The Dilemma of Difference (Part 2)
Holding the SEND problem
Something Wicked this way comes, although not in the sense that Shakespeare meant.
In Part 1, I made the case for the SEND crisis in England being a Wicked problem; not evil, but fiendishly complex.
I wrote the post to encourage those who don’t feel they have a complete hold on the problem to join the debate because - and this is the thing about Wicked problems - no one person has a complete hold on the problem; what’s more, they never will. And right now we are in a period of collaborative sensemaking whereby, to find a way forward, we need to open up the debate respectfully and listen to what is being said.
I also made the following points:
There are fundamental problems with schooling which mean that this problem will keep re-emerging and shifting - we should accept this.
There isn’t a once-and-for-all solution and the system cannot be optimised to resolve the ‘Dilemma of Difference’.
Despite the above, we need to keep moving forwards because there will be better ways of doing things.
In this post, I would like to talk about how we imagine the problem to be. I will suggest that the problem is too big, too ambiguous, and too complex for one mind to hold and, therefore, to make sense of the problem requires many people - an act of collective sensemaking. How we imagine the problem to be - not What we imagine the problem to be - because it is not in stasis: the problem, and how we conceive it, continues to shift. I use the term imagination because we cannot hold this problem clearly in mind like a replica of reality. Instead, comprehension is an act of imagination.
Scale and ambiguity
It is sometimes said that only a handful of people in the world understand Einstein’s Theory of General relativity (this post suggest it is only three!). If so, then the Dilemma of Difference is even more difficult because, I am going to suggest, no single person can grasp its scale and complexity.
To begin, we would have to understand the full range of human diversity, including the biological and social origins of human difference. As a species, we have tried to get to grips with this by inventing various categories and labels. It hasn’t always gone so well!
I spoke with Dr Neil Gilbride this week, an academic with complexity credentials, about the Wickedness of the SEND problem. When I mentioned the labels that we attach to human difference he pointed out that these are ways of people dealing with complexity. If we set aside for a moment whether these labels accurately diagnose and describe real human differences, we can reflect on this idea that labels arise as a sensemaking tool, and have legitimacy on these terms as well as their truthiness. We can get hung up on the truthiness argument and forget that what we are trying to do is understand things well enough to make a positive difference to those who need our help. When we diagnose someone as autistic, the intent is to make things better for them in some way, whether that means helping them come to terms with who they are and why they have experienced the world in a particular way, or so that resources can be directed towards supporting them, should they need this support.
[It is fair to say that there are plenty of examples of where the categorisations of human diversity haven’t been so benignly applied in human history, but we live in an era, and in a place, where society is far more tolerant and supportive of difference. Granted, we are still doing things that are nowhere near as helpful as they need to be, but much is done in good faith.]
The point here is that labels are a way of us getting a grip on the problem. These labels can do harm, but they are there partly because we cannot comprehend the diversity of human difference without grouping these differences together and calling them something. Some of these labels will describe biological and/or psychological conditions, whilst some will merely describe collections of behaviours or symptoms without any known cause. Some are more helpful than others. But they will all help someone, somewhere, make sense of something that is otherwise impossible to get a grip on.
For educators, a tension arises because the categorisations we apply are often medical in origin. They are intended to serve purposes of diagnosis, treatment and research and are not designed to be helpful to educators. Teachers need to know what educational barriers exist and what can be done to help. The medical taxonomy does not always convey the information teachers need. Ben Newmark makes the point that a teacher needs to know that a pupil struggles with concentration, not that they have ADHD; that a pupil is sensitive to noise, not that they are on the autistic spectrum; that a pupil will need help accessing written material, not that they are dyslexic. It is the need, not the label, that is often most useful. That is not to say that the label is not useful at all, it is just not that informative to the teacher. Indeed, it can mislead because these labels describe the norm within the difference, not the range. They can lead to assumptions about need.
However, we cannot expect teachers to do without categorisations and labels. Without these, we would unreasonably expect teachers to hold in mind the complex profile of the needs of every pupil they teach. The response to this problem may be a taxonomy of need that speaks to educators. Approaches such as the Response to Intervention model have arisen to meet this need.
In addition to the problems of scale and ambiguity, the Dilemma of Difference can be understood according to opposing paradigms, which we will turn to next.
How do we think about difference?
If we are going to engage in this debate, we must be able to recognise what philosophical position arguments arise from; this is an inherent part of the Wickedness. I am going to give a very brief description of the relevant paradigms, but I would encourage you to read more.
Our SEND system as it is in England today is built on a medical model of disability whereby a diagnosis of impairment is made so that there can be treatment. This often leads to a disability being viewed as a misfortune; a burden to be born by the unlucky person. This viewpoint invites pity, charity, or intervention. Its reliance on a platonic ‘norm’ of a healthy person can be criticised as ableist. However, a disabled person may perceive of their disability in this way and welcome treatment which reduces their disability or enables them to overcome the barriers that stand in their way.
Arguably, this paradigm has become more dominant as a result of the 2014 reforms, as is evident through the increased demand for diagnosis to access resources so that schools provide appropriate interventions for those with additional needs.
In opposition to the medical model is the social model of disability which situates the problem as being with society, not with the individual. From this perspective, society is set up to exclude certain people, deliberately or inadvertently. Take kerbs as an example, which are a small step up from a road to a pavement (curbs and sidewalk respectively in the U.S.A.). These assume that you can step up, which excludes by design those in a wheelchair. In this sense, the individual has an impairment which affects the way they interact with the world, but the disability is imposed by society.
Evidence of the influence of the social model can be seen in schools in talk of ‘inclusive teaching’ (sometimes called quality-first teaching). Whilst a medical model would diagnose those who cannot access lessons fully and put in place additional interventions to compensate, the social model implies that the teaching should, by design, not exclude those with impairments - dropped kerbs for all. The kerb example illustrates something else which is that a dropped kerb both avoids excluding the impaired person and stops the unimpaired person from tripping over the kerb. Similarly, inclusive teaching is non-exclusionary and benefits those without impairment. This argument is made in relation to practices such as modelling, scaffolding, and clarity of explanation.
If you enter the arena of debate right now, you will see these paradigms playing out in the discourse. For example, some commentators are arguing to shift the focus from a deficit-model of diagnosis, labelling, and intervention to a system whereby resources are directed to schools so that the core offer is non-exclusionary and minimises the need for '‘different’ or ‘extra’. This notion is sometimes referred to using terms like ‘universal offer’ and ‘inclusivity’ (although, as noted in Part 1, these terms are used to mean different things by different people).
It is also worth mentioning one more perspective, which is that of neurodiversity. Even the social-model of disability contains the idea of there being a norm from which people deviate from. Neurodiversity advocates for accepting the full spectrum of human diversity as ‘normal’. This perspective is popular among young adults who identify as being neurodiverse and who have experienced stigma, exclusion or bullying as a result of their difference. As adults working in a SEND system which medicalises difference, the neurodiversity paradigm can feel a little ‘out there’, but if we are to hear all voices in the debate, including those of young people, we must set aside our preconceptions.
If you are interested in how we reconcile these paradigms, I would suggest reading Hornby’s paper which proposes a an educational model of inclusive special needs provision.1
Lenses
The last aspect of the complexity of this problem I would like to discuss is the disciplinary lenses through which we can view the problem.
Should we be looking at the Dilemma of Difference in relation to special educational needs as an economic, social, political, philosophical or or psychological problem, or something else? Well, you can probably guess that my answer is: all of the above and more. The risk is that if we view it only through one lens, the solution will inevitably fall out of that perspective (a case of Maslow’s Hammer: when all you have is a hammer, you see everything as a nail). So, if our lens is social, we will lean towards solutions that make children feel less excluded from education and society. If our lens is political, we will prioritise appeasing powerful interest groups.
However, that is not to say all lenses are equally valid or indeed useful. Wickedness is not an excuse for relativism. There are facts. One of these is the economic reality of the crisis: the threat of bankruptcy for local authorities; the unaffordable forecasted costs; the proportion of public funds tied up in litigation; the excessive costs of private special school placements. The economic lens is undeniably important.
The problem is also undeniably political, with a lower and upper case ‘p’. Parents of children with special educational needs must not be disenfranchised lest we create further conflict and disharmony between parents, schools and the wider education system.
We should also look through the lens of systems theory. The SEND system is an attempt to impose simplicity on a complex problem. It is necessarily imperfect. As with all attempts to solve Wicked problems, there are unintended consequences and emergent behaviours. Remember the idea of metamorphism discussed in Part 1 - the game of whack-a-mole we play. The problems we see now are a consequence, at least in part, of how we tried to solve the problem last time. In his blog posts here and here, David Thomas describes this succinctly, weaving together political, economic, philosophical and systemic perspectives to describe the problem and how we arrived at this point.
Is it any wonder people steer clear of this debate? It is thornier than a thorn bush, stickier than a toffee pudding, and has more twists and turns than a twisty turny thing (I couldn’t resist the Blackadder reference). But it’s okay! Because we do not have to hold all of this ourselves - we cannot. Each of us can hold perspectives on the problem. In doing so, we should embrace the ambiguity, welcome different voices, and seek to learn more. We should make this an inclusive debate.
There is that concept again: inclusion. We keep using the word, but are we clear what it actually means? If there is a Part 3, it feels like it is this that needs some unpacking.
Hornby, Garry. (2015). Inclusive special education: Development of a new theory for the education of children with special educational needs and disabilities. British Journal of Special Education. 42. 10.1111/1467-8578.12101.