ABSTRACT
This fi nal chapter asks the question seldom asked in all the literature on special and inclusive and alternative education – what will happen to the young people when they have experienced what is offered as their education? What emerges from the policies and practices is that in all the various separations from mainstream or attempts to ‘include’, young people have experienced a manufacture of their inability. Despite all the rhetoric in England of “Investing in Potential” (DCSF 2009) and “Educational Excellence Everywhere” (DfE 2016), the result is that most of the young people have emerged as mainly only fi t for low-level vocational courses, sporadic employment or unemployment, and in some cases, non-employment, dependency or youth offenders’ institutions. The belief that all children are born with a potential to learn without limits is lost in ideological adherence to beliefs that higher levels of education and training are necessary for successful competition in knowledge-driven economies, and only a few can achieve this. Traditional assumptions that lower social groups are not capable of learning to useful levels for the economy, underpinned by social class hierarchies in which upper and middle classes have little intention of giving up their assumed rightful privileges, ensures unequal education and outcomes. While the relatively recent assumption that education is a basic human right has led to political acceptance that schools must be more ‘inclusive’, the expanding population of low achievers and ‘special’ students, has led inexorably to their future via a curriculum that assumes their low-level abilities, to low-wage, low-skill, exploitative jobs or unemployment. This is all now exacerbated by the disappearance of many jobs via further automation and robotics. As always there are exceptions and they may again be
class-based. The many claims and adjustments that children ‘have autism’ or Asperger syndrome from middle class families, do not necessarily preclude higher levels of education and gaining employment.
