A study of inclusion policy and practice in English primary, secondary and special schools. Commissioned and funded by the National Union of Teachers, UK and published by the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education. http://www.teachers.org.uk/resources/pdf/CostsofInclusion.pdf "Pupils, no matter their particular needs or learning disabilities. belong together with their same age in the educational mainstream. This was the view of the landmark Warnock Report1 in 1978. Three years later the Education Act (1981) provided the impetus for the move towards integration of pupils with various forms of ‘learning disability’ into mainstream classrooms... More recently, the Government’s endorsement of a curriculum and pedagogy built around a concept of personalised learning (Milliband10 2004), is clearly in accord with the more comprehensive notion of special educational needs (on which ‘inclusion’ was originally fashioned). However, while welcoming the potential of this new approach, knowledgeable commentators such as Wedell11 (2005) argue that it will fail to provide a context in which special educational needs can be effectively addressed, while the continued emphasis on the ‘standards agenda’ and the assumption that this is best achieved through whole class teaching is maintained (p.5)... Ofsted12 too (2004) has commented that the inflexibility of school and classroom organisation could sometimes be ‘handicaps to effective developments’.
It therefore seemed appropriate to conduct a further more detailed investigation of the issues surrounding teachers’ attempts to implement ‘inclusive ‘policies while experiencing the pressures which these earlier studies had so graphically documented. Again the National Union of Teachers agreed to commission the project."
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