really sad to pick on somebody like Rachel isn’t it?’ and he said, ‘yeah miss it is actually’.   I then said, ‘you know, laugh at somebody of your own standing, but to laugh at Rachel, that makes you a bit sad doesn’t it’ – and he said, ‘yeah miss’.   So that sort of inclusion is good and it’s good for the rest of the class.   It’s not that I’m not against it – but it’s all like it’s gone from huge amounts of special schools and isolation – you know if you go back to Victorian times, just appalling, awful, to throwing them all in.

A child like Sean is going to get naughtier and naughtier because he’s failing and he’s never going to get anywhere.   And then when he comes out he’s not going to hold a positive experience of school – which if he’d been put in a small integrated group with heavy support, in the right setting with the right curriculum for a Special Needs child, then he would get something out of it.   We were doing engines in cars yesterday in drama and being racing machines.   Everyone was being a part within the machine, we had a crash and everybody had to roll over everybody, but Sean can’t be part of the group – he can’t work with people and so in the end I said, ‘we can’t have people lying on their backs in the middle of drama Sean – you either join in or you go and stand outside of the classroom’ so he said, ‘I don’t care, I don’t like drama anyway’.   And you know it’s pathetic, his little eyes looking in, it’s almost like the whole of his life he’s got this glass screen and he’s looking in through the screen, desperately wanting and trying to join in, but can’t – and putting him in a school like this is not going to help him at all – it’s tragic.

I went to a convent school in Oxford; it was an all girls’ school.   I’m 47 so that’s quite a long time, but there was nothing like wheelchair access, rights of people who, you know, not at all, no.   Any sort of handicap or anything was pushed under the carpet.   At my school there wasn’t anybody who had any sort of handicap, other than somebody who might have a sharp temper or something like that, no.   In those days more were excluded and put into various boxes, it wasn’t necessarily the right thing.

ROSE

I'm a classroom assistant. Well actually I often associate it with bad behaviour and keeping children in school, but I'm sure it also means less able students staying in the class and staying with the rest of the class to be taught, so that they are not identified perhaps or made to feel different. Some teachers think it is very important to keep children in at all times and others if they've got a less able group, they like them to be withdrawn from time to time with a classroom assistant to do some different work.

I think it depends. I mean, teachers seem to interpret it differently, they have different ideas of what it means and it is a bit of a grey area really. Some teachers feel that they will let a group go out with a teaching assistant because they think that's effective, but they're sort of a bit, they know it's not really approved of that, well senior management really like everybody to stay in the classroom. But it seems to me - I've never really got to the bottom of it, I suppose I've never asked, so nobody is actually saying 'you must'. It is left to individual teachers how they're going to organise their groups or whatever so I, personally I can see, because I've worked with two teachers and one teacher has asked me to withdraw a group and I have seen how effective that is. Just a few sessions a week doing some very basic work. They actually have caught up very well, and I have worked with a teacher who always wants me in the room with the children.

 I suppose I don't have to have a view because I feel, you know I come here and a teacher tells me what to do so it doesn't matter what my view is, so I don't bother thinking about it may be. I wouldn't dream of saying anything. Oh no I wouldn't think it my place to say, oh no I couldn't do that.

RUTH

To me it is a very, very nice idea, inclusion but unfortunately teachers aren't given the training or backup or support to include children properly. I think it is all a very, very, very nice idea but the money and the support and everything isn't there to cope with it.

I mean I understand quite a lot about children with autism but I have never had to deal with a boy like the one I have in my class at the moment. So it's not that I don't know something about it and what do to but when you get one as extreme as this one I really don't know what to do and so although he's in my class and he has been assessed by psychologists and all the various things like that there's...it's then like well you've got to get on with it - you've just got to deal with him. And I sort of wonder, well how? What do I do? You know, he sits there and some days he writes nothing, growls and makes noises, and I keep saying this and saying it and saying it and it's like nobody’s listening and you know I don't know whether to push on and try and keep on trying to make him do something national curriculum, or give him a completely different programme. You know I want someone to say to me this is this is what he needs and then I can do it but it's, it's just really difficult knowing what to do. At the end of the day he’s going to move up to year 6, he's going to move up into secondary school and he's going to end up in a special school or he's going to end up in massive trouble or whatever. He's a very disturbed boy as well I think, with other things, but you know we don't seem to. Everyone just thinks that you can cope with it. You're an experienced teacher, you can cope with it. It makes me feel quite angry really. Quite angry. Yeah, quite angry because you do try to do the best that you can but you know I'm not trained in those things. I'm not trained specifically in some of these very, very major problems. Yes, it's nice that people have faith in me, but there is only so much that you can do.

Endwords

Defining inclusion is a thorny and controversial task which has occupied many commentators over the years (see, for example, Wilson, 2000; Thomas, 2000). It remains a complex, contested and confused concept and it is apparent that ‘establishing a shared understanding of inclusion is elusive’ (Pearson, 2001, p.146). As we have noted earlier, it is variously and often hazily defined by government publications in England - ‘inclusion can be many things’ (O’Hanlon, 2003, p.13).

Whilst policy, structure and culture might shape the broader social context in which teachers and teaching assistants operate, it is their personal interpretations and understandings, their day-to-day enactments, their agency which determines how the policy is formulated and re-formulated in practice, what it looks like on the ground.

… enacted policy reflects the implementation of policy aspirations but it also constitutes a continuing rearticulation and contestation of the meaning of policy as an expression of power, normalising views of how the world is , whilst at the same time marking the limits of power by the ambiguities of policy as practice. (Armstrong, 2005, p.145)

Derrick Armstrong’s analysis, here, corresponds with our own position in carrying out this study and asking teachers and teaching assistants to share their understandings, views and narratives. Underpinning our study is the belief that, methodologically, the study of the stories that people tell about aspects of their lives can generate fruitful insights not only in relation to the lives and topics being investigated, but also about the wider context in which those lives and topics are lived out. Thus, in this research, the personal views and stories told about inclusion inform us about the reality of inclusion on the ground and illuminate ‘the ambiguities of policy as practice’. There were frequently ‘ contradictory elements within their own thinking’ (Croll and Moses, 2000) , ambiguities inpractice, perhaps ; they expressed support for the principle of inclusion while, at the same time, qualifying this –  Yes But.

Paul Croll and Diana Moses (2000, p. 2) observe:

At one level, inclusion as an educational ideal has the ‘moral high ground’, but at the day-to-day level of the thinking that informs education policy its position is much less secure.

In our conversations with teachers and teaching assistants a tension was clearly evident between an educational ideal, perhaps, and the day-to-day living of inclusion; between an espousal of government rhetoric and their subjective experiences, their woven unique realities (Broadfoot, 2002); between systemic and personal elements in their perceptions and understandings of inclusion. Thus in the stories re-presented here the systemic elements, for example, of the organisation of special and mainstream schooling, transition between phases, withdrawal groups, curriculum and finance are apparent. The personal and human aspects of the day to day involvement with individual children – the six year old autistic twins, Sally’s son David, the excluded boy in year 2, Sean, Dan, Rachel and the boy with autism in Ruth’s class – however, reveal and illuminate the lived realities.  

References

Armstrong, D. (2005) Reinventing ‘inclusion’: New Labour and the cultural politics of special education Oxford Review of Education, 31 (1) 135–151

Avramidis, E., Bayliss, P. and Burden, R. (2002) Inclusion in action: an in-depth case study of an effective inclusive secondary school in the south-west of England International Journal of Inclusive Education, 6, 2, 143-163

Benjamin, S. (2002) The Micropolitics of Inclusive Education Buckingham, Open University Press

Bullough, R. (1998) Musings on life writings: Biography and case studies in teacher education in Kridel, C. (Ed) Writing Educational Biography New York, Garland

Broadfoot, P. (2002) Editorial Comparative Education 38(1) 5–6

Croll, P. and Moses, D. (2000) Ideologies and utopias: education professionals’ views of inclusion European Journal of Special Needs Education, 15(1) 1–12

CSIE (2002) Index for Inclusion (2 nd ed) Bristol, CSIE

Denzin, N. (2003) Performing (Auto)Ethnography: The Politics and Pedagogy of Culture Thousand Oaks, Sage

DfEE (1998) Meeting Special Educational Needs : A Programme of Action Sudbury, DfEE

DfES (2004) Removing Barriers to Achievement: The Government’s Strategy for SEN Annesley, Notts, DfES

OFSTED (2001) Evaluating Educational Inclusion Available at www.ofsted.gov.uk/publications HMI 235 e-publication

O’Hanlon, C. (2003) Educational Inclusion as Action Research Maidenhead, Open University Press

Pearson, S. (2001) Inclusion: A developmental perspective in O’Brien, T. (ed) Enabling Inclusion, Blue Skies … Dark Clouds? London, The Stationery Office

Thomas, G. (2000) Doing injustice to inclusion : a response to John Wilson European Journal of Special Needs Education, 15 (3), 307-310

Thomas, G. & Loxley, A. (2001) Deconstructing Special Education and Constructing Education Buckingham, Open University Press

Wilson, J. (2000) Doing justice to inclusion European Journal. of Special Needs Education, 15 (3), 297–304

Wolcott, Harry F. (2002) Sneaky Kid and Its Aftermath Oxford, Alta Vira Press, Rowman and Littlefield

home . about the conference . programme . registration . accommodation . contact