Those for the first part of the 20th century are concerned mainly with matters of detail. Some of the detail, in spite of the unfamiliar contexts, seems familiar enough: Leicester Municipal Technical School (ancestor of today's De Montfort University) found that participants in the Government Scheme for Higher Education of Ex-Service Students after the First World War "are decidedly inclined to unpunctuality, to snatching odd minutes for cigarette smoking, and are certainly lacking in the ordinary care necessary in handling school apparatus". During the Second World War, the vice-chancellor of Liverpool University, Sir Arnold McNair, complained that "pupils did not always go to the university which provided the best instruction in their particular subject and so their education suffered". She had thought it would apply to just 2 per cent of pupils instead of the 20 per centseeking them. It had become too bureaucratic with parents coming to feel that "all the cards were stacked against them".The Department for Education and Skills denied there had been wholesale closures, saying the number of children taught in special schools had "remained broadly static" for 10 years..
As long ago as 1962, the then chief secretary to the Treasury was telling the prime minister Harold Macmillan that he was "concerned about the provision we are making for the universities. It turned out to have the widest appeal of any play at the National.". Baroness Warnock, the architect of the drive towards teaching special-needs children in mainstream schools, is to deliver a damning indictment of the system. She argues that schools should serve a wider variety of needs, including autism, but should be small enough to provide a reassuring and personal environment for emotionally vulnerable children.Lady Warnock, whose change of heart wasrevealed in The Independent last October, acknowledges her responsibility for designing the statementing system, which had "tu`rned out to be a not-very-bright idea". She also calls for a review of the statementing process - whereby parents can apply for a statement of their children's needs - claiming it is "wasteful and bureaucratic" and "must be abolished".Her U-turn is confirmed just a day after the Conservatives called for a moratorium on special-school closures, claiming the number of places in them has been reduced by 6,000 since 1997.Shesays support for inclusion "springs from hearts in the right place" but she describes its implementation as a disastrous legacy.
In a pamphlet to be published by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, she says the pressure to include pupils with special needs in mainstream schools causes "confusion of which children are the casualties".She says she wants to see an independent committee of inquiry set up to investigate how the policy is operating. But now, except for people who have had a classical education, you get no frisson when Agamemnon behaves like a pig."You get around it but generation by generation the feeling I get is that people are being cheated of something that's really good to know. Certainly it makes life harder, if you produce work 50 per cent of which is from a classical repertoire, if people do not have an overview of English literature and English history."Students are currently required only to study history until the age of 14. I did history because I liked doing it so it was never a burden.
