ABSTRACT
In the early summer of 2005, the news media reconfirmed reports that Baroness Warnock, whose committee of inquiry (Warnock Committee, 1978) set a course for special needs education in Britain from the 1980s to the present, had had a change of heart about inclusion. Her argument is set out in Warnock (2005). I am not going to summarise it but I am going to draw upon one significant aspect of it and its relevance for this chapter, since she appears to have been much influenced by Dyson’s (2001) observations about learners. Essentially what Dyson argued is that a British response to including pupils in mainstream schools has had to cope with a ‘dilemma of difference’. This dilemma is formed from the contradictory forces of wanting to treat all learners as essentially the same and recognition that, in fact, there are important individual differences between learners which require tailored approaches. Warnock’s (2005) view is that the time has come to recognise that including all children in mainstream fails some learners since their needs are so different from the ‘mainstream’ that although they might be included in name, they are disadvantaged and effectively excluded in practice.
