ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a broad historical background to forms of pupil management that determine which pupils can and should share classrooms with one another. It studies debates concerning inclusive schools (the Salamanca conference of 1994 in particular), but also assessment for learning and special needs, in light of two models European societies have used to organise populations since the High Middle Ages. On the one hand, the leprosy model keeps bodies outside the city to preserve its purity. On the other, the plague model ties down and restricts bodies within the city on the assumption that its status is already complex. We see these two models realised in Corona legislation (controlling borders on the one hand, test and trace on the other) but also in two very different attitudes to exceptional education: either separating pupils in different institutions or keeping diverse pupils in the same institution. This division of models can be applied to special needs education, assessment for learning, and religious education. An analysis of inclusive education by such administrative and economic standards neutralises the morally charged issue of the value of inclusion so that its practices may be evaluated in different terms.
