What does an inclusive classroom looks like? Take a minute and try to picture it. What are the students doing? What is the teacher doing? Specifically, what is the climate like?
In your mind’s eye, is the classroom you picture one where female teachers are subjected to misogynistic abuse? Is it one where disabled children are bullied? What about a classroom where the teacher is not in control, all students live in fear of a bully and little learning takes place? Is that what you imagine?
Probably not. Those scenarios would clearly go against the aim of being inclusive because they would make some members of the class feel uncomfortable or unsafe and because they would militate against the learning goals of being in school.
What about an early primary classroom where the majority of the class are learning literacy while one child plays on the ‘Lego table’ at the back. Is that inclusive? In a way, it is clearly physically inclusive. The child is in the same class as their peers. There is a physical proximity. Yet, they are not being included in the same activities. Is this the magic of ‘differentiation’ we hear so much about?
What about a classroom where the teacher only talks to the students who raise their hands. Is that inclusive? Let’s think about this — some students may struggle a little with self-regulation and if they know they can opt out, they may choose to do so. Is that in their best interests? Is it inclusive if some students make progress and others do not, even though they could within a different structure?
I ask these questions because I am in favour of classrooms that are inclusive and I think we could be doing more to make more classrooms inclusive. There are students currently struggling who, with a change in approach, would probably thrive. However, I am not an inclusion fundamentalist. I think that students should sometimes be placed in classrooms or settings that best reflect their needs at a particular moment in time. Taken to its extreme, inclusion would see non-verbal Year 8 students in an algebra class with their same-age peers. This is neither ethical nor moral. Yet, by even admitting to such obvious limits, this places me at odds with the vast majority of inclusion advocates.
How can I be sure we could be more inclusive? That’s because if I look at the evidence for the kinds of teaching methods that best support neurodiverse students, they align with a set of practices all students benefit from. Calm classrooms with clear routines where expectations and consequences are explicitly taught benefit everyone. There is no trade-off here.
Yet, inclusion advocates are surprisingly quiet on such classroom strategies. Instead, they have a tendency to invoke United Nations charters and, from their cosy adult workplaces, argue that governments should do more to prevent schools from suspending or expelling violent, abusive and disruptive students.
Often, violent, abusive and disruptive students have disabilities. This is not surprising because such behaviours form part of the diagnosis of certain disabilities.
However, most children with disabilities are not violent and disruptive and these children will benefit from calm, orderly and safe classrooms, just like anybody else.
I do not have the analysis, but it would be interesting to see a breakdown of suspensions and expulsions by type of disability. If teacher were simply prejudiced, we should see all categories of disability overrepresented. I strongly suspect this is not what we would find.
In the UK at the moment, the inclusion fundamentalists sense an opportunity. A piece has been published in The Observer that suggests the new government is about to row back on all the work done on improving behaviour over the past few years, abandoning its best-practice behaviour hubs program. The journalist who has written this article, Anna Fazackerley, has an eccentric track record. It is therefore hard to decide the extent to which this reflects real government intentions versus the extent to which she is ventriloquising the campaigning efforts of an educational establishment attempting to pressurise a new government. Time will tell.
Time will also tell, regardless of the choices made by the government. The key difference between the educational establishment and its view of students and the kind of approach I advocate is that I am right and they are wrong. Whenever their romaticism informs policy, everything rapidly falls apart. Look at New South Wales and its U-turn on suspensions and expulsions. Look at the mess in Scotland. In the end, the truth will out.
Let’s hope that the UK’s new government gets to that truth sooner rather than later.
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Update: Ir seems the article in the observer was completely wrong. See this interview with the new UK education minister that was posted to Twitter.
Thanks for the valuable observations about including students with disabilities in this post, Mr. Ashman. Sometimes the claims about inclusion and the actions undertaken in the name of inclusion simply do not make sense.