Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

Special Educational Needs: a New Look

Special educational needs, the statement, inclusion; anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with children and schools is likely to be familiar with these concepts.  Indeed the concept of inclusion now extends well beyond education into every nook and cranny of social policy.  What is not so well known, perhaps, is that these concepts are little more than thirty years old, and that the Warnock Report of 1978 brought them into the public arena.  This report heralded an era in which it was no longer acceptable to regard some children as 'defective', no longer acceptable to 'label' them as such before sending them to institutions at which little or nothing would be expected of them educationally. We tend to take these changes for granted, but they were radical at the time.

We have Baroness Warnock and the Warnock Committee to thank for articulating the vision and the concepts that turned these changes into policy and practice.  However, as is usually the case with shifts of this nature, not everything has gone smoothly. Though countless children have benefited from the Warnock reforms, others have been frustrated by them. Mary Warnock is the first to admit this. In this pamphlet, indeed, she says that "nothing less than a radical revolution is required", and calls for an urgent government review of the field of special education. Bringing both her expertise with difficult concepts and her long experience in the field of educational policy to bear on this issue, she explains in detail what in her view has gone wrong. This pamphlet will be of great interest to teachers, policy-makers, educationalists and parents of SEN children.

Order Now