Please do not see this as a book that is just for the specialists – activists in the field of disability education talking to activists in the field of disability education – but as a book for anyone who cares about young people and about putting into practice the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and later instruments such as the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (ratified by the United Kingdom in 2009).

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration famously declares that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. But in a factual sense we all know that this is not true. We all come into this world differently endowed. Some of our endowment is external – riches, loving parents, congenial surroundings; some of it is internal – our physical and mental capacities and personalities. What we eventually become is shaped by the complex interaction of these internal and external forces together with what happens next.

So what should happen next? If all human beings are to be free and equal in dignity and rights, they have to be given the means to become functioning members of the grown-up world. Everyone, says Article 26(1) of the Universal Declaration, has the right to education. Education, says Article 26(2), shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The only halfway positive right in the European Declaration of Human Rights of 1950 is in the First Protocol: ‘No one shall be denied the right to education’. Though narrowly construed as a right of ‘access to such educational facilities as the state provides for such pupils’ (as Lord Bingham put it in A v Head teacher and Governors of Lord Grey School [2006] UKHL 14, [2006] 2 AC 363, para 24), in this country we have decided that we have a duty to educate everyone.