Product Description

This highly topical book suggests that distinctions should be made between kinds of special need, and the possibility addressed that some SEN children might be happier and more effective as learners within non-mainstream settings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256054 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From the Back Cover

Included or Excluded?

The challenge of the mainstream for some SEN children

Ruth Cigman

Should all children be included in the same schools? Or should some be ‘excluded’, or at least offered separate provision so that their needs may be more successfully met elsewhere? ‘Excluded’ is an emotive term. In the context of education, what does it mean?

In 2005 the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain published a pamphlet by Baroness Warnock that expressed serious concerns about the effects of her report on special education, published almost thirty years earlier. Not least of these was the suffering of certain children in mainstream schools, who had nowhere else to go since the closure of special schools in their area. Baroness Warnock’s concerns raised a storm with the press and with many educationalists and disability groups.

Included or Excluded? provides a considered response to that over-heated debate. It is a forum in which conflicting arguments may be heard and reflected upon independently of media hysteria. It does not pretend that the inclusion debate is solely an intellectual one. Some of the chapters are by teachers or parents of children with special needs, or by people who have such needs themselves. Some are by educationalists, psychologists, lawyers, philosophers.

The lives of children are at stake, and this book is for anyone who cares about young people and the society we are creating for their future.

About the Author

Dr Ruth Cigman is lecturer in philosophy at Birbeck Faculty of Continuing Education, University of London, UK.

Baroness Warnock, Peer and lead author of The Warnock Report (1978) that radically shaped UK education policy.