Introduction

The philosophy of inclusive education is based upon recognition of education as an inalienable human right. Yet the UK falls considerably short of delivering this right in practice to disabled children and children with learning difficulties.

Despite progress, in 2010 disabled children continued to face profound inequalities in relation to their access to, participation in and outcomes from our education system. The costs of this disadvantage to the individuals concerned, their families and to society as a whole are enormous.

In the 30 years since the Warnock Report initiated the drive towards inclusive education, a succession of Acts of Parliament and policy initiatives have sought to address the opportunities of disabled children and children with learning difficulties. Divorced from the pursuit of equality, however, this framework continues to fail to recognise and systematically address the structural causes of inequality and disadvantage both within and outside our education system. In this sense, the present special educational needs (SEN) system might be viewed as an extremely expensive and often futile effort to ameliorate the effects of this failure. Such a view appears to be supported by Ofsted, which in its Special Educational Needs and Disability Review (2010) concluded that ‘as many as half of all pupils identified for SEN School Action would not be identified as having special educational needs if schools focused on improving teaching and learning for all, with individual goals for improvement’.

Our approach to the education of disabled children has failed to keep step with wider developments concerning disability rights. In the fields of employment and public services, real efforts are being made to reconcile social and economic welfare with civil and political rights, with increasing emphasis on removing barriers, promoting individual autonomy and supporting full participation. Yet in relation to the most formative years of disabled people's lives, at school, we remain doggedly stuck to an outmoded social welfare model – meeting ‘special needs’, which are considered to be born out of individual ‘deficits’. In the meantime, the philosophy of inclusion has become a tarnished and contested ‘political football’, which has arguably reached the limits of its usefulness as a political and practical force for change.