Introduction

In May 2010, the new Coalition government published its Programme for Government (HM Government, 2010). In it, the government states that it will ‘prevent the unnecessary closure of special schools, and remove the bias towards inclusion’ (p 29). This claim is based on two core beliefs; first, that the previous government's decision to close special schools was unnecessary; and, second, that the outgoing administration had created, in policy and practice, a bias towards mainstream education.

During the 2010 election campaign these two policy assumptions were placed in the lap of the Prime Minister-to-be, the Rt Hon David Cameron MP. Whilst out on the election trail he was approached by Jonathan Bartley, a South London parent of a disabled child, who had had to fight extremely hard to get his son into a mainstream school.2 Mr Bartley questioned the party leader about a statement in the Conservative manifesto that suggested they wanted to reverse an ‘ideological bias’ towards inclusive education (Conservative Party, 2010). He claimed that his son's experience clearly demonstrated that there is no bias towards inclusive mainstream education, but rather a bias towards special school provision.

Mr Cameron's response was to talk about the difficulty that parents currently experienced in getting the choice of school that they wanted for their child. His aspiration seemed to be that a reformed system could bring about real parental choice that could lead to effective provision irrespective of ‘whether it is [in a] special school or whether it is [in a] mainstream [one]’. He placed emphasis on the notion that the fulfilment of parental choice about an educational placement would be a marker of an appropriate, responsive and effective system.

Clearly, both Mr Cameron and Mr Bartley agreed on the point that the system currently does not work for parents, does not serve their choice and ultimately can lead to disabled children being placed in inappropriate educational services. Where they differed was the direction in which the bias was travelling. In this chapter, we will argue that, in part, both Mr Bartley and Mr Cameron were correct in their assertions. Mr Cameron was right that there was an ideological approach to inclusive education; however, we would argue that this is more in the sense that the last government's policy belied practice in this area. He was also right in the claim that in the current system parental choice is undermined by the way in which policy frameworks and legislation are structured. We will, however, suggest that the structural bias is, as Mr Bartley argues, towards specialist and typically segregated education for disabled children.