Should schools be judged on how inclusive they are?
Only is we understand what inclusion really means, and why we can't have it all.
Ofsted will consider if it could assess how inclusive a school is as part of inspections, school leaders have been told.
Lee Owston, the watchdog’s national director of education, told the Schools North East Academies Conference that “some schools were more inclusive than others” and questioned whether this was right.
He added that schools performance in this area was something Ofsted’s bosses would be looking at as it considers future inspection changes.
Meanwhile, Labour’s shadow schools minister, Catherine McKinnell, told the same conference that if elected, the party would ensure that Ofsted’s school inspection framework promoted inclusivity in mainstream schools.
This is a debate that burns in education. What does it mean to be inclusive? When should we exclude? Some unserious people, driven mad by their activism, believe we should never exclude. But these people usually have not, or do not teach in a school where behaviour is challenging. Or they have no experience of schools since they studied in one. Not to exclude when necessary is a safeguarding disaster. Students cannot be forced to endure spaces with, for example, their abusers, or exposed to students who deal drugs or bring in knives. Exclusion must be done only when necessary, but when necessary, done.
What is inclusion though? That’s the pivot around which this all revolves. When I started teaching in 2003, I was amazed that classrooms often contained students so badly behaved, or with learning needs so pronounced, that I knew I could never provide for them adequately. What should I do, I wondered, with a student who doesn’t speak English, but has no interpreter in the class? With a pupil who frequently assaulted or insulted teachers? With a student in a GCSE class with a reading age of seven? More, why were such pupils packed into the same classroom as everyone else? Why weren’t some taught in small nurture groups? Why weren’t some in specialist provision? Why weren’t some suspended, or in rare, instances, excluded? Inclusion, I was told. And that was seen as the end of the debate, like a magic word. Because who could ever be against inclusion? Who would dare dispute it?
Inclusion was treated Very Seriously. I received several lectures and tutorials on it when training. Every lesson plan I made had to include awareness of inclusion issues. Differentiation was supposed to be the catalyst to this magic process; if I planned the right lesson, it seemed, everyone would be caught in the gravity of the lesson. This was a complete lie. Inclusion alone wasn't the answer to these issues.
Plato spoke about Noble Lies- untruths that were useful, like the belief in Gods, which he claimed kept people moral even if they didn't exist. Inclusion-no-matter-what was and is an attempt to generate a contemporary Noble Lie, only instead of conjuring goodness through the threat of divine retribution, we imagine that wishing for inclusiveness creates it.
But it doesn’t. Instead, inclusion, handled in the most knuckle-headed manner, can create an environment where everyone loses: children with special needs don’t get the support they need- instead having to cope in classrooms for which many are not ready- and the mainstream class has to suffer due to the disproportionate focus that challenging or very needy students require. And somewhere under this enormous pyramid of toil and chaos, is the teacher, unable to meet the needs of his class, harrowed by failure. Inclusion-at-all-costs creates environments that are less inclusive. Classes that are safe, chaotic, undignified, are less inclusive, especially for children with the greatest needs. No child flourishes in chaos. Everyone needs safety, calm and dignity- especially those who are most disadvantaged or vulnerable.
Redefining Inclusion
1. Inclusion doesn’t mean ‘in the class with everyone else.’ This is inclusion at its most witless and destructive. It is also the default definition in many, many mainstream schools: you’re included if you’re geographically present. You might as well say that the waiters at Buckingham Palace are guests at the garden party.
2. But all this does is to create pressure-cooker classrooms where the few drain the attention of the one, to the detriment of the many or the all. The teacher is scraped thin as butter on toast and lessons are carpet-bombed. Learning over.
3. Inclusion, like any value, cannot be the only good we seek. It must be balanced with other values, such as the rights of the class, the teacher to a safe and calm environment, and the learning of all children. If every child matters then every child matters.
4. For some children that can be achieved in the mainstream classroom; modifications that can be done with relative ease: task that differentiate for different abilities; seating plans that accommodate children with hearing issues etc, reasonable accommodations in lessons, pedagogy, boundaries, consequences etc.
5. For some children, inclusion needs to mean special provision. Overwhelmingly, this means smaller groups, separate classrooms and specially trained staff. That way they can get the attention they require without dominating the classroom.
6. Staff trained in a meaningful way. I feel especially sorry for teaching assistants. Often they are the least trained, the worst paid and the least valued members of staff, and yet the demands on them are Herculean. ‘Work a miracle with this pupil’ they are told, without being told how. Children with special needs don’t just need a warm body nagging them, or writing out their answers; they need specialist educators, trained in specific areas: EAL; Autism; reading strategies; extreme spectrum behaviour. And they need subject knowledge too, to teach meaningful content. I know many TAs who do a fantastic job. But there are some TAs who want to add value to their child’s experience, but don’t know how because they haven’t been trained to the level they both need.
7. For inclusion to be meaningful, we also need to exclude meaningfully. Good internal inclusion units are a joy: a school within a school, a Russian Doll of focus and care. Some are holding patterns; three goes on the rollercoaster and the pupils are dropped back into the circus. Inclusion spaces in a school are not a penalty; they are a strategy to prevent exclusion. We need a lot more of them.
8. And we need to exclude externally when necessary. As a last resort, when we have tried everything else. But schools are not perfect utopias where we can get everything we want. I wish more people in education are aware of the concept of trade-offs, and opportunity costs. Often we need to accept the best of all possible worlds rather than always trying to have it all. Sometimes a student exhausts our capacity to meet their demands. And if we have sincerely tried it all, then exclusion is sometimes the only option left, for the good of the community.
It can also be a way for children to obtain the provision they need, by relocation to specialist provision. Pupil referral units and alternative provision are not borstals; to send a child to one is not a failure. Often these are the best places for a child to have their needs met. The best ones are places of joy. They change and save lives. We need to overcome a feeling that they are shameful. They are intensive care for children who need it the most.
Some schools need to exclude more than others because they face far higher demands than others. The demographic of their intake is exposed to far greater factors of challenge, like socio-economic circumstances. We should not penalise these schools for having to deal with these circumstances. We don’t criticise a hospital for having a higher casualty rate than a theatre next door, because their circumstances are different.
And we don’t criticise a school just because they have a higher than average rate of exclusion; to do so is a profound misunderstand of what averages are, or what they mean. The only correct lens to evaluate a school’s exclusion rate is ‘was the exclusion necessary?’ If the answer for each individual one is ‘yes’ then the sum total is justified. If the school has done everything it can to avoid the exclusion, then the exclusion is a fair one.
And some schools have higher standards than others, while others permit more misbehaviour.
Some attempt to never exclude, and instead retain students who terrorise others, all in the name of being inclusive. But all this does is sacrifice the good of many children for the sake of a very few. But the class’s safety, learning and dignity is not the life support for a child who expresses themselves chaotically or dangerously. Children are not therapy for other children. All children matter.
So we have to be very wary of applying inclusivity bluntly. It is an admirable principle, in principle. In practice, it need to be practical.