Special education needs in the UK Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Special education needs in the UK - Essay Example This research will begin with the statement that it is an incontestable reality that students possess different capabilities to learn, diverse emotional behaviors, various social skills, and dissimilar physical endowments. This prompts the necessity to adopt a curriculum and an educational system with programs that care for students who may not cope well in the mainstream education system and programs. The inclusion of students with special needs in a mainstream education system, in the UK, continues to gain dominance with legislation in place to provide special education needs (SEN). Poon-McBrayer and Lian define SEN students as a group that needs special services to achieve and attain their full learning capabilities. The Warnock report initiated the debate of inclusion of mainstream and special education, a move that saw the development of special education assume an all-encompassing approach. It is doubtless that the extent of reforms in sociological viewpoints, about the provisi on of education to students with SENs in the UK, has evolved tremendously since the 1978 Warnock Report and remains highly appreciable. Social transformations have continued to transform special education in the UK. Before the turning point, marked by the Warnock Report, segregation and exclusion of SEN students had been a dominant practice. In the past, the perception of disabled students was undesirable and non-inclusive. Segregation of nondisabled students featured serious cases of abandonment, neglect, and rejection.... Social exclusion among students, as Anabel (2010) identifies, was a complex challenge to tackle as a means of promoting equal opportunities for all learners, disabled and non-disabled. Exclusion did not exist in one form or kind, a challenge that rendered it a great challenge to achieve inclusion. It is noteworthy that there are varied degrees of segregation as McDonald (2008, p.28) identifies. The social processes that define exclusion of the disabled, in most learning environments, are contentious and should attract ardent considerations from educators and policy makers. Exclusion of the disabled, in the education system, involved the denial and limiting of very fundamental rights. The multidimensional character of factors that promote social exclusionism rendered it a demanding endeavor to promote inclusion. Noteworthy is the fact factors that escalate exclusion of SEN students were structural as opposed to circumstantial. That is, exclusion emanated from the set up, and sociologi cal viewpoints held by the very society whose students with SEN experience the exclusion. Social exclusion promotes educational exclusion and the later cannot end when the former still prevails. Such is the complexity entailed in finding an insight into social exclusion in the education system over the past. The UK had experiences of exclusion of SEN students for a long time before the concern led to the formation of the committee that came up with the Warnock Report. Inclusion is necessary to avoid possible exclusion of society members with special needs. Inclusion involves cooperative learning that engages all students from the mainstream schools and