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How inclusion fails black children

The term ‘all-inclusive’ usually describes the package holiday deal where tourists are parachuted onto an island which they barely can remember afterwards, and eat and drink themselves silly. Little education about the place visited takes place except lessons in how to say ‘Yeah Mon!’

In a strange sort of way, our recent education policy has been driven by an all-inclusive ethos. We were told that black children would benefit in a climate where fewer children are excluded, where children with special needs are sent to mainstream school not special schools, and where children from a range of backgrounds and abilities learn together.

However, little has progressed for black children under this ethos. They still suffer high inclusions and boys in particular can’t seem to get five easy GCSEs.

Now the National Union of Teachers (usually left of centre) has called for an independent review of inclusion policy and practice.

Could it really be that the policy designed to support children in need is actually undermining them? Like all these matters we do need a little historical context.

A lot of inclusion policy was a response to the bad practices of the 1960s and early seventies – where black children were sent to ‘educational sub-normal units’ on the basis of, say, a frantic hand gesture in the classroom.

While many special schools did little teaching, too much time was spent bussing children around.

In the new world of inclusion, black children would be freed from the prisons of being ‘sub-normal’ and welcomed back into humanity.

My issues were that many of these institutions should have been closed and the emphasis placed on containment, rather than education.

The real problem was that there were black children with serious emotional and behavioural problems. The left and a crop of educationalists were telling us that to label these children would be to ‘socially pathologise’. So, in my comprehensive, one boy would be beating another boy into a pulp and schools were left with two options: kick him out onto the streets or try to contain him.

In the end none of these worked. No one wanted to admit that we had in our community a number of head-cases that needed special help.

Instead, many of these children, as they do today, disproportionately disrupt classrooms and are often negative leaders to more naive pupils.

Perhaps the worst thing about the inclusion agenda is how it has neglected generations of potentially excellent black students into a dumbed-down mediocrity.

The money, time and energy was therefore always given to the few mad–hatters at the tea-party, while those who wanted to be stretched, nurtured and developed intellectually, were neglected.

The scandal around inclusion is that, it wasn’t your stereotypical white or Asian pupil with spectacles who suffered in the all-inclusive binge-out. It was those black students who were scraping through with Cs, when they should have been getting A grades.

Many of our boys who were excluded for violent behaviour have ended up in prison. We can’t blame exclusions alone for this.

The complex family life and personality disorders of some of these characters really meant they should have been given psychological support. They were in no position to deal with mainstream school, they should have been sent to a therapeutic provision. Instead they were comforted by evil street gangs.

The logic for exclusion was driven by the notion that everything that went wrong with black boys was due to teacher racism. Remove that and everything will be fine. It denied the real psychological trauma that visited a boy every time his father walked out, or was kicked out.

It denied the psychological impact of peer-group pressure and the over-consumption of ganja on the brain. These were said to be ‘pathological’ mumblings from the right.

Now all the old stalwarts of inclusion are saying we may have got it wrong. Of course you did.

Mary Warnock, architect of England's special needs inclusion education system, published a damning report on how it has turned out in practice.

Baroness Warnock says pressure to include pupils with problems in mainstream schools causes “confusion of which children are the casualties".

She also says the way the most severe needs are assessed is “wasteful and bureaucratic" and “must be abolished".

She wants a “radical review" by an independent committee of inquiry.

Although not talking about black children specifically, she has recognised the neglect of the children themselves. Let’s meet these specific needs by being honest about some children in our community. It is better to do this than throw them into an all-inclusive free for all.

Published: 16 June 2006
Issue: 1222

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