Thank you very much. I'm a bit worried because I have to remember to say
next slide please. So if I get lost in this, that's why.
It's been really lovely to listen to you and I'm looking forward
to hearing all the other speakers as well. Next slide please.
Just my contact details in case you want them.
So I'm just going to tell you, what I'm going to tell you.
I'm going to talk about the House of Commons Education Committee report that came out recently
and I'm going to be asking were the reforms as the report said,
the right ones for disabled children, and I also want to think a little bit
about how rights are understood in the SEN system
and then I want to think about resistance and how we might imagine otherwise,
so drawing on the Portman's kind of let's think about this in a different way
and so suggest that the arts is a brilliant space to do that,
and then just say a little bit about utopias. Next slide please.
So, as many of you will be aware, oh I should have said,
I will say all the words on the slides and I'll describe any of the pictures
that are necessary for meaning, so there's a picture of the report on the slide.
On the 16th of October the House of Commons Education Committee
published its report on special educational needs and disabilities.
Now this is an important record of the failings of the current system.
It documents the lack of accountability in the system and the lack of rigorous inspection.
It highlights the need for oversight as it describes the Department for Education
as having serenely provided over chaos for the last five years.
I was interested to hear in the beginning, people talking about school or nursery
getting outstanding status and I think that is clear that that can't be happening
or shouldn't be happening when schools are not inclusive schools or settings.
So the report details the treacle of bureaucracy that parents wade through that we've heard about already
and the burden put on parents shoulders and forgive me, but note the gender-neutral term
erasing the work that primarily mothers of disabled children do to fight for their children's education.
So local authorities it says are ignoring the law.
There's still not enough employment and training opportunities for young people post-16.
Health and social care is still not working.
The local offer which is supposed to document the support in your local authority
is described as useless. And the Department for Education stands accused
of adopting a sticking plaster approach to reforming the system.
So this report concludes that a generation of children are being let down.
You don't need me to tell you that this report is pretty grim,
and I was pleased to see that the committee were documenting
what was happening for children and families
and I think that some of the recommendations in the report, if implemented
could make a positive change in children's lives.
But, and this for me is a big but...
I think that both the SEND reforms and the committee's report are fundamentally flawed.
Sadly I don't think either have the potential to enable the kind of radical change
that is needed to change the lives of children and young people
categorised as having special educational needs and disabilities.
So let me try and explain why. Next slide please.
So the report boldly states, the SEND reforms were the right ones, and I disagree.
Now there's an interesting question here about who does or doesn't
have the authority to say what's right or wrong in policy terms
and I think it's important to be open and say that I was invited here I think
because I'm a professor of education at the University of Sheffield
but I'm also the mother of a son who's now 23
and he's been through the SEN system and so my arguments are very much shaped by
both those experiences. So I'm going to explain why I disagree
that these were the right reforms and think about two questions that are
sort of hidden in the title of my talk and they were:
Were the reforms the right reforms for labeled children? and
How are disabled children's rights understood in the context of special education?
So it seems to me that the answer to the first question, were these the right reforms,
is just a flat no. Of course I agree with the committee that there's been a failure to implement
the reforms and there's a need for greater accountability and oversight.
But there are fundamental issues
not addressed by the reforms or by the committee's report.
So the first for me is the failure to address what
inclusion means in schools and how this is experienced by children.
The legislation assumes that there's a shared understanding of what
inclusive education could and should look like and we just
don't have that. We still have inclusion units in
mainstream schools that in some cases just effectively
separate students labelled with special educational needs from other children.
We still have children sitting in corridors with their teaching assistants
while the rest of the class work in the classroom with a teacher.
We still have seclusion rooms or booths where children sit for weeks or even months on end
in so-called inclusive schools.
The number of children who are home educated with SEND has risen massively
and i'm not talking about people who make an ideological choice to educate their children at home,
but parents who just feel that the system isn't working for their children and withdraw them.
So we can't take it for granted that we all agree what inclusion is
and we need a conversation about that.
Linked to this problem of understanding what inclusion is
we also have to pay attention to what's described as a marketised system of education
and how this, I think, negatively impacts on all children
and disproportionately on disabled children.
So we all know that schools and teachers are measured against performance targets
and good schools attract more money and more funding.
Schools need to do well by children to thrive.
Unfortunately, doing well by their children is framed in very narrow terms
and fails to catch the achievements of children who are not traditionally academic
and in the marketised system children with SEND become the problem.
They are thought of as threatening the school's ability to do well in the league tables
and reducing their ability to recruit. And reducing the school's income further.
Some schools, and we all know this, do their best to deter disabled students.
we've all heard stories about parents being told that the school down the road is better for children like yours.
An inclusive policy becomes unsustainable in a marketised system
in which children with additional learning needs of any kind
any kind that demand additional resources becomes problem.
And right at the heart of all of this is a failure to address the language
of education for disabled children. Next slide please.
So SEN is still defined by an individual child's difficulties and within child deficits.
So if sadly like me you know the legislation because you've been fighting
you might know this quote. But a child of compulsory school age or a person has a learning
difficulty or disability if he or she has a significantly greater difficulty
in learning than the majority of others of the same age
or has a disability which prevents or hinders him or her
from making use of facilities of a kind generally provided
for others of the same age in mainstream schools or post-16 institutions.
Next slide please. Now you might wonder given the grim account of the
education system I started with why I want to focus on language.
Well, it's clear to me through my research and my personal experience that the language
that we use matters. So for example that seemingly everyday phrase
a child with special educational needs, suggests that special educational needs and disabilities
is something that a child has. But describing a young person or
a student as a young person with special educational needs
isn't just a description of what somebody has.
The category of SEND is only and always given to a child in a particular context.
That's why people talk about removing the barriers to children's learning.
Different environments create or prevent children's learning and participation.
The current language of policy is deeply problematic because it always
positions the child with SEND as the potential problem in the education system,
not what's going on around them, they're positioned as the problem.
The policy is underpinned by a deficit model of disabled children
and this has haunted their lives since the Warnock Report 40 years ago.
In the current language of policy children with SEND are effectively described as being
not quite like other children and this is a really risky position to be in.
As we've recently seen in the media a headline now amended after complaints
suggested that the special needs, note the absence of the word children here,
we're diverting resources away from other pupils.
The headline seemed at best to forget or at worst not to believe
that children with special needs are actually children and pupils too.
And it reminded me of when my children were little
and at my son's school I regularly heard teaching assistants talking about
taking the special needs out. And one day my daughter
had a friend home for tea and she asked me as she got out of the car,
Is your son a special need? No, I said, he's a boy.
I expect many of you have got similar stories to tell.
So the SEND reforms were not the right reforms, because they
failed to address the question of inclusion, the problem of the marketised system,
and the language which sorts and separates children into the category of 'not quite like us'
and ultimately, not quite a child. So let me move to my second question.
How are rights understood in the context of SEND?
And so here I want to return to what I wrote
in the in the lovely book that you all have on your chairs
and just read a little bit from that.
If I tell you that I need a chocolate biscuit,
you can tell me I don't have a right to it
and you can choose whether or not you give me that biscuit.
Similarly, if we describe some children as having special educational needs, not rights,
then there is a sense that meeting that need is optional. If we agree that non-disabled children
have a right to their education, then so should disabled children,
regardless of whether or not some or all of that education is labeled as special.
Education is a right for all. Education is not a chocolate biscuit.
Now I realize I actually should have said education isn't champagne because
sometimes when I give this talk, people get out chocolate biscuits.
so maybe I should have set the bar a bit higher and said it wasn't champagne.
But I hope you get the point. So we use the language of need in
education every day without paying any attention to the fact
that some children have needs while other children have rights.
Now i'm not claiming that disabled children are the only children who've
been excluded. I recognise that disability intersects
with other forms of marginalisation including racism,
sexism and poverty. And yet despite a growing number of
international and domestic human rights conventions and charters
progress in securing inclusion and full citizenship for disabled people
has been limited. A host of statistics remind us of the marginalisation of
disabled children in education and beyond.
Children with SEND are seven times more likely to be excluded from school than
non-disabled children. They're more likely to spend time in
isolation, more likely to experience restraint and medication
and some are incarcerated from institutions away from home.
And we saw almost daily news stories that reveal
disabled children's rightlessness and their exclusions from communities.
And we know from the learning from death's mortality review
that children with learning disabilities life expectancies
is 20 to 30 years less than their non-disabled peers.
We need to call out the language shift that makes education a right for some
and need for others. Next slide please.
So I've talked, and there's no denying it, things are pretty grim
but I honestly don't believe that things are hopeless
and I do believe that things could be different.
And so I want to spend some time thinking about how things could be different.
And so I'm going to go back to 1959 and the American sociologist C. Wright Mills who coined the term,
sociological imagination. What Wright Mills encourages us to do is
to step back from a situation and look at it again. And to understand
what we're experiencing as individuals as part of the wider picture.
So in this way we can step back, or try to step back, it's really hard to step back
when you're in the middle of a fight over your kid's education.
But try to step back from that and think about
how the system is the thing that's producing children is the problem.
So we're all experiencing those problems day to day, but it's the system
that's making those things happen. And then once we've kind of tried to
recognise that, we have to step away and think,
okay, how how could it be if we try to imagine a system
where no child is produced as a problem in education?
Next slide please.
So there's a picture here of a mask and it
it says at the side, get married, have kids, work at apple hq,
dream big be brave and courageous, is the other word.
This was from a workshop that we did with young people
as part of a project that we're involved with at the university
and what we wanted them to do I guess as well was imagine things otherwise.
But, imagining things could be different,
is often a difficult thing to do especially I think when you're
bogged down in the day-to-day of you know running a home getting the kids to school.
And this is where I think that the arts can help us.
I think they have a vital role to play
because engaging with the arts means engaging with the imagination
and the arts can be made open and accessible to everyone
and that's why we're keen to work with artists in the research project with
disabled young people. And I think the arts can be political
with a big or a small p and the arts can help us to see
injustice and address power imbalances.
So, I'm really interested from learning from everyone here
about how engaging in the arts might spark ideas about different possibilities
for children in education and in their wider communities and through
the families too. So engaging the arts can build connections and
much needed collective strength and solidarity
when times feel tough for us all. And so I hope we're going to be able to see later
and that we can start to imagine better
worlds or even perhaps utopias for all our children.
Thank you very much.
you