This book considers the progress that has been made since the 1980s in educational provision in the UK for disabled students, including children and young people in schools and adults in higher education. The authors, drawn from a range of pedagogic, professional and activist backgrounds, consider the advances, challenges and difficulties that make up the current experience of disabled students and look to the future of what might come next in the pursuit of greater educational opportunities.

As editors, our own starting point is to consider these issues through the perspective of the social model of disability; a model theorists and activists have long advocated, albeit in various guises. In short, this juxtaposes a disabled person's impairment with the response that society has to it, so that rather than perceiving disabled people as subject to overarching deficiencies caused by their impairment, instead it is the environment and arrangements through which disabled people live that often cause the barriers and disadvantage that they experience.

In education, as elsewhere, this has had a strong impact; requiring, for example, steps to be taken to ensure greater access for all. This was not always the case. Following the recommendations of the 1978 Warnock Report a disabled child would be likely to be grouped by his or her education authority into one of roughly 11 categories, broadly relating to a medical or quasi-medical label, and then placed in a requisite educational setting purportedly designed to cater for their perceived ‘deficit’. In many respects, such approaches have changed, and today diversity is often seen as an asset rather than a problem. Schools and colleges are encouraged, and to an extent legislatively required, to remove barriers for disabled students.

However, despite changes in policy and practice, this has rarely challenged the fabric of the way in which education is delivered to disabled students. This is explored by Anne Borsay in her chapter, locating the history of education for disabled people within a context of social oppression and measuring the progress to date and the challenges ahead with a human rights yardstick.