A teacher hands out a worksheet, says "read this and write your answers in two minutes," and puts the video on. A student who is Deaf cannot follow the video. A student who reads slowly runs out of time. A student who writes by hand with difficulty hands in half a page. A student who is still learning the language of the lesson understands the worksheet only in part. Four children, four different barriers, one lesson that was designed for none of them.
Nothing in that story required a label. It required noticing that the lesson had barriers, and that some can be removed for everyone at once. That noticing, and the legal and professional machinery around it, is what inclusive and special education is about. It also carries some of the sharpest disagreements in education: about words, about where children are taught, and about who decides.
Not diagnosis or advice. This piece describes how education systems and research treat disability. It does not describe how to identify any condition, and the invented students below are illustrations. If you have a concern about a child, start with the class teacher and the school's learning-support or special-needs coordinator, and with the child's family and doctor.
There are two classic ways to think about disability. The medical model locates the problem in the person: a body or mind that differs from a norm and should be treated, trained or cured. The social model locates the problem in the setting: a person who uses a wheelchair is disabled by stairs, a Deaf person by a lecture with no interpreter. The phrase came out of British disabled people's organisations in the 1970s (the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation's 1976 statement) and was named by the academic Mike Oliver in 1983. Most scholars see neither model as the whole story. The World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (2001) combines them: how someone functions depends on the person's body and on their environment and supports. A pair of glasses is a medical fix, a large-print book is a barrier fix, and both can be right.
For a teacher the practical question is to ask, for each barrier, "what in the lesson, the room or the test could change?" before asking "what is wrong with the child?" Try it on five common situations.
Illustrative scenarios, not cases. In practice the two lenses are combined, and the person's own view comes first.
Without JavaScript: for a student who uses a wheelchair and has a class upstairs, the person lens asks how to get the student up the stairs; the setting lens asks why the class is upstairs and whether it can move or a lift can be installed.
A slogan from the disability-rights movement sits behind this: nothing about us without us. It was used by activists for years before James Charlton gave it to a 1998 book, and it means that disabled people, and children and families, are consulted in decisions about their schooling, not only informed of them.
Language about disability changes quickly, differs by country and is sometimes contested within a community. Two patterns are worth knowing.
Person-first language ("a student with a disability", "a child with Down syndrome") puts the person before the characteristic; it is the default in much US professional and legal writing. Identity-first language ("a disabled student", "an autistic child", "a Deaf student") treats the characteristic as part of who someone is; it is standard in the UK for "disabled people", and many Autistic and Deaf communities prefer it. In a 2016 survey of 3,470 people in the UK, Lorcan Kenny and colleagues found that "autism" and "on the autism spectrum" were the most widely accepted terms; autistic adults, family members and parents endorsed "autistic" far more than professionals did, and almost half of professionals favoured "person with autism". The authors' advice for anyone unsure was to ask the people concerned. A capital letter marks a similar choice: "Deaf" often refers to a cultural and linguistic community that uses a sign language, while "deaf" describes hearing level (a distinction going back to James Woodward, 1972).
Terms also mean different things in different countries, and this trips up readers of international research. The phrase "learning disability" refers to an intellectual disability in the UK, but in the US and Canada it usually means a specific difficulty with reading, writing or mathematics in a student of typical general ability. "Special educational needs" is a legal term in England and Ireland; in the US the legal term is "disability" under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Old words ("retarded", "handicapped", "cripple") are now considered offensive; in 2010 the US passed Rosa's Law to replace "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability" in federal law. Look a few up.
Summaries of common usage, not legal definitions; usage in other countries varies and keeps changing.
Without JavaScript: "learning disability" means an intellectual disability in the UK and a specific difficulty such as reading or maths in the US; "Deaf" often marks membership of a sign-language community.
A working rule used by many teachers and writers: use the words a person or their community uses about themselves; where you don't know, ask, or use the plain description ("a student who uses a wheelchair") rather than a label. Avoid "suffers from", "confined to", "special" as a euphemism, and "high-functioning" or "low-functioning".
Rights to education for disabled children are recent. The US Rehabilitation Act's Section 504 (1973) banned disability discrimination in federally funded programmes; the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990, promised a "free appropriate public education" in the "least restrictive environment" and gave families a role in an individual plan. In the Supreme Court's Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District (2017) the court held that the plan must be reasonably calculated to let a child make progress "appropriately ambitious in light of the child's circumstances". England's Warnock Report (1978) and Education Act 1981 moved toward teaching children in ordinary schools "whenever possible"; the Children and Families Act 2014 created Education, Health and Care plans. Italy's Law 517 of 1977 is usually credited with moving children with disabilities into ordinary classes. The Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994) called on governments to give inclusive education highest priority. And the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (adopted 13 December 2006; in force 3 May 2008; Article 24 is education) commits states to an inclusive education system at all levels. In 2016 the Convention's committee issued General Comment No. 4 on Article 24, which draws a sharp line between four things.
| Term | In the Committee's sense |
|---|---|
| Exclusion | Students are directly or indirectly prevented from or denied access to education |
| Segregation | Education in separate settings designed for a particular impairment or several, apart from other students |
| Integration | Placing students in existing mainstream schools if they can fit the standard requirements |
| Inclusion | A system change in content, methods and structures so all students take part |
The comment's key point is that being in the same building (integration) is not inclusion unless the school itself changes. Not everyone agrees with all of it, as the section on evidence below explains; some Deaf and blind organisations, including the World Federation of the Deaf and the World Blind Union, asked unsuccessfully for an exception for sensory-disability education.
Without JavaScript: a child refused any school place is excluded; a child sent to a separate school only for children with one kind of impairment is segregated; a child placed in the ordinary class with no change to teaching, tests or room is integrated; a school that redesigns teaching so all can take part is inclusive.
The curb cut is the standard picture. Sloped kerbs were campaigned for by disabled activists in 1970s Berkeley, California, and are now used by people pushing prams, wheeling suitcases and riding bikes. The writer Angela Glover Blackwell named this the "curb-cut effect" in 2017: a change made for one group tends to help many.
In teaching the matching idea is Universal Design for Learning (UDL), developed from the 1990s by David Rose and colleagues at CAST in the US and now used in many countries. It asks teachers to plan lessons with several routes in from the start: multiple means of engagement (why to learn), representation (what is presented) and action and expression (how to show learning). CAST published version 3.0 of its Guidelines in 2024. Be careful about the claim that follows: reviews describe the research on UDL as a whole framework as limited and hard to separate from other good teaching, and the strongest evidence is for particular practices (captions, explicit instruction, worked examples). UDL is better understood as a planning habit than a proven programme.
Two other words teachers must separate: an accommodation changes how a student learns or shows learning (extra time, a reader, speech-to-text) without changing the target; a modification changes what the student is expected to learn. Which one fits is a judgement made with the student, the family and the specialists. Switch options on to see the curb-cut effect.
Six invented students and a lesson delivered by speaking. Each option opens a route for the students listed. Illustrative: a real class is messier, and each student's own preferences decide.
Without JavaScript: switching on captions lets the Deaf student, the student who finds long speech hard to hold, and the student still learning the lesson's language all take part; typed answers help the student who writes slowly; extra time helps the student who needs it.
Evidence in this field is harder to gather than in most of education: children differ, randomising children to schools is rarely possible or ethical, and "inclusion" covers very different practices. A few findings are fairly solid. Explicit, well-structured teaching with practice and feedback helps students who find learning hard, as it helps others. Small-group or one-to-one targeted interventions, especially in early reading and number, have good evidence. The Education Endowment Foundation's 2020 guidance for mainstream schools makes five recommendations, among them high-quality teaching for all, carefully chosen small-group and one-to-one interventions, and working effectively with teaching assistants. Teaching assistants are a good example of method versus deployment: in the large Deployment and Impact of Support Staff study in England (Blatchford and colleagues, 2009), pupils who received more TA support made less progress, which the team attributed to how assistants were used (substituting for teaching) rather than to assistants themselves; the EEF now reports positive effects when assistants deliver trained, structured interventions.
On placement the evidence is mixed and the argument is as much about values as data. Reviews of studies on inclusion (for example Ruijs and Peetsma, 2009; Hehir and colleagues, 2016) generally find small positive or neutral effects on students with special needs and little or no harm to classmates, but the studies are mostly observational, so children placed in mainstream classes may differ from those who were not. Here are the positions, in their own terms.
Another contested area is who gets identified. Counts depend on definitions as much as on children. In 2022-23 about 7.5 million students aged 3 to 21 in US public schools, or 15%, were served under IDEA (US National Center for Education Statistics). In England in the 2025/26 school year, 14.8% of pupils received "SEN support" and 6.0% had an EHC plan (Department for Education), about 21% altogether. Neither figure is a measure of how many children "are disabled": each reflects a country's legal categories and funding. In the US, researchers disagree about whether Black and other minority students are over- or under-identified once family income and achievement are taken into account (Morgan and colleagues found under-identification in several categories; Skiba and colleagues documented over-representation in others), and both sides in this literature agree identification should serve the child rather than ration support.
Disability in school is a relationship between a child and a setting, so teachers get the most leverage by changing lessons, rooms and tests, with the child and family at the centre. Respectful language follows the people it describes; the law now separates being in the building from being included; the evidence supports specific practices more than slogans; and on where to teach, serious people still disagree.
Try this: take one lesson, worksheet or video you use or have seen. List three barriers in it, then one change for each. Notice how many of the changes would help other people too.
Sources. UPIAS 1976; Oliver 1983 and 1990; WHO ICF 2001; Charlton 1998. Kenny et al., Autism 2016; Woodward 1972; Rosa's Law 2010. Section 504 1973; EHA 1975 and IDEA 1990; Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District (2017); Warnock Report 1978, Education Act 1981, Children and Families Act 2014; Salamanca Statement 1994; UN CRPD (adopted 13 December 2006, in force 3 May 2008) and General Comment No. 4 (2016, paragraph 11). Blackwell, Stanford Social Innovation Review 2017; Rose and Meyer 2002; CAST Guidelines 3.0 (2024). Blatchford et al., Deployment and Impact of Support Staff 2009; Education Endowment Foundation guidance on special educational needs in mainstream schools (2020) and teaching assistants. Ruijs and Peetsma, Educational Research Review 2009; Hehir et al., Abt Associates 2016; Kauffman and Badar on placement; Warnock, Special Educational Needs: A New Look (2005). Morgan et al., Educational Researcher 2015; Skiba et al., Exceptional Children 2008. NCES Condition of Education (students with disabilities, 2022-23); DfE Special educational needs in England (2025/26). The scenario data are illustrative. This is educational information, not advice about a particular child.