ABSTRACT
Article 23 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC (1989)) specifically addresses the rights of children with disabilities to enjoy ‘a full and decent life’ that promotes dignity, self-reliance and active participation (Lansdowne 2009: 16). The key to the realisation of those rights is seen as education (Smith 2010). This chapter will examine the role of inclusive education in England in ensuring that the rights of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are upheld and consider what has been achieved. Children with disabilities are disproportionately more likely to live in poverty,
be vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse and have limited access to education (Lansdowne 2009). The disadvantage and social exclusion experienced by many disabled people is not the inevitable result of their impairments or medical conditions but rather stems from attitudinal and environmental barriers (Knowles and Lander 2011: 141). Those barriers persist as an outcome of the historical prejudice, discrimination and cruelty to which disabled people have been subjected for hundreds of years, resulting in a tradition of segregation and ill-treatment across work, education and social life. It is important to understand in the first instance where these attitudes originated and why they remain so deeply embedded in the public consciousness. Whilst in recent decades disability rights movements have made significant progress in tackling the inequalities that exist between disabled and nondisabled people, there is growing evidence of the lasting impact, and even a recent resurgence of those negative attitudes and their repercussive effects, on the experiences of disabled children and young people in everyday life. Terminology that describes disability in an acceptable way has changed over
time. According to the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) and its successor, the Equality Act (2010), a disability is an impairment that has a substantial and long-term
effect on the individual’s ability to carry out tasks of everyday life. The 1981 Education Act states that a child has special educational needs if they require provision over and above what is generally provided in schools (Hodkinson and Vickerman 2009). There is considerable overlap between the two definitions so, for the purposes of this chapter, the term Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) has been used where appropriate.
