Introduction

This chapter considers the assumptions and implications of policy developments in multi-agency working over at least the last 40 years for the support of children and young people with disabilities. We look at four policy strands: that of post-Warnock statutory SEN assessment, inclusive education, the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda and the era of Education, Health and Care plans. Our focus is on education, and although the actual policies referred to would vary in other contexts, the overall argument will, we claim, apply to all. For most of the last four decades there has been a constantly renewed call to improve multi-agency working and, more recently, far-reaching structural changes to integrate services. However, it is questionable whether this has been for the benefit of children and young people with disabilities. Additionally, in the last decade, as multi-agency working has become more of a taken for granted, the trend of considering how to improve processes has diminished. We make the case that problems in multi-agency working have been repeatedly conceptualised in ways that do not tell the whole story and therefore do not make it easy for improvements to happen.

Multi-agency working has been understood in terms of ‘what works’, looking at systems and communication, rather than in terms of the complex politics around professional roles and relationships. The perspectives of parents and young people on how services should work with them has been ignored or ineffectively included.

The rise of ‘unofficial’ exclusions

Formal exclusion is a preventative or punitive sanction whereby a child or young person is removed from an educational setting for reasons connected to misbehaviour or rule breaking. Headteachers in England can lawfully suspend a pupil from school for a fixed period and, in extreme instances, remove them from the school altogether via a permanent exclusion.

Excluded children and young people are often the most vulnerable children and young people. They are twice as likely to be in the care of the state, four times more likely to have grown up in poverty, seven times more likely to have special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and ten times more likely to have recognised mental health problems (Gill, 2017).

Pupils with SEND account for a disproportionate number of suspensions and permanent exclusions. Official data show that rates for both types of exclusion have returned to pre-pandemic levels, with suspension rates around four times greater, and permanent exclusions about five times greater, for pupils with SEND, compared with those without SEND (DfE, 2024a). Separate data indicate exclusions for autistic pupils alone increased by 59 per cent between 2011 and 2016, compared with an overall exclusion rate of 4 per cent over the same period (Ambitious About Autism, 2018).

Schools cannot use formal exclusion procedures to remove pupils for reasons unrelated to breaches of behaviour. Yet in recent years, England has seen the emergence of a shadow system of unofficial exclusion. These

One of the few things that everyone in the education world agrees on is that the special educational needs and disabilities system is broken. Parents are deeply frustrated at having to fight for their children to have access to necessary resources.

Mainstream schools feel unable to provide the support they know pupils need, due to a lack of funding. Special schools are in an even tougher financial position. Many local authorities have been plunged into debt they have no route to paying off, which risks the financial health of the whole council.

Central government knows this situation is unsustainable. Gillian Keegan, the last Conservative education secretary, called it a ‘lose, lose, lose’ system. Her new Labour replacement, Bridget Phillipson, has firmly agreed with this assessment. But solutions are not obvious, or at least not affordable ones, given the straightened times.

It feels like a lot of important questions – many of which are highlighted in this valuable guide – have been ignored for a long time. Not least, why have we seen such a substantial rise in the number of young people with certain conditions, that has driven huge year-on-year cost increases. This applies to conditions like autism and ADHD but also broader behavioural challenges, and mental illnesses like anxiety and depression.

There has been a remarkable lack of curiosity about these trends among policymakers, perhaps because there are no easy or obvious answers. But without halting, and ideally reversing these trends, or at least applying different approaches to managing them, it is hard to see how any government can get a grip. They tie into a wider array of problems affecting the most vulnerable young people, including rising poverty and an increase in instances of abusive or neglectful parenting.

Introduction

The past 30 years have seen significant progress with regard to the inclusion of disabled students in higher education. Part 4 of the Disability Discrimination Act, passed in 1995, was amended by the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001, which inserted new provisions with regard to the duties of schools and other educational establishments to disabled students. The Disability Discrimination Act was subsequently incorporated into the Equality Act 2010. Since 2001, universities have been obliged to avoid discrimination against disabled students by making reasonable adjustments and avoiding less favourable treatment. From this point, disabled students had enforceable rights to reasonable levels of support, rather than being dependent on the goodwill of staff and students. As we discuss below, participation rates of disabled students in higher education have improved rapidly and this group now make up around 15 per cent of all UK higher education students, and 17.5 per cent of first year, full-time, first degree students (HESA, 2022). Nonetheless, many problems remain, including unequal rates of participation by students with different types of impairment; higher drop-out rates and poorer degree outcomes for some groups; difficulties in accessing support; and challenges relating to social and academic inclusion. As reported in earlier research (Riddell et al, 2005a; Fuller et al, 2009; Hector, 2020), once admitted to a particular course at college or university, disabled students still have to engage in a daily struggle to access buildings, course materials and examinations. Developing friendships, building wider social networks and negotiating identity may also prove hugely challenging.

When the Children and Families Act was published in 2014 it was described as the biggest reform to child welfare legislation in 30 years. It set a strong vision for a system which put children and families at the centre and was built on joined up services which focused on delivering the best outcomes. There is no doubt that was its intent. So how did we lose this?

Partly those joined up services changed, the reorganisation of health services and schools had a fundamental impact on structure and accountability, local authorities also entered a period of austerity and then there was a pandemic.

One of the unintended impacts of the changing education system was the creation of a hostile environment for children and young people with SEND. The previous government’s focus on narrow attainment measures reinforced by an attendance and behaviour approach which did not recognise an increasing number of children and young people struggling to find a confident and secure environment at school, led to a system where children who could not conform where increasingly excluded.

The SEND system also acquired its own identity and bureaucracy, leading to an ‘othering’ of children with SEND, a view that there were children, and then a separate category of SEND children, where the same understanding of valuing childhood and achievement did not apply. If we add to this the fundamental impact of the pandemic on young people and the broader understanding of the impact of autism on girls and young women, and the rising prevalence of mental health needs, a system which needed greater flexibility became increasingly inflexible.

In 2008, Miller, Cobb and Simpson wrote about the issues between assessment and attainment for children and young people who are deaf, have vision impairment (VI) or multi-sensory impairment (MSI). They examined the implications of an assessment system in England which effectively pulls in two directions.

While much remains challenging in the current system of assessment and attainment for children and young people with sensory impairment (SI), in 2023, what they achieve academically, one could argue, only gives us a small insight into their experiences in education.

This update will examine previous assertions made by Miller, Cobb and Simpson, including original extracts, in relation to the current situation. Additionally, we take a broader contextual look at education policy and changes and a glimpse at the holistic education experience for children and young people with SI.

Original chapter extracts

The following extract is taken from Chapter 8 in the first edition of this book, by Olga Miller, Rory Cobb and Paul Simpson.

Introduction

The needs based special education framework established after the Warnock Report has endured for over 40 years, despite its progenitor more than once calling for its abolition (Warnock, 1978, 1993: xi, 2005; Education Act, 1981). A limited extension of a disability rights-based approach to special education was introduced through the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (2001), followed by an extension of its measures in the revised Disability Discrimination Act (2005) and the Equality Act (2010) which unified discrimination legislation and extended protections to individual disabled children.

Following the reforms in the Children and Families Act 2014, the Code of Practice 2015 (DfE/DoH, 2015) attempted to integrate the rights provisions within the overall special educational needs (SEN) framework, but in practice the rights framework has played an ancillary role to the dominant Warnock framework. Essentially both legal frameworks seek to remove barriers to learning (DfE/DoH 2015: 1.33) but operate on entirely different principles and apply to overlapping but not coterminous groups of children and young people. The Warnock framework seeks to identify SEN needs and the Equality Act framework to prevent discrimination. The failure to address the discontinuities between the two legislative strands within the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) framework undermines the aims of the reforms and is a barrier to equitable provision.

Introduction

The human rights agenda, broadly defined, promotes health and wellbeing by upholding ‘opportunity and choice, freedom of speech, respect for individuality and an acceptance of difference in all spheres of life’ (Armstrong and Barton, 1999: 211). For disabled people, the realisation of these aspirations is an inclusive society, where the economic, political, ideological, social and cultural barriers that underpin inequality and discrimination are dismantled. The purpose of this chapter is to assess the historical development of education for disabled children against the human rights yardstick, focusing on Britain between the late 18th century and the early 1980s. Three main themes will be pursued: the inability of legal entitlements to replace segregated with inclusive schooling; the contribution of the professions to this failure; and the threat to human rights posed by schooling that compromised participation in family, community and employment. The chapter will conclude by locating education within a broader framework of social exclusion that encompasses cultural representation as well as public policy.

From segregation to inclusion?

Charitable origins

Segregated education for disabled children dates back to the early modern period when dedicated institutions emerged from private tuition. Sensory impairments – judged to be particularly pernicious because they denied full access to the word of God – were the initial category of disability to attract attention. Thus, the first ‘special’ school – opened in Edinburgh in 1764 – was for deaf pupils.

Over a decade ago, and after nearly 30 years of policy changes and legislative reform, we sought to take stock of progress in the provision of effective education for disabled children and young people and for those otherwise defined as having special educational needs (SEN). We brought together leading thinkers from a range of perspectives in the field and asked them to consider ongoing challenges and opportunities in a series of chapters for our book, Education, Disability and Social Policy.

This revised and updated second edition considers progress and revisits those challenges and opportunities, as well as new ones that have arisen since then. We have returned to some of the original authors to consider developments on the topics they covered in their chapters, and have also included several new voices to consider other themes that were not as visible to us, or which have surfaced since the first edition; such as school exclusion, the intersection of SEN with race and racism, and the increasing prevalence and understanding of the social, emotional and mental health needs of young people, which has driven much of the increase in demand for support.

While we were writing the introduction to the first edition in 2010, a general election resulted in a change in government. After 13 years in power, Labour were defeated and replaced with a Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition. In turn, this resulted in a new approach to SEN policy which sought to combine disconnected twin manifesto commitments of meeting the needs of every child and ending the supposed ‘bias towards inclusion’.

One of the key ‘areas of need’ identified in the 2001 Special Educational Needs Code of Practice1 was ‘behaviour, emotional and social development’ (hereafter BESD), which was operationalised as follows: ‘Children and young people who demonstrate features of emotional and behavioural difficulties, who are withdrawn or isolated, disruptive and disturbing, hyperactive and lack concentration; those with immature social skills; and those presenting challenging behaviours arising from other complex special needs’ (p 87).

This was replaced in the 2015 Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice2 with some subtle but important differences in wording. The area of need was now worded as ‘Social, emotional and mental health difficulties’ (hereafter SEMH), and operationalised as follows:

Of particular note is the way in which ‘mental health’ has been headlined as a core part of one primary area of need within the 2015 code of practice, whereas in 2001 those words only appeared in the context of noting the potential link between special educational needs and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

I start from thinking that every school should be barrier-free for all, and every child is special and should get their needs met. That way, disabled kids would be the same as everyone else, and there would be no ‘special needs’ stigma talk. But I recognise that this utopian answer is some way off.

In the meantime, we need to concentrate resources on some schools, and develop expertise to work with disabled children, so that we can enable them to develop and grow, as we expect with all our children. I do not think that it is about young people with disabilities having the same outcomes as everyone else, because that will not be possible for all. But everyone develops and grows, so the gap I am interested in is between where they are now, and where they will be in five years’ time, with all the educational input they will have received.

Let me say something about disability. I think that disability is complex: people are disabled by social barriers and oppression, and also by bodies and minds which work in different ways, or not as well as the average. I think embodiment is a challenge for everyone, although this is usually only evident by mid-life, when everyone realises that they have special needs for some sort of repair or other. I want us to see our commonalities. As a group of young disabled people said to me more than 30 years ago: they are just like young people without disabilities.

I want everyone, particularly children and young people, to feel okay about having bodies or minds that work differently.

As we thought about, debated, drafted and finalised the second edition of Education, Disability and Social Policy we found ourselves at the start of another significant political transition, with potentially major policy consequences.

The change of government to a Labour administration has brought with it a new manifesto commitment:

This commitment is made against a backdrop of severe financial strain and ‘utter disarray’ in the system in England to support children with special educational needs (SEN), as reported by the Local Government Ombudsman. A report for the Local Government Association revealed that resourcing the requirements of Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans has led to cumulative deficits in local authorities in England which at the time of writing stand at £3.2 billion and are projected to rise to £5 billion by 2026.2 Meanwhile, the same report finds that in 2022/23, only 8 per cent of children and young people with EHC plans achieved the expected level in reading, writing and mathematics, a figure that has remained unchanged from 2016/17. If nothing else, this stagnation indicates a pressing need for a renewed focus on educational outcomes for students with SEN.

Introduction

In the autumn of 2020, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) premiered Small Axe, a British anthology film series created and directed by Steve McQueen. The anthology focuses on the lives of West Indian (henceforth, Black or Black British)1 immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s. One of the films in the anthology, Education, is based on actual events of the 1970s, when some London councils followed an unofficial policy of transferring a disproportionate number of Black British children from mainstream education to schools for those then called ‘educationally subnormal’.2 The practice was exposed by Bernard Coard's 1971 pamphlet How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System. The pamphlet explains that teachers and educationalists in British schools had a pervasive bias toward white children as inherently good and ‘normal’. Instead, ‘[t] he [Black] children are made neurotic about their race and culture. Some become behaviour problems as a result. They become resentful and bitter at being told their language is second-rate, and their history and culture is non-existent; that they hardly exist at all except by the grace of whites’ (2021: 32).

Coard's argument has been widely cited as a summary of the role of institutional racism in the intersection between race and ability in England (Gillborn, 2015; Rollock et al, 2015; Gillborn et al, 2016). His pamphlet exposed what many had been trying to disguise: from the early eugenicists and the origins of IQ testing, racism has been implicated in the history of education in England (Gillborn, 2008).