Free Book Shines Light on Inclusion from Pupils’ Perspectives

‘The Inclusion Illusion’ by Rob Webster is available free to download via UCL press and exemplifies how children with SEN experience mainstream schools. The central contention of this book is that for many pupils with high-level SEND, inclusion is an illusion. The day-to-day reality of ‘being included’ is not, as tends to be argued or assumed, synonymous with receiving what might broadly be thought of as ‘a mainstream education’. Instead, far from being taught alongside their peers, the inclusion of pupils with high-level SEND is revealed to be a chain of varying degrees of marginalisation.

This book argues that the way schools are organised and how classrooms are composed creates a form of ‘structural exclusion’, which preserves mainstream education for typically developing pupils and justifies a diluted pedagogical offer for pupils with high-level SEND. This book prompts questions about what inclusion is – what it looks like to those in whose name it is operationalised – and suggests why a more authentic form of inclusion is necessary and how it might be possible.