A review of thinking and research about inclusive education policy, with suggestions for a new kind of inclusive thinking

Changing ideas on inclusive education

For inclusive education to be at the core of education—as it should be—it has to be a truly inclusive education, not one that is narrowly defined. It can be so, and there has certainly been a progressively broadening compass to the idea of inclusive education. The term ‘inclusive education’ now refers to the education of all children, not just those with disabilities. But we should note that the pulse that has forced this change was social and political more than it was educational. The crystallization of political and social movements for equity in the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s brought us to see inclusion as being about diversity and social justice just as much as it is about mainstreaming and disability. Since that tectonic shift in thinking about the ethics of separation and exclusion, the idea of inclusion has moved from being seen in a one-dimensional landscape—primarily about disability and difficulty—to a three-dimensional terrain that now incorporates a more extensive spectrum of concerns and discourses about the benefits that come from valuing diversity.

As we move more firmly into the twenty-first century, it is time now for ideas and policy about inclusion to move forward once more, to fold around a range of matters concerning learning, community, identity and belonging. Inclusion has to be conceived with many surfaces—disability, certainly, and social justice, no less— but now other facets of life at school: community, social capital, equality and respect.

As I talk about these, I note that there have persisted into the twenty-first century some strong voices—quite recently, for example, Kauffman and Hallahan (2005) and Warnock (2005)—arguing for the benefits of continuing separate education. Their arguments have been about the impracticability of inclusion, its supposedly ideological roots and the benefits of special education. Counter-arguments have been advanced on epistemological, rights-based or outcomes-based grounds (e.g. Hegarty, 1993; Rustemier, 2002; Artiles, 2003; Gallagher, 2004; Reid & Valle, 2005). Personally, I am persuaded by the power and validity of these counter-arguments. But I argue in this essay that a yet stronger case needs to be made for a new kind of thinking and policy about inclusion. In part, this is necessary more comprehensively to engage with those critics of inclusion and the thinking in which their critique was embedded. It is necessary also, though, to link with present-day ideas about thinking, learning and teaching and to escape the ruts of twentieth-century thinking on exceptionality.

My argument is organized around four connected themes. First, there is a need to move outside the kinds of thinking that still construct and define failure at school. Second, arguments for a new form of inclusive education have to be built on knowledge of the damaging consequences of inequality, relative poverty and contrastive judgment in schools. Third, inclusive education policy and practice has to build more firmly and conspicuously on knowledge about the benefits of social connection, communities of learning and social capital. Fourth, understandings about the development of policy on inclusion must gain insight from international comparisons of policy and its effects.

All of these themes are interrelated, but I shall take them each in turn.

1. The past and present: moving away from beliefs about ‘difficulty’ and ‘disability’

Although there have been formal moves supposedly toward inclusion in most countries since the Salamanca Statement on Principles, Policy and Practice in Special Needs Education (UNESCO, 1994), the reality is different, as Graham and Jahnukainen (2011) have shown. Inclusive education is still like an island, considered as a separate territory from mainstream education, with its own discourses, policies and practices. In order to understand why this is so one must understand inclusive education's contemporary status as a consequence of its history and the twists and turns that shaped it during the twentieth century. One has to understand it as the product of systems of belief.

The most important concern here is that inclusive education did not spring to life de novo in response to egalitarian, desegregative concerns rooted in social justice. Rather, it emerged out of special education. This has had consequences from the expectations and beliefs that reside in the birth, development and maintenance of the field—its precepts, premises and expectations. While its current concerns are indeed desegregative, therefore, the field nevertheless has a history, and that history—a long one—is of an instinct to expect and to identify difference and disability.

Where are the roots of that history and what are its consequences? The instinct to find the young people whom Bauman (1995) calls ‘the failures and the recalcitrant’ (p. 180) existed in the establishment of special schools in the nineteenth century and before, but it had been given a stimulus in the early part of the twentieth century by the systematization of public education and by the simultaneous growth of the eugenic and psychometric movements. These ‘sciences’ gave what appeared to be a logical foundation for segregative systems at the same time as providing the metrics and the means for the execution of segregation. Together they gave the rationale and the agency for separation. So, in the mid-1920s, the American psychometric pioneer Lewis Terman (1924) was able to assert that ‘The first task of the school would be to establish the native quality of every pupil; second, to supply the kind of instruction suited to each grade of ability’ (p. 336, emphasis added).

It was only after the Second World War that the respectability of eugenics evaporated and with it the logic for separation. At the same time as notions about the stock of the species became discredited, it began also to be recognized that separation marginalized and devalued the separated minority. Key new insights such as that provided by Erving Goffman's Asylums (1961/1968) made people think more deeply about the effects of separation. As Chief Justice Warren put it in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education (Supreme Court of the USA, 1954, para 22): ‘We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’ This was a conclusion reached because separation ‘…generates a feeling of inferiority as to [students'] status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone’

Brown was an important marker, but public recognition of the reasoning embodied in the Brown judgment reached its climax in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, a movement concerned mainly with ‘race’ (as ‘Brown’ was) that gave confidence in its slipstream, as Minow (2010) has shown, to other groups that had felt discrimination, segregation and oppression. Not long after this, in the 1970s and 1980s, similar developments happened in Europe, though from different provenance—from the social democracy of the Scandinavian countries, with stress on equity and participation (Antikainen, 2006), to the communist local government of Italy (see Canevaro & de Anna, 2010). Action was being demanded to eliminate discrimination, segregation and exclusion.

The new anti-discriminatory climate that had developed across the world in the decades spanning the 1950s to the 1980s had its roots also in other, broader movements. There was a decline in respect for authority and a new wariness about its interests and motives, and there was more caution about the significance and worth of professional knowledge. The effect was to make the recipients of special education—parents and students—more confident in challenging the decisions of authorities and professionals.

It wasn't just this liberalization in political climate, though, that gave rise to a move to oppose exclusion in policy. Other ideas, more specifically from education, eddied together with the realizations about social justice internationally in the post-War period. There was a resurgence of interest in progressive educational thinkers, which was stimulated by figures such as John Holt and Lawrence Cremin in the USA and Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky in Europe. Notions that success or failure at school were constructed rather than within-child led educators to question beliefs about the crystal-hard relationship that had been assumed to exist between ability and achievement.

With beliefs about ability being challenged, there was corollary questioning of notions of ‘learning disability’. There turned out to be no clearly defined population for whom special provision ultimately could cater, even though assessment procedures with all their supposed precision had implied (and still imply) that those who are identified have discrete ‘within-person’ problems. As Coles (1978, 1987) pointed out with some highly detailed analyses, this is a far from accurate assessment: children fall behind at school for a host of reasons, most of them having little or nothing to do with ‘dysfunctions’ in the workings of their brains.

Worse, the statistics revealed that it is minority populations of various kinds who were (and still are) identified as having learning difficulties or behaviour difficulties and who were (and are) disproportionately selected for special provision: Tomlinson (1982), Artiles and Trent (1994), Artiles (1998), Patton (1998), Smith and Kozleski (2005), Raffo et al. (2006) all tell essentially the same tale. And such understandings are far from new. Gordon's (1923) studies of canal boat children in the UK or Wheeler's (1970) findings about, ‘mountain children’ in the USA revealed the centrality of cultural milieu rather than inborn characteristics in determining success at school.

But these understandings resting in context often seem to compete poorly with deficit-related explanations in explaining failure. So it is often the longstanding, deficit-related beliefs of the field of special education—beliefs that it is ability and disability, not poverty, difference or life experience—that have succeeded in ‘explaining’ success or failure.

The evidence shows, though, that the individuals the ascertainment procedures predominantly identify are those who are, simply, at a disadvantage. The children and young people ascertained to be in need of special education are the ones who are seen to be failing in the mainstream—and these are very disproportionately those from minorities. The evidence shows that notions of specialness—of learning difficulty or, worse, learning disability—are constructed as much as anything out of the disadvantage created by coming from one minority or another.

If ‘learning difficulties’, in the vast majority of cases, then, proved to be a chimera, the segregative and remedial solutions to these identified ‘difficulties’—perhaps unsurprisingly—have proved, with a range of research consistently over the years, to be equally lacking in substance (see Christoplos & Renz, 1969; Thomas & Loxley, 2007; Skrtic, 1991). What the consistent failure of these putative solutions appears to show is that it is not diagnosis and separate treatment that are important for success at school, but rather the existence of the right conditions for learning—of an understanding of what learning is and what it can be in school.

Despite decades of such evidence, not much of this appears to have entered the policy makers' consciousness. So the UK government's recent discussion document (its ‘Green Paper’) on policy for ‘special educational needs’ (Department for Education, 2011) could assert that ‘Current practice harms children who do not have SEN, but who are identified as having SEN’ (p. 67), as if there were a population of young people with constitutional difficulties who could be precisely identified, if only our assessment procedures and tools were reliable enough. These attitudes continue to thrive because of the relentlessly deficit-orientated history of special education and because of beliefs about ability (to which I shall turn in the next section, on the way that ‘ability’ is constructed). They are often promoted by vested interests (see Apple 1995 and Coles [2000, 2003] for exposés of some of the vested interests).

Despite these resilient beliefs and attitudes, there has been a realization in the espousal of the views of progressive educators—from Dewey (1915) and Vygotsky (1934/1986; 1978) to Lave and Wenger (1991), Scardamalia and Bereiter (1999) and many others that learning is social—or ‘sociocultural’ in the jargon—that it depends centrally on the learning milieu, wherein meaning, narrative and apprenticeship are crucial. It depends on the context and culture for learning, as, for example, the detailed idiographic studies of researchers such as Johnston (1985) and Hart and her colleagues (Hart, 1996; Hart, et al., 2004) reveal in their analyses of children's difficulties at school. Such work shows that students' success or failure at school is due less to ‘learning disabilities’ and more to an array of factors around which acceptance and inclusion are constructed (Artiles et al., 2011). The simple message from these new realisations is: if context is wrong, learning doesn't happen.

While there is this recognition, though, there is insufficient recourse—even among those who have been at the forefront of the push to inclusion—to the arguments posed by Dewey, Vygotsky, Holt, Hart and others. Inclusive education has to become more than a synonym for special systems in mainstream schools, more than a peripheral dimension to mainstream education. Too often there is still recourse to the cliche′ of ‘learning disability’ or ‘learning difficulty’ as explanation.

And too often, even when the easy palliatives of ‘learning disability’ are eschewed, there is recourse to explanation in other easily identifiable issues in other forms of separateness: disability, race and gender. Clearly, race, disability and gender are vitally important in the making of failure, as I have just noted, but their identification can lead simply to what Sennett (2004) calls ‘degrading’ forms of compassion. They can become crude devices on which we can hang stereotypes about learning and they can maintain medically orientated and deficit-orientated explanations of failure (Young, 1990; Slee, 1993). The question that needs to be answered is how and why characteristics such as race, disability and gender operate on students' learning at school. How are problems at school constructed out of these characteristics?

The answer suggested to us by sociocultural understandings (and the other analyses I shall describe later in this essay) is that difficulty is constructed out of disruptions in learning caused by discomfort, alienation, anomie, fear, hostility and mistrust and that schools may themselves offer a seedbed for such phenomena to do their worst. Once such phenomena have done their work in generating alienation, schools may exaggerate any pre-existing differences through the systems they set up (see Allan, 2008). With the convenient attribution of difficulty in learning to certain stereotypes, it is easy to downplay the influence of the broad disruptions to which I have pointed.

Those disruptions represent what could be called a closure on learning, wherein self-appraisal occurring via comparison of oneself with others brings on detachment and an identity of failure. What is invoked is alienation—alienation that breeds the boredom and anxiety that in turn further inhibit learning.

2. The future: an inclusive education that considers relational inequality as well as equity

I have raised in the previous section what I take to be the inertness of traditional ways of considering exceptionality. I have also touched on the consequences of the isolation of inclusive thinking from the mainstream of educational thinking and of social and political thought—thinking that incorporates understandings of the consequences of poverty and disadvantage. In this section I move on to review in more detail some recent discussion about the effects of inequality, especially work that gives some clue to the mechanism of relative poverty's influence on educational failure. It is the consequences of relational poverty that are at the core of much contemporary thinking, and education needs to consider these consequences more closely.

More than a decade ago, in looking at relative poverty and inequality, Keating and Hertzman (1999), in summarizing a range of epidemiological research, identified a phenomenon they called the ‘gradient effect’ (p. 3). By this they meant the extent to which social differences exist between members of a population. They discussed the significance of this effect, with the important point being that the greater the gradient amongst members (i.e., the difference existing between members of a population) the greater will be the unease, mistrust and discontent. They put it thus: ‘Particularly striking is the discovery of a strong association between the health of a population and the size of the social distance between members of the population.’ They proceeded: ‘…this gradient effect [obtains] not only for physical and mental health but also for a wide range of other developmental outcomes, from behavioural adjustment, to literacy, to mathematics achievement’ (p. 3).

Around the same time, Willms (1999a) reported important findings about the significance of gradient for education. He examined associations between parent education and child literacy in different OECD countries—including Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, the USA and Poland—and in different US States. He found that where parents themselves were highly educated (measured by number of years in education), literacy levels of their offspring differed least, so children with highly educated parents performed equally well in each country. But for less educated parents, advantage went to the Swedes and Dutch, with Americans and Poles performing worst.

After reviewing more studies about school effects, Willms (1999b) suggested why this might be so—why the children of less educated parents do better in Sweden than in the USA. One of his central conclusions was about gradient: ‘…when students are segregated … [those] from disadvantaged backgrounds do worse’ (p. 85). He notes that such segregation may come from many and varied directions: from special programs for ‘gifted’ children to phenomena such as charter or magnet schools.

I should re-emphasize that the significant ingredient in notions of gradient lies in inequality: it is about the differences that exist between high and low and their magnitude and visibility—it is not about absolute levels of income or capital. It is these differences that have impact on a whole range of outcomes. While there is some evidence for the mechanism of the operation of gradient in health (Sapolsky, 1999), the reasons for the impact of gradient have not yet been explored empirically in education, though I have already touched on one plausible hypothesis about their operation here. This is in the damage done to individuals' sense of worth and identity where they see themselves, through major differences between themselves and their peers, conspicuously excluded from the expectations, the activities, the resources, the worlds of those peers. In such circumstances people are likely to abdicate, to withdraw or to resist, as a range of research about ‘deviance’ has indicated (see Cohen, 1955; Matza, 1964; Cohen et al., 1999). Where it is clear because of the steepness of the gradient that any kind of equivalence of achievement is impossible, people will create their own identities, even if the process involves resistance, discomfort or ‘deviance’.

The absence of the acknowledgement of the sequelae of steep social gradient can be seen with the persistence of segregation and inequality in education. Minow (2010), for example, in reviewing a range of research, observes that ‘…schools too often are already settings for renewed racial segregation through academic tracking, special education assignments, and students' own divisions in lunch tables and cliques’ (p. 153). And, after a major review of inequality Marmot (2010) concludes: ‘Inequalities in educational outcomes are as persistent as those for health and are subject to a similar social gradient. Despite many decades of policies aimed at equalising educational opportunities, the attainment gap remains’ (p. 19).

However, a segregative mindset is not inevitable, as Willms (1999b) has noted. He draws attention to attempts that have been made in some areas for school restructuring that move away from segregative measures to initiatives for curricular restructuring, parental participation and site-based governance. He also suggests that the beneficial influences operating in low gradient places may be in the way parents are encouraged to relate to the school in governance and as volunteers. Likewise, Marmot (2010, p. 20) points to the significance of education in the early years with closer links between schools, families and the local community with more and better extended services. More could be done in training teaching and non-teaching staff to work across home-school boundaries.

The consequences of steep gradients are now incontestable: scrutiny of international comparisons provided by OECD (2010) for the period from 2000 to 2009 shows remarkably consistent findings relating to the gradient effect, with the countries with the shallowest gradients performing, broadly speaking, at the top of international tables of educational outcomes. In societies with greater inequality and less inclusion there is lower achievement at school and there are more casualties of the school system. As Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) put it, following their seminal review of the societal consequences of inequality, ‘…more equal societies almost always do better’ (p. 1).

One should not be pessimistic about this effect in policy terms, though, for the effect is transitive—and therefore manipulable. So there is hope of influencing the effect not only in national policy but also in local practice, and such influencing should form a central plank of twenty-first-century education policy.

I have stressed that when one thinks of the gradient effect, one is considering the effect of comparison—comparison that arises out of the conspicuousness of differences in capital. But comparisons rest not merely in monetary capital, they rest also in social capital (to which I shall turn in the next section) and in the constructs we devise precisely to enable comparison—and in schools this happens through comparisons of what is taken to be ability. Comparisons on the basis of ability have forever been at the root of segregation and it is these comparisons that transmute to the alienation that is sapping of status, identity and self-belief.

It is these—identity, belonging and self-belief—that appear to me to have currency far beyond the ambit of ability and it is to this fact that one could point as a partial explanation at least for the observations of Ferri and Connor (2005), Minow (2010) and others that more than half a century after the Brown judgment, segregation is as prevalent as ever. One might say that understanding the symbiotic relationship between measured ‘ability’ and alienation makes for the beginnings of a new psychology of difference. The relationship between the two provides a fulcrum on which new possibilities for understanding children's difficulties at school pivot. One can suggest that the alienation and exclusion experienced by students are constructed largely out of comparison—out of the comparison of each student herself or himself with others—and the institutional endorsement of such comparison by teachers and other professionals. The point to be made is that it is not so much absolute standards of ability that are important for assessing learning ‘disability’, as perceptions concerning relative status.

It is relative status rather than ability—or its obverse in disability of multifarious kinds—that is important in generating failure. But relative status has competed poorly as an explanatory concept against ability and disability. Ability, as I noted in the previous section, has always shown great resilience as a framing concept, despite the force of empirical evidence and rational argument to contradict it (see, for example, McClelland et al., 1958; McClelland, 1973; Gould, 1981; Howe, 1990; Wahlsten, 1997; Ericsson & Delaney, 1999; Dickens & Flynn, 2001). Such analysis seems to show that inside the assessing systems of schools there are in fact few objective standards, and in their absence there remains for judgment of difficulty or success little more than the comparison of one student with another. It is on such comparisons—no more and no less—that beliefs about ability rest and are perpetuated. But these beliefs are epiphenomena: they arise merely from the comparisons, the gradings and the hierarchisations.

Worryingly, though, in our notionally inclusive educational world, assessment and comparison still provide, using a still-increasing array of tests, a process for enabling and legitimizing the hierarchisation and judgment of students. Perceptions of ‘difficulty’ or ‘disability’ are thus constructed around and within discourses of comparison—around normality and abnormality, success and failure, the functional and the dysfunctional.

If the separation of one child from another is, then, down to comparison— rather than ability pure-and-simple—how do hierarchies and status actually affect identity in such a way that learning and even health are substantially affected? Marmot (2004) puts the mechanism down to the complex set of relations that exist among inequality, hierarchy, cooperation and control over one's own life. He suggests: ‘There is a large body of literature [referring to Sapolsky, 1999] supporting the importance of these five characteristics—control, predictability, degree of support, threat to status, and presence of outlets—that modulate the impact of a psychologically threatening stimulus’ (p. 114).

The latter, the threatening stimulus, is conspicuously found in the judgmental environment, with its contrasts and comparisons, created in much of today's stateregulated education. The message of work on relative judgment implies that this environment needs continual challenge—respect, identity and control need to be given back to those inhabiting the institutions that are created for them.

I shall come to identity and respect in the next section, but let me stay for now on the effects of comparison. How might comparisons be amplified or attenuated by the school as a particular kind of social institution? There are school-related answers that I have noted already. But there are surely ways that one can proceed that go beyond strategic tips and algorithms to more broad-ranging policy change. We can note what gradient effects tell us about school organization and the unwelcome consequences that analysts tell us come from deliberate differentiation or segregation of any kind, whether that differentiation originates in special action for ‘gifted’ children or from innovations such as ‘magnet’ schools. We can encourage parental participation and student voice as ways of promoting effective communities of learning. We can look for ways in which routine comparison may be attenuated inside the school. In the classroom, we can employ Putnam's (2000) analogy of ‘WD40’ action to promote bridging—action that encourages cooperation, sharing, debate and the involvement of all.

Among all of these considerations—perhaps binding them—is the construction of ‘social capital’, and it is this to which I now turn.

3. The future: an inclusive education of social connection, communities of learning and social capital for learning and inclusion

There are all kinds of influences at school that may affect one's identity and these influences, if the argument I have developed from my review so far is valid, are more important for success at school than more straightforwardly deficit-related or even curricular matters. The corollary is that promoting the kind of environment that positively affects self-worth is at the heart of the reduction of failure. I am arguing that inclusivity can be promoted both at school and at wider community levels and that the efforts operate with reciprocal influence.

How can community be fostered? Putnam (2000) offers some interesting insights, discussing the connectedness among people, the ‘…social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them’ (p. 19). He notes a widespread decline in social participation in the USA, from voting in elections to trusting people on the street (Putnam, 1995). The interesting feature of Putnam's discussion is the light it shines on new kinds of exclusivity and inclusivity. He distinguishes between bonding (that is to say, exclusive) and bridging (inclusive) social capital. Bonding will reinforce particular reciprocities and exclusive identities and solidarity, while bridging social capital, by contrast, is outward-looking. Bridging networks are good for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion, says Putnam: it can generate broader identities and reciprocity, while bonding social capital bolsters our narrower selves.

Each—bonding and bridging—can be seen in forms of school organization and one can see how bridging and bonding could be encouraged or discouraged by the school. Bridging could be promoted by the ‘WD40’ activities to which I have already alluded—in Circle Time (Bliss & Tetley, 2006) or the encouragement of sharing and cooperative activities, for example the ‘jigsaw groups’ of Aronson (2002). Kim and Schneider (2005) and Kao and Rutherford (2007) showed the existence of bridging in parents' involvement. Garcia-Reid (2007) showed positive and direct effects of bridging by encouraging ‘teacher support, friend support, and parent support on school engagement’ (p. 164). Beaudoin (2007) asserts that the promotion of certain activities among students, involving consideration of social and political issues, resulted in increased bridging social capital, which was taken to be the cause of improved well-being. One might go further to suggest that more fundamental within-school norms and beliefs lie behind the connectedness of bridging social capital—beliefs in equal potential, in respect and recognition for all. The less desirable ‘bonding’ would be encouraged through ‘house’ formation, organized competition, systematized testing, token economies and so on.

The ability to learn depends on the kinds of such links that are established, for connections exist, crucially, between motivation, identity and learning. Learning and the putative ‘failure’ of learning come down to social processes that arise in the course of doing things socially. If one is involved, included, feeling on an equal par, one will learn. If not, one won't—and this tallies keenly with Paulo Freire's (1972) insistence that education is to be found in the lived experience of participants, where people work with each other rather than on one another.

Perhaps because of inclusive education's history in special education, educational institutions have until very recently failed to enable—in students who are in any way different—a feeling of being on an equal status with others. Instead, education has promoted what Corbett (1996) has called a ‘sugar-coated poison’—a notion of need—in its attitude to disadvantage, wherein a Rawlsian logic of redistributive justice has been allowed to perpetuate a delusion that help should be provided to those in this need. As commentators such as Midwinter (1977) and Skrtic (1991) have pointed out, such a response is manifested in professional and institutional responses to children's difficulty—responses that inhibit structural change in schools and demobilize community response.

Fraser (1996), Christensen and Rizvi (1996) and others have challenged the Rawlsian redistributive logic, noting that it is now recognition that is more important than redistribution. It is recognition, respect and identity that are most important for young people's success at school—not the identification of need, nor help. New forms of injustice arising both from nonrecognition and from disrespect contribute to one's alienation and exclusion. Nonrecognition and disrespect arise from the way that comparisons are actively encouraged by education's discourses and processes; they arise from the way that schools handle existing inequalities. The key issue is whether schools exaggerate or attenuate inequalities between their students and the contrasts that potentially follow (see also Allan, 2008).

4. Policy, politics and international perspectives

Fifty years ago the celebrated American educator Lawrence Cremin (1961) suggested that: ‘In other countries at times of great social upheaval, they have a revolution. In the United States, they add a new course to the curriculum’(p. 136). Cremin's warning was that simplistic disaggregations of the social from the educational must be rejected. But 50 years on, as commercial and cultural globalization gather speed, and as education policy influenced by neoliberal thinking takes firm hold in many places, the error of the USA has become the error of the world: the ‘new course to the curriculum’ solution has gone forth and multiplied internationally (see Wolf, 2001), with the new course, new curriculum or new program—now called ‘What works’—seemingly the first place to look for a solution. The US No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) now even requires teachers to use ‘scientifically proven’ practices in their classrooms (Thomas, 2012).

Part of my argument in this review leads to a different route from the ‘new course to the curriculum’ or ‘What works’ solutions to educational change, particularly when we are thinking about inclusive education. Looking internationally at the characteristics of the consistently best performing school system—and, a rarity, one that is not identifying burgeoning numbers of students with ‘special educational needs’—that is to say, Finland's (Graham & Jahnukainen, 2011), one finds not a resolute focus on the ‘new course to the curriculum’ or the ‘scientifically proven’ methods of teaching insisted on by NCLB. Rather, one finds a focus, as Sahlberg (2007) puts it, on ‘policies based on equity, flexibility, creativity, teacher professionalism and trust. Unlike many other education systems, consequential accountability accompanied by high-stakes testing and externally determined learning standards has not been part of Finnish education policies’ (p. 147). Or, as Finland's education minister, Tuula Haatainen, put it, the advances depend on a ‘broad-based, open-access education system’ (ICP, 2011, para 4). Elsewhere, she notes that there is ‘…a philosophy of inclusion underlying this system’ (Coughlan, 2004, para 15).

One needs also therefore to make a plea for an international consciousness about inclusive education and its place in contemporary discourse (see Sayed, 2002), since many countries of the South (possibly encouraged by international NGOs) appear to be imposing on themselves a form of cultural imperialism as they make presumptions about the appropriateness for them of what they take to be the cutting edge inclusive education of the North. Harber (2004) reveals the damaging consequences of this in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa—of copycat educational ideology, with policy and practice typical of the North often shoe-horned into cultures for which it is alien. The consequences are in a curricular desertification and ‘schooling as violence,’ as Harber puts it, with schools ‘often responsible both for initiating violence and perpetrating forms of violence existing in the wider society’ (p. 3).

The argument of this paper is that inclusive education is meaningful only when embedded in understandings about community and communality, only when seen as both reflective of, and creative of, inclusion in society—only when, as Slee and Weiner (2001) put it, inclusion is seen as a kind of ‘…reconstruction consistent with new forms of thinking about education and social issues’ (p. 94). Here, far from needing to draw on Northern experience, certain parts of the developing world—for example the state of Kerala in India, Costa Rica and Sri Lanka—can stand, instead, as exemplars to the North (see Marmot, 2004; Thomas & Loxley, 2007) in their reductions of difference, much as certain parts of the developing world were identified by Paulo Freire (1972) as exemplars for moves to improved literacy. Economist Amartya Sen (1999) describes the process operating in Kerala as a ‘support-led’ approach to improvement in life conditions: ‘The support-led process does not operate through fast economic growth, but works through a program of skilful social support of health care, education and other relevant social arrangements’ (pp. 45–48).

These unusual exemplars (Kerala, Costa Rica and Sri Lanka) have achieved the shallow income gradients to which I referred in section 2. The benefits of such reductions in inequality rests in the provision of education for all, which in turn operates at two levels: it is providing for individual knowledge, but it is also symbolic of society's affirmation of once-marginalized groups and its endorsement of those groups' participation and inclusion. So in some way this provision seems to be endowing added value. Perhaps this value-added comes in the form of a boost for identity, status, belonging and self-belief, as I noted in section 2. Inclusion, and the status it brings, breeds not only health but also the conditions for learning and growth to occur.

And as Booth (1999) points out, success also rests on an explicit recognition that inclusion is about more than ‘special needs’. It is about participation. Booth suggests that participation is denied in many developing countries for a number of reasons: poverty; war; environmental degradation; abuse and violence; HIV and AIDS; the spoken language being different from the language of instruction; pregnancy and child care. He points out that the ‘special needs version’ of inclusive education is doubly irrelevant for learners in these countries, where the pressing and overriding need is for participation.

Coda

In this review essay I have tried to indicate how inclusive ideals might be realized in education and in society more generally, nationally and internationally. The coming years need inclusive educators—and all educators internationally—to focus on the nature of learning in schools and to look for reasons why learning so readily closes down there. Inclusive educators must uncouple from the resolutely deficitorientated history of exceptionality and mesh instead with contemporary currents of thinking on the ways in which children learn or fail to learn at school.

I have talked of two psychologies of learning with which I feel a new inclusive education needs more firmly to engage. First, there are new models of learning that stress the centrality of community, with an emphasis on meaning, narrative, apprenticeship—in short, the context and culture for learning. And, second, there is what I have called a new ‘psychology of difference’ based on knowledge about gradient effects and the effects of these on our sense of identity: it tells of a strong connection between what students feel about themselves in communities and how they learn. What both of these streams of thought bring home is that the focus has now to be on communities of learning and how students are constructed as members of such communities through processes of comparison and judgment. The significance of gradient effects is crucial here.

I have talked about the closure on learning brought about by alienation. The focus of inclusive education can now shift to the ways in which the school may abstain from actively promoting community structure, in fact doing much through its routines (for example, of assessment and comparison) actually to impair the development of communities of learning and to encourage withdrawal. The future contribution of inclusive education hinges on its ability to retreat from histories of identify-assessdiagnose-help and to examine the ways in which schools enable community and encourage students' belief in themselves as members of such community.