Surely there’s some truth in what cherry says?
I work with disabled people in a professional capacity so I spend a considerable amount of time assessing how the environment can be best suited to their needs and wishes, and how to make reasonable adjustments.
I know of one young man whose parents want him in a mainstream school so that he is fully included. This has been tried now for three years. The school are saying they can’t keep him and other children safe, despite extensive adjustments (full time TA, conversion of a staff office into his own classroom).
The fact that they had to build him a classroom probably tells you that he is excluded rather than included. They do try to integrate him where possible but he finds it distressing. He goes into assembly but he screams until they allow him to leave. He’s developed some quite maladaptive strategies in order to be removed (screaming, biting) which does suggest a level of distress that I don’t think he should have to experience.
This is also distressing for his older brother to witness.
The LA have offered a place in an alternative school but his parents refuse because they want him included in mainstream. I feel so sorry for this child because he has no peers, no friends at all. It’s not ‘inclusion.’
Does this not prove that sometimes it’s not possible to integrate a child in the way parents might prefer?
Many years ago I worked in a wonderful special school that I think this young man would have loved. Like many special schools, it was closed down and the land sold off for housing. The children were robbed, in my opinion. The current system is much cheaper and we’ve all bought into the narrative that inclusion can always be achieved. It’s hard to know how to make it better, because any suggestion that a child can’t be fully integrated goes against the prevailing narrative.