ABSTRACT
This book has considered the development of special education policies since the end of the Second World War and has advanced the argument that a lifehistorical perspective illuminates the contested values and interests that have been struggled over in the growth of the special education sector in the UK. Moreover, it has been maintained that life stories are grounded in the wider social, economic and political processes of society. They both reveal the operation of these structures and illustrate the nature of resistance to them. For example, ‘inclusion’ has been a major theme of recent policy debates in education, but this concept is not an abstract principle. It is a policy discourse that is politically defined in different ways at specific historical moments. Thus, as taken up by the disability movement, it can articulate a socio-political critique of oppression, while in other contexts it may describe policies of economic retrenchment and depoliticised social normalisation.
