Instead of inclusion

It’s the first day of school at Centre Academy, a school for children with dyslexia, ADHD and other learning problems. We’re having a school meeting, and I’m talking with all 70 of our students (ages seven to 18) about plans for the year. First the Lower School, then the Middle School, and finally, the Upper School … “And for those of you who are planning on going to university,” I conclude, “please see me soon. There’s lots of work to do.”

Ten minutes later. A knock on my door. Enter Tom, 15, a new student. He wonders if we can talk. We can. He is puzzled by my reference to university. “I can’t go to university.” Why not, I want to know. He’s incredulous. Then, haltingly, “because … I’m too stupid.”

Experience has on occasion made me somewhat hard-bitten, but in this instance, I really want to cry. What, I wonder, has it taken to make this boy arrive at this conclusion? Why does a 15-year-old decide that it’s time to give up?

Sadly, I know the answer. Tom’s ADHD had been diagnosed years ago and his learning difficulties were allegedly addressed through the government’s policy of inclusion. Formulated by Baroness Warnock in the late 1970s, inclusion was a hybrid of democracy and idealism run rampant: children with learning difficulties happily learning alongside children without problems, in mainstream schools that would provide “support” to those who needed it.

The result: children like Tom, who sat in classes of 30 students led by well-meaning teachers. But they had little, if any, experience with special needs and even less knowledge. On the rare occasion when specialist support was available, Tom was taken out of class. He might as well have had a neon sign around his head proclaiming ‘I’M DIFFERENT’. In such a setting, ‘different’ too frequently equated with ‘inferior’ and eventually, ‘stupid’ – not only in the eyes of his peers but also in his own.

He was wrong. In fact, Tom completed the programme at Centre Academy and is today a university student. He is doing very well.

How did this come about? As you’ll imagine, Tom had much to do with it, as did the school. We’ll get to that later. But the parents were the major initial factor. Seeing their son’s needs not being met in a mainstream setting, increasingly concerned by his lack of confidence and other by-products of Inclusion, they had arrived in my office a few months previously. “We feel so alone,” Tom’s mother confided. Fortunately their sense of desperation had generated research, and they had eventually discovered Centre Academy.

What they found at Centre Academy was, I am sure, much the same as would have been evident at most other special needs schools – an entirely different environment for learning: classes of five or six, significant amounts of one-to-one instruction, a subject-specific staff highly experienced and knowledgeable with regard to learning difficulties, reading specialists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and exceptionally supportive and nurturing counsellors. Perhaps most importantly, they found a school ethos that reflects the professional conviction that special needs children have definite talents and abilities; many are exceptionally bright with an array of academic and vocational possibilities waiting to be discovered.

For his part, Tom discovered that he was now in an environment that he could manage. After some testing and observations in class, he was given an Individual Education Plan (IEP) that, for the school, was a working document, not an art form sacrosanct until the next annual review. A recommendation for two hours per week of speech & language therapy or three hours of reading help meant not only that he should get such assistance but that he definitely would. The IEP was, in effect, our contract with Tom. And it was reviewed all the time and amended accordingly.

More discoveries: Tom soon found that he was comfortable here. Our specialists were teaching him coping skills by which he could control his impulsivity and other difficulties. His Mentor, a highly experienced teacher specially chosen for him, taught him ways to overcome his difficulties with note-taking and organisation; the mentoring group was the stage by which he learned some fundamental socialisation skills. And all the while his subject teachers required that he be an active learner. Tom found that no one here is anonymous; you can’t hide in a class of five or six. And he began to take pride in the success he was experiencing.

He was also helped by what experience had taught us. Homework diaries, for example, are a great thing, but students have a tendency to misplace, lose or forget them. So we email homework, just in case. Similarly, we find that introducing our children to subjects as diverse as theatre on the one hand and science on the other is fine, but their intellectual understanding and their social expertise profit from trips to theatres, museums and the like that abound on our doorstep in London. Most importantly, Tom revelled in not feeling different. The sense of the inferior was replaced by a sense of worth. I saw this first hand when a schools inspector asked him how the students at Centre Academy approached learning. “We just get on with it,” he said.Sometimes, such officials seem bewildered when I explain the success that our children have as they return to mainstream education or move on to colleges. It is most apparent when I note – admittedly, with some pride – that we have never had one of our graduates fail to gain admission to university. Better, I should think, that they are bewildered by the longevity of Inclusion. Although Baroness Warnock recently admitted that it has proven to be ‘a disaster’, the government continues to close special needs schools – over 90, at last count.

Some years ago, the government’s determination to play ‘Myopia’ to Baroness Warnock’s ‘Pollyanna’ resulted in policies that were inadvertently antithetical to the interests of special needs children. This, I suspect, would have continued had not the parents increasingly registered their concerns and complaints, and the effectiveness of these collective outcries was, indeed, underscored by Baroness Warnock’s disavowal of Inclusion.

Nevertheless, myopia and, indeed, irony continue to prevail. At the recent plenary session of the G-8 in Russia, for example, I sat listening to speaker after speaker extol the virtues of inclusion. You may imagine the reaction when I presented a thesis that in effect asserted that ‘Inclusion leads to Exclusion.’ Ironically, a few months later, I received tacit support from the British Government’s former Education Secretary who, when one of her children was diagnosed as having special needs, promptly withdrew him from a school that was was wedded to a policy of inclusion and placed him in a special needs school.

Against this backdrop, a critic of contemporary affairs recently noted that in our highly impersonal and material world, ‘there are no more heroes’. He is wrong. At Centre Academy, I have 70 children, and what they are doing – essentially reclaiming their futures – is, indeed, heroic. But perhaps the most important heroes are their parents, for it is their determination and hard work and willingness to persevere that eventually enables them to find schools that can address the needs of their children.

Dr Duncan Rollo is Head of Centre Academy, London, which helps students with specific learning difficulties reclaim their futures.