Belonging in an age of exclusion

ABSTRACT

The struggle to achieve a condition of belonging in education by and for children with disabilities exposes the deep structure of social exclusion that is represented in and reproduced by schooling. Seeking inclusive education is undermined by a range of factors including the appropriation of the discourse inclusion by deeply conservative forces committed to sustaining exclusion and the ethic of competitive individualism that is the engine for education policymaking and school level practices. While inclusive education and the establishment of belonging for the diverse range of students who seek enrolment and successful participation in school is a challenging ambition, it is a first order requirement for sustainable futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• social theory
• belonging and community
• special educational needs
• inclusive education
• education policy

Introduction: it was only my imagination

There seems always to have been differences between elements of rhetoric and practice in the theatre of public policy and administration. It would appear to be wrong to think otherwise given the ascendance of what is referred to as the ‘communications (coms) strategy’. Considerable public resources are dedicated to getting the story right, or at the very least palatable for as many constituencies as possible, when shaping, introducing, implementing, defending and ultimately dismantling government policy. This is not to say: ‘the policy is good, it just went wrong in practice’. Fulcher (1999) counselled us away from such analytic laziness. Rhetoric and practice can never be untangled; theirs is at the very least a co-dependent relationship wherein language is a part of the policy-making process. More precisely there is a unity that may be expressed as discursive practice. The policy represents values choice-making and authorisation (Easton 1953), and this is expressed textually, orally and practically. Key terms and phrases (‘best practice’, ‘evidence based practice’) themselves become characters in the policy story (Graham, 2018; Ball 2017; Fairclough 2000). For this reason, a broad and ambitious analytic frame must be deployed to make sense of public policy, such as is reflected in the work of ‘policy sociology’ (Ozga 1987; Ball 1997; Whitty 2002; Rizvi and Lingard 2010). This need for a ‘sociological sensibility’ is certainly the case for inclusive education policy-making wherein confusion abounds.

Community, diversity and inclusion animate official educational policy discourse. This is evident in documentation such as: education policy-statements, programme pamphlets, degree and course descriptions, school prospectuses, and school to home news bulletins that accumulate in students’ backpacks. If we accept that supra-organisations such as the OECD, UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, are representative, this discourse is global and not bounded by nation state territories (Slee 2018a). These terms echo through local and informal channels – principally through social media; what I am reliably told is the blogosphere. Following Kenneth Burke (1966), Phil Graham (2018) considers language as ‘dramastistical’ characters that are not of themselves real but act through the ‘various stories we tell to each other’ in policy documents. This is not dissimilar to Bourdieu’s (2014, 37) notion of collective fictions in institutional life that are ‘recognised by belief and thereby become real’.

Perhaps it is naïve, but I had accepted ‘belonging’ as a conceptual and practical precondition or element of community and inclusion. Ergo, I had assumed that inclusive education embraced a commitment to dismantling exclusions that formed the foundations for the oppression of vulnerable individuals and population cohorts. Education, through its principal vehicle – the school, set itself the not insignificant goal of optimising viable and sustainable futures for all based on values of fairness and justice (Rawls 1972; Touraine 2000). In short inclusive education is a franchise of an education in and for democracy (Dewey 1966; Bernstein 1996; Apple 2018; Pearl and Knight 1999; Slee 2018b). Sustainable Development Goal 4 and the Education for All movement press governments to more inclusive futures for hitherto marginalised and excluded populations (UNESCO 2017).

That this has not been secured is hardly surprising. Composite data that reflects the world we live in suggests that inclusive schools are conspicuously out of synch. Ours is a world that is most precisely mapped according to deep divides of concentrated privilege and peak inequality (Dorling 2018). We live in an age of exclusion marked by the increasing flows of people displaced by conflict and man-forged disasters. As the refugee, now a largely pejorative term of reference, seeks the kindness of humanity the walls and fences buttressed by local legislation make clear their status as surplus populations (Bauman 2004).

With biblical overtones Bauman (2001, 3) describes community as a warm, friendly secure place that is not available to us living in ‘ruthless times’; it is a paradise lost or longed for, in reality unattainable.

For us in particular – who happen to live in ruthless times, times of competition and one-upmanship, when people around seem to keep their cards close to their chests and few people seem to be in any hurry to help us, when in reply to our cries for help we hear admonitions to help ourselves … - the word ‘community’ sounds sweet. (Bauman 2001, 3)

Belonging, it seems, is an accoutrement of privilege. And, I hasten to add, privilege is not just reckoned or applied according to a material calculus. Other identity features intersect to form markers of separation, markers of not belonging. Historically, schools have been enlisted in the application of boundaries through institutional givens such as banding, streaming, and special education defended as best practice. In effect, such practices continue to reflect hierarchies of belonging and exclusion from the educational main-game. Ball (2013, 48) suggests:

The school became in many respects an expression of humanity and a demarcation of the limits of humanity – who was and was not educable, of value, worth investing in.

In this brief essay I will consider the stage upon which schooling is played out and suggest that there are unacknowledged forces within the culture and structure of schooling that render schools places for some rather than all children and young people. I will also examine the progress of inclusive education as an accomplice in the exclusion of students with disabilities. Rather than pretend that there are conclusions I will simply offer four propositions to support belonging as an educational aspiration in an attempt to imagine the conditions of education where belonging is authenticated by practice and not simply a rhetorical flourish or tactical distraction. This last part of the essay will therefore present a divergent ‘social imaginary’ where community is, if not realisable, at the very least an organising motif and ideal worth grasping at.

What are we signing up for?

Shifting the books on my shelves around to make room for new titles, and perchance, new ideas, I happened on a dusty copy of Robert Tucker’s The Marx-Engels Reader. Venturing inside the once deep blue cover, I saw my youthful existential entry, Roger Slee ARTS II, 1974. At the risk of derision for drawing from the counsel of the unfashionable early work of Marx’s (1848) Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis XI seems as pertinent as ever:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. (Marx, from Tucker reprint, 1972, 109)

The quote, and the theses from which it is drawn, resonate/s with this essay in three important ways:

• First, is an acknowledgement that ‘the abstract individual whom he (Feuerbach) analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of society’. In other words, to understand exclusion and pursue inclusion we cannot separate the object of analysis from their context. This is of course very annoying for the neo-positivism that lurks within special education, as it demands frames of reference that challenge the gold standard of experimental design. It is just as annoying for the meta-narratives of critical pedagogy conceived in the global north and stretched across the global south.

• Second, and related to the previous observation, is the imagined division between theory and action.

• Third, is the advocated shift from civil society to human society, or socialised humanity. Herein, lies the visceral connection to a project of human engagement to understand and resist oppression. Exclusion and estrangement though played out in big numbers are also intensely individual and personal experiences.

Inclusive education research is simultaneously a call to action and an analytic framework. It sets aspiration and a corresponding framework for practising education wherein belonging, community and inclusion are system and individual ‘key performance socialised indicators’.

A world of exclusion

In his book The Exclusive Society, Jock Young – a critical criminologist – describes the movement to the exclusive society:

It is a movement from modernity to late modernity, from a world whose accent was on assimilation and incorporation to one which separates and excludes. It is a world where, I will argue, the market forces which transformed the spheres of production and consumption relentlessly challenged our notions of material certainty and uncontested values, replacing them with a world of risk and uncertainty, of individual choice and pluralism and of deep-seated precariousness both economic and ontological. And it is a world where the steady increment of justice unfolding began to falter: the march of progress seemed to halt. (Young 1999, 1)

While we would debate the conditions of inclusion Young affords modernism, especially if we were to consider the unrelenting history of genocide, banishment and exclusion of people with disabilities (Stiker 1999; Snyder and Mitchell 2006), there is no doubt that the economic and cultural shift that he describes has torn apart old certainties and connection for many. Sennett (2006) also describes changing social conditions in The Culture of New Capitalism. He describes the fragmented and virtual state of community and the transitory status of the citizenry. For Bauman (2000) this is liquid modernity wherein surplus populations are the collateral damage of globalising material and social relations. Education, as Connell (1993) contends, is not simply a reflection of these new social conditions it is intimately bound up in their reproduction.

According to UNESCO (2018) by the end of 2016, approximately 124 million children and adolescents were not in primary or lower secondary education. These data are not random; they reflect the exclusion of vulnerable population cohorts. Protracted conflict, as well as man-made and natural disasters, generates population displacement suggesting that UNESCO data likely understates the prevalence of children missing school. For example, UNICEF reported 28 million children homeless due to the conflict in 2016 (Deutsche Welle 2016). UNHRC (2018) reports that of the 65.6 million displaced people in 2016 22.5 million carried refugee status. Of that 22.5 million 189,300 were resettled. Maley (2016) cites data from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimating that 1,008, 616 refugees and migrants had sought to cross into Europe by sea in 2015. 3771 others perished at sea. Of the 65.6 million displaced people 55% came from Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan. The wall, rather than the bridge, is the metaphor of our time (Marshall 2018; Sennett 2006; Bauman 2004, 2016; Gleeson 2016). Commenting on the plight of displaced people Maley (2016) gives us cause for pause:

The idea of the nameless number provides a sobering reminder that most victims of oppression go unremarked by the wider world. It is all too easy when confronted with substantial refugee flows, such as Europe witnessed from 2015, to lose sight of the individuality of refugees, of the specific experiences of suffering and dislocation that so often have come to dominate their lives.

This is but one element of the global picture of exclusion. Child labour, child marriage, and the widening of the gap between privilege and poverty as capital is concentrated in the hands of a shrinking minority augment the canvas of exclusion globally (Slee, in press). Disability is also a reliable predictor of poverty and estrangement. An estimated 15% of the world’s population has a disability, representing over one billion people (Goodley 2017, 1). The World Report on Disability (World Health Organisation 2011, 39) found that people with disabilities in developed countries experience worse educational and labour market outcomes, and that they are more likely to be poor and marginalised than persons without disabilities (see also: Barnes and Sheldon 2010; OECD 2012). Notwithstanding difficulties in securing prevalence data (Alborz, Slee, and Miles 2013), the situation worsens for children with disabilities living in developing countries (WHO 2011, 39; Grech 2009; Muderedzi and Ingstad 2011). The World Report on Disability (WHO 2011) cites a number of countries in Africa, Asia and South America to demonstrate the increasing levels of poverty and more limited educational and vocational opportunities for children with disabilities.

There is a bi-directional relationship between disability and poverty. Education is a key agent in the non-random allocation of poverty (OECD 2017; WHO 2011, 10). Students with disabilities who attend a regular neighbourhood school with their siblings and neighbourhood peers achieve superior educational outcomes to those who attend separate special schools (Cologon 2013; Crawford 2008). The experiences of children with disabilities in Italy (D’Alessio 2011) or in the province of New Brunswick in Canada where students with disabilities are educated in their neighbourhood regular school (Porter and Towell 2013) amplifies this claim.

The scale of exclusion globally has profound implications for children and their education. This is not only a welfare logistics problem; how do we mobilise food, shelter, health care, security, education and so on in conflict zones, it is also a challenge for the inclusive curriculum. How do we ensure that such challenges (population displacement, war and terrorism, environmental degradation, drought and famine) become a part of a future-oriented problem-based curriculum? Reading school prospectuses is a source of frustration. They predictably make claims that children are being educated to meet the responsibilities of global citizenship. For the most part, this has translated into equipping children to use the world as a travel, itinerary, labour exchange or shopping catalogue. An inclusive education framework expects that we take up the problem of exclusion as a substantive curriculum concern. It is an opportunity to model different social relations and possibilities. Such a proposition is counter to the current operation and ethos of education jurisdictions around the world. Gillborn and Youdell (1999), Apple (2013, 2018), Ravitch (2011, 2013, 2016) and Ball (2017, 2007) have charted the impacts of high stakes testing, marketisation and hyper-audit protocols on schooling. Students are reduced to being bearers of results and competitive individualism is anointed as the ethical framework for twenty-first century schooling (Slee 2011, 2018).

Inclusive education – a quixotic preoccupation?

The political project of including students with disabilities in the neighbourhood regular school with their siblings and peers predates the emergence of inclusive education as a field of education research, policy and practice. Parents, educators, medical practitioners and community advocates have long championed the rights of children with disabilities to a ‘mainstream’ as opposed to segregated special education (Biklen 1985; Lewis 1989, 1993; Henderson 1993). The passage of anti-discrimination legislation and international agreements and conventions following litigation and civic activism has established education in regular schools as the right of all children, including students with disabilities (90, 19; Norwich 2008). Legislative caveats, the maintenance and, in many jurisdictions, the growth of separate schools, professional interest and community agitation merge to maintain the exclusion of many students from neighbourhood schools. Paradoxically, the infrastructure of inclusive education is applied to monitor, calibrate and segment school populations.

The transposition of human rights legislation and international conventions into the regulatory and policy frameworks for progressing inclusive education by government jurisdictions continues to diminish it. Caveats to mitigate risk, suppress cost escalation, maintain school structures and preserve professional interest attenuate the human rights agenda. Inclusion is conditional and subject to negotiation and cumbersome protocols. There is also a high incidence of students being directed away from their local schools by principals, school psychologists and administrators notwithstanding their legal responsibilities (Deloitte Access Economics 2017).

For Tomlinson (2017), special education and its new-found sibling; inclusive education, have assumed the task of dealing with the fall-out of the political economy of late twentieth and twenty-first century mass compulsory schooling. Tomlinson (1985, 157) had earlier observed:

Special education in Britain, as in other advanced technological societies, is expanding. In changed forms and rationalised by changed ideologies, notably the ideology of special needs, it is becoming a more important mechanism for differentiating between young people and allocating some to a future which, if not as stigmatised as in the past, will be characterised by relative powerlessness and economic dependency.

The disappearance of the unskilled labour market radically reconfigured school populations. Formerly, children who were failed out of or left school before gaining a qualification transitioned into the adult world of work finding destinations where they might reasonably feel that they belonged. They claimed their stake in community and were afforded respect and the means to make a living in worthwhile employment. For the most part, they could get on with their lives. The dilemma was, and remains, do schools restructure education to ‘deal with increasing numbers of young people who are defined as being unable or unwilling to participate satisfactorily in a system primarily directed towards producing academic and technical elites’ (Tomlinson 1985, 157)?

Over the past three decades, there has been a discernible expansion in the diagnostic categories available for the description of students’ individual deficits. This too is a part of the ontological movement described by Young (1999) representing changes in the creation, dissemination and authority of psychiatric and medical knowledge. Disengagement, disruption and underachievement, once considered to be educational challenges (Slee 1995) or classroom management problems (Freiberg and Brophy 1999), are now considered to be problems of the mind (Harwood and Allan 2016), thereby reinforcing the authority of psychologists and special educators as experts on disability (Tomlinson 2017). Schools convinced that ‘students with special educational needs’ can only be educated by trained specialist personnel, are reluctant to enrol students with disabilities until there is a guarantee of additional funding for what are now considered to be additional students.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM ( APA 2013 ) is regarded as an indispensible educational resource for schools (Tobin and House 2016). Published in eighteen languages and available as a smart phone App, the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-5 is often referred to in social and popular media. For those students who do not exhibit the requisite number of symptoms as described in DSM, psychiatrists now refer to shadow syndromes where not all of the DSM criteria are identified to allow official diagnosis (Frances 2013; Kutchins and Kirk 1997; Whitaker 2002, 2010). DSM is the subject of continuing critique, not least for its fiduciary conflict of interest (Frances 2013; Paris and Phillips 2013).

The emergence and rapid rate of diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are instructive on a number of levels. Rose (2005) tracks ADHD from its foundations in early studies of hyperactivity. Large and influential organisations such as Children and Adults with Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) have secured government and corporate backing to build research, improve the quality and availability of diagnosis and support professional and community education (Slee 2011). Epidemiological research (Wang et al. 2017; Rowland, Lesesne, and Abramowitz 2002; ADHD Institute 2017; Lawrence et al. 2015) note worldwide prevalence rates from 5.29% to 7.1%. The prevalence rate in China, extrapolated from selected regional measures, was estimated to be 6.26% representing some 23 million children and adolescents (Wang et al. 2017). The ADHD Institute (2017) reports on the significance of geographic variance:

Geographical location was associated with significant variability between the prevalence estimates from North America and both the Middle East (p = 0.01) and Africa (p = 0.03), while no significant differences were reported for prevalence rates between North America and Europe (p = 0.40), South America (p = 0.83), Asia (p = 0.85) or Oceania (p = 0.45). This finding was confirmed in a meta-regression model using Europe as the comparator: significant differences in prevalence were found between Europe and both Africa (p = 0.05) and the Middle East (p = 0.03).

Variance of prevalence data within and between countries is regarded as indicative of methodological disparity. For some, the discovery and exponential growth of diagnoses presents a story of the improvement of medical knowledge that has enabled students to learn and teachers to teach more precisely and effectively adopting a bio-psycho-social approach to educating children with behaviour disorders (Barkley, Cooper). Others have challenged the veracity of the so-called brain science applied to its discovery and explanation (Harwood and Allan 2014; Slee 2011; Tait 2010; Laurence and McCallum 2009; Rose 2005, 2007). Kutchins and Kirk (1997) describe the sweeping of everyday life into psychiatry and maladies of the mind. The construction of normalcy and bio-cultural identities (Davis 2013) is simply a representation of the arithmetic of majority (Bauman 2000).

As schools become sites for increasing competition, children with no viable destination remain at school. Seeing no connection with the activity of school, they disengage, disrupt and are likely to be formally diagnosed with special educational needs (Harwood and Allan 2014; Tomlinson 2017). Many of these students are consigned to alternative, special or inclusive programmes outside of the regular school with reducing educational and social opportunities. ADHD may have become a proxy for the evaporation of the unskilled labour market (Tomlinson 2017), and for the contemporary management of difference. This is not to say that differences, childhood disorders or mental illnesses do not exist – it is a caution about reactions to human diversity and the deleterious impacts upon population groups who are not well served by schools.

Would Sisyphus have walked away? Failing better

If Bauman (2001, 7–8) is correct and community is a ‘tantalizing’ mirage on a shifting horizon, we share Sisyphus’s condemnation to an impossible task. Sisyphus, the King of Ephyre (Corinth), was renowned for his cunning. His punishment by the Gods was to roll a large boulder to the top of a hill. Arriving at the top of the hill, the boulder would roll down to the base of the hill. He was condemned to repeat this to eternity. Remaining committed to advancing the right to an inclusive education for all students, including students with disabilities, requires a lifetime subscription. Edging the rock of exclusion towards the summit, we know that it will again roll back from where it came. Every day, a parent will arrive at a school and go to the ‘inclusion room’ where their child with a disability spends the day with the other children with disabilities in the school. Another parent will watch as other children receive invitations to a birthday party. Some might be checking their finances to see if they can provide money for the school to hire an aide for their child. Still another, will be told by a well-meaning principal, teacher, special needs coordinator or school psychologist that their child would be safer or cared for in another school. Some parents find out that their child spends long periods of time in a seclusion room by themselves with no way of seeing out or of letting themselves out of the room. Many others, having been buffeted around by acts of exclusion will seek refuge through home schooling or at the special school and paradoxically their decisions will be described as exercises in choice. Parents of children with disabilities may read the international agreements, for example: United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD 2006), to which their government is a signatory and wonder why, when they have pledged to make progress towards the education of all children in the regular school, these governments are building more special schools. All of these scenarios, each painfully real, tell them that their children do not belong. In the face of this, it might reasonably be asked: Why persist?

In framing an answer to this stubborn challenge I sought guidance from Martha Nussbaum’s (2006) interrogation of what she considers are the three unsolved problems of social justice:

• ‘the problem of doing justice to people with physical and mental impairments’,

• ‘the urgent problem of extending justice to all world citizens, showing theoretically how we might realise a world that is just as a whole, in which accidents of birth and national origin do not warp people’s life chances pervasively and from the start’, and

• ‘issues of justice involved in our treatment of nonhuman animals’ (Nussbaum 2006, 1–2).

Nussbaum describes how people with disabilities remain an afterthought, after the basic institutions of society are already designed (98). It is also apparent that people with disabilities in general, and people with mental disabilities in particular, were left outside of the formulation of theories of justice. How might we rise above the institutional and ontological spaces we presently occupy, to progressively form the knowledge, relationships and institutional arrangements that eschew exclusion and instate the dignity of social belonging?

There is another side of the coin where parents will speak of the inclusive school their child attends. This is well documented (Henderson 2011; Hehir and Schifter 2015). How this has been and might be achieved is also available through accounts of empirical structures and practices that change school cultures: curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and school organisation (Ainscow 2015, 2016; Hehir and Katzman 2012; Cologon 2014, 2013; Tomlinson and Moon 2013; Henderson 2011; Rieser 2008; Ainscow, Booth, and Dyson 2006; Tomlinson 2001, 2014). Springboards for innovation and creativity that progress the project of inclusive education are available (Porter and Towell 2013; Westside Innovative Schoolhouse – https://www.wishcharter.org/apps/pages/socialjustice; Berhampmore School, Wellington, New Zealand – http://berhampore.school.nz). In these real-world examples of more inclusive schools, and there are many others, we witness schools that start from the act of owning and valuing all children. Belonging is the anchor from which fundamental reforms to organisational life and the message system of education: curriculum, instruction and assessment (Bernstein 1971) proceed.

Accordingly, inclusion, and within it – belonging, is an operational value and organising practice that must be placed as a key indicator of educational accountability and success. At the heart of inclusion, as we have said, lies the principle and practices of belonging. Those who are now seen as surplus populations (Bauman 2004) and are subject to economic, social, political and educational exclusion are a measure of the depth and reach of democracy. They are the guilty conscience of our institutional and cultural forms. Guidance for educators might be framed as a set of hypotheses for them to test in their schools and classrooms. The guidance proceeds from four unified and still tentative hypotheses:

Table

Hypothesis: Exclusion is a direct and growing threat to sustainable futures.

Explanation: The segregation of population cohorts nourishes ignorance, fear and hatred. Segregation is expensive – directly with respect to bifurcated plant and infrastructure, and indirectly through long-term maintenance of population cohorts in segregated provision and through its impact on health, incarceration and welfare benefits.

Hypothesis: Exclusion born of an ethos of competitive individualism in schooling compromises educational attainment and nourishes social division and conflict.

Explanation: Schooling is organised around high stakes testing programmes and student results on credentialing examinations. Student results become a measure of the quality of a school with performance tables constructed to show national, regional and individual school ‘standards’. Students are reduced to the status of being the ‘bearers of results’ (Slee 2011, 2018a, 2018b) and schools develop strategies to select, manage and reject students (Gillborn and Youdell 1999). According to this educational political economy there is a hierarchy of student value. Competitive individualism increases the precariousness of the trajectories of vulnerable population cohorts.

Hypothesis: Exclusion is misrepresented in education.

Explanation: Many of the dividing practices in education are presented within a discourse of inclusive education and proposed for their educational benefit. Streaming and banding students according to ability is a tradition of modern schooling. It has established itself as a common sense approach to teaching students of mixed ability despite there being a longstanding research demonstrating its deleterious educational and social effects (Gamoran 2010; Oakes 2005; Oakes, Gamoran, and Page 1992; Good and Brophy 2008). Many other structures and practices of exclusion exist such as inclusion rooms, units and programmes where children are congregated according to diagnostic categories. Most recently it has been argued that ‘place’ doesn’t matter, so long as practice is inclusive. Separate special schools are awarded prizes for excellence in inclusive education (https://mtommanespecs.eq.edu.au/Calendarandnews/News/Pages/2016-State-Showcase-Award-winners-for-Inclusive-Education.aspx).

Hypothesis: Exclusion must be addressed through the key message systems of schooling to instate, promote and sustain belonging as a social disposition.

Explanation: Exclusion is articulated through the key structures and cultures of schooling. Bernstein (1971) refers to the message systems of curriculum, instruction and assessment. How we construct these elements of school life has the potential to more or less exclude, or to more or less include students. Reforming curriculum, instruction and assessment is the first step (Gabel and Connor 2014). Simultaneously reform needs to apply to the organisation of education (system-wide, school-wide and in the classroom). Here I refer to plant and infrastructure: built environment, material resources, workforce composition and hierarchy, schedules, extra-curricular programme and rules and protocols. Inclusive education requires scrutiny of policies, programmes and practices (Booth and Ainscow 2011) to ensure a matching of rhetoric and practice. In this way we may achieve the deployment of language as an authentic inclusive performance and not as tactical exclusion.

Conclusion – as if

As noted above inclusive education is as frustrating as the fates afforded by the gods to Tantalus and Sisyphus. Both suffered an eternal struggle for out of grasp goals. Inclusive education has been referred to as a process (UNESCO 2018) because of the ubiquity and resilience of exclusion as a social and educational phenomenon. There is a clear line of departure from the misery shared by Tantalus and Sisyphus. Inclusive education as a political, research and teaching aspiration and method affords us successes en route to that grander destination. The outliers of inclusive education remind us of the importance of belonging for all. And herein is an often-unrecognised fact of inclusion; the beneficiaries are not just those whom have been the objects of separation. Everyone draws benefit from inclusion and that must be the stuff of another very long essay. The successes of inclusion enable us to resist the periodic and unreflexively partisan backlashes (Kauffman and Hallahan 1995; Kauffman et al. 2018; Imray and Colley 2017; Farrell 2006, 2010; Warnock 2005; Hornby 2014). Ball (2017) reminds us that futurology and conclusions are fraught with danger in spheres of social policy. Accordingly, the hypotheses suggested in this paper promise no complete resolution, they can do no more than offer a suggestive framework for some next tentative steps as we continue in our attempts to, as Samuel Beckett suggests, fail better.

Acknowledgement

Thank you to the reviewers who read and commented on this manuscript and to the guest editors, Dr Susan Gabel and Dr Christina DeNicolo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Roger Slee is a professor of education at the University of South Australia and Visiting Professor in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. He is the Founding Editor of the International Journal of Inclusive Education and his Routledge books include The Irregular School and Inclusive Education Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny.