Learning in the shadow of eugenics: Why segregated schooling persists in Australia

Abstract

Inclusive education is a global priority and binding obligation for Australia to meet as a signatory to international human rights treaties. It is also supported by evidence as an effective model of schooling for all students and supporting those with disability. Yet segregation remains deeply embedded within the education systems of all states and territories and the Australian Government has indicated its commitment to retaining it. In this article, I present a policy analysis using the concept of path dependency to identify historical events that created this dual track of segregated and regular education settings as well as the mechanisms that maintain it. I show that eugenic anxieties were fundamental in the formalised creation of segregated education settings. I also show that their expansion was fuelled by the rise of disability assessments, particularly the assessment of intellectual disability, and remain embedded in current policy even when they are antithetical to its goals. I conclude with suggestions for how this might be overcome and what it might take to achieve an inclusive education system in Australia.

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

This year is the 150th anniversary of the first legislation for a public education system in Australia, Victoria’s Education Act 1872, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA). The creation of both Acts was mired in protracted public debate and controversy. Although distinct in many ways, both Acts share a vision of addressing social inequity and discrimination. Their ultimate passing through parliament attests to the collective agreement reached on the importance of ensuring equitable access to a quality education for all young people.

There has been some progress since each Act was introduced, most notably the increase in access to education for students who had previously been institutionalised or excluded from school. However, the core vision of equitable access to education for all remains unrealised to this day. Indeed, a significant body of evidence highlights that for many students with disability, discrimination through diminished access to regular schools and classrooms through segregation, exclusion or denial of support remains all too common. These issues have been explored in considerable detail within several hearings dedicated to inclusive education at the ongoing Royal Commission into Violence, Neglect, Abuse and Exploitation of People with Disability (Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, 2020; Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, 2021). In these hearings, first-person testimony has painted a bleak picture of the number of young people with disability having restrictions placed upon their enrolment and attendance at school, or going without appropriate support in their learning, with devastating outcomes.

In this paper, I consider the circumstances in which these two Acts were developed and the events that followed. Using the concept of path dependency, I show how the events following the introduction of each Act continue to exert influence on contemporary policy and legislative reform in ways that perpetuate segregated schooling in Australia. First, I examine the rationale for abolishing the segregation of students with disability into separate schools and classrooms through an examination of the human rights and research basis. Following this, I show how the rise of eugenics contributed to the development and expansion of segregated schools in Australia and continues to exert influence on modern policy reform. I conclude by highlighting how we might step out of these shadows cast by our history and achieve genuine systemic reform.

The human right to inclusive education

Sustained momentum to desegregate school systems has built progressively over the last half century through global campaigns. The origins of this movement can be found within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) in which Article 26 declared education to be a right of all children without exception. Despite this, for a long-time children with disability remained the exception with limits placed upon their enjoyment of rights, particularly in education (de Bruin, in press). Since that time, a series of treaties and guidance documents from the United Nations has articulated an increasingly clear preference for young people with disability to be educated in general education system (United Nations, 1971, 1975, 1989, 1994). Yet they also permitted segregation for some on the basis of the severity of a disability. As a consequence, there was little change in the domestic laws of signatory nations (de Bruin, in press).

It was not until the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD; United Nations, 2006) came into force that the right of students with disability to access their education and additional support within the regular education system was formalised as being without limitation. All nation states that ratified the CRPD, such as Australia, are under binding obligations to uphold in their domestic laws and policies this right of all learners that is expressly recognised under Article 24 on Inclusive Education. In their guidance comments on implementation for the CRPD, the treaty’s monitoring body, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, notes that the placement of students into organisational groupings (classrooms, units and schools) by disability classification constitutes segregation and is discriminatory (United Nations, 2016, paras 10 and 13; 2018, para 64). Accordingly, signatories to the CRPD are encouraged to transfer the resources that they invest from segregated to inclusive environments (United Nations, 2016, para. 39, 68) and remove segregation on the basis of disability in their education systems (United Nations, 2016, para. 12).

The evidence for inclusive education

Beyond the human rights and social justice case for inclusive education, a substantial body of research literature on inclusive education exists. My review of the research on educating and supporting students with disability in regular education settings found that this results in better outcomes in relation to academic progress, social competencies and connectedness to others and communities, as well as post-school adult outcomes such as employment, health and housing (de Bruin, 2020). This review includes robust meta-analyses amassing the findings across multiple studies and decades (Carlberg & Kavale, 1980; Oh-Young & Filler, 2015; Wang & Baker, 1985). It also includes system-level studies that found that increasing time in general education settings correlates with a significant improvement in academic achievement (Cosier et al., 2013; Hehir et al., 2012). It further includes classroom-level research such as matched-sample studies comparing the outcomes for similar students in different settings. Studies using these designs refute claims that students with complex learning profiles such as intellectual, developmental and/or physical disabilities cannot receive appropriate support or benefit from inclusion in regular education classrooms, showing that they can often achieve better outcomes (Helmstetter et al., 1998; Hunt & Farron-Davis, 1992; Hunt et al., 1994; Kurth et al., 2021; Rea et al., 2002).

The case for ending segregation

The case for ending segregation is clear both in terms of human rights and the evidence of better outcomes. Yet despite the wealth of evidence making the case for change, and despite Australia’s early ratification of the CRPD, segregation remains entrenched as students with disability continue to experience persistent disadvantage, discrimination, segregation and exclusion within education systems and sectors (Poed et al., 2020; Senate Education and Employment Committee, 2016). Indeed, there appears to be little political appetite for change (Lassig et al., 2022) with the findings from the current Royal Commission into Violence, Neglect, Abuse and Exploitation of People with Disability showing that even a human-rights driven policy change, such as Queensland’s Inclusive Education Policy 2021, has not been sufficient to put an end to violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation in education (Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, 2020, 2021).

Some researchers have attributed the durability of segregation in the face of legislative and policy reform to the presence of systemic barriers to inclusion, such as attitudinal barriers and the preparation of teachers for diverse student cohorts (Sharma & Loreman, 2013). However, others have critiqued this research focus as limited, noting that it has not ultimately resulted in an end to those barriers (Schuelka et al., 2020). Focusing on barriers overlooks the lingering pressures exerted by historical events and the mechanisms that serve to maintain the status quo. These historical events can be understood to operate as feedback loops that exert ongoing influence on the design and implementation of policy reforms.

Using path dependency to analyse segregation in Australian education

The influence of past events on contemporary policy can be analysed by using a concept called path dependency. This concept enables public policies to be viewed not only as outputs from the political process but also as inputs that influence future social, economic and political conditions and decisions (Pierson, 1993). Path dependence considers the chain of events over an historical sequence. It acknowledges the ongoing influence of a sequence of past events on current and future actions, including events that begin auspiciously but become mired and inertial (Schreyögg et al., 2011). Indeed, in path dependency, the early events matter more than the later events.

The approach that I use in this study uses the three-part definition of path dependence provided by Mahoney (2000) to consider how events in the history of segregated education in Australia subverted subsequent reforms. The first part of this definition is that, rather than initial policy conditions of creating path dependency, it is attributable to early critical junctures that follow the initial conditions. The second part is that these junctures cannot be explained by the initial conditions and could not have been definitively predicted. The third is that once these contingent events have taken place, institutions created by them become durable and are reproduced through self-reinforcing, or reactive sequences that resist change (Mahoney, 2000).

There are four such modes of institutional reproduction in path dependency. Mahoney (2000) suggests that each of these contains the possibility of being disrupted. Below, I consider the relevance of two that operate as mechanisms that serve to maintain the path dependence of segregated education in Australia. Mahoney (2000) identifies the first as the utilitarian mechanism which is a rational cost-benefit assessment by those institutional actors who benefit from those mechanisms within the institution. This mechanism can be disrupted by removing the benefit to institutional actors and removing their incentive to maintain the status quo. The second is the legitimacy-based mechanism that operates through assumptions of the moral appropriateness of maintaining the status quo. This mechanism can be reversed by changing their beliefs or values of the institutional actors within the system. In the sections that follow, I use the concept of path dependency and the two associated modes of instructional reproduction as a framework to analyse why segregation in education was created and how it persists in contemporary Australia.

The initial conditions of ‘universal’ state-based public education in Victoria

Before Australia was a federated nation, Victoria became the first of the British colonies to legislate for free and compulsory education. The debates leading up to the introduction of the Education Act 1872 in Victoria, and the Act itself, adopted the rhetoric of providing an education for all children and arose from concerns about social divisions and disadvantage born of poverty and sectarianism. The achievement of Justice George Higinbotham in persuading the churches to give up providing a faith-based parish education for children and to hand over these children’s education to the State was no small feat. It took him many years and multiple attempts as well as a position as Commissioner on a Royal Commission (Victoria. Royal Commission on Public Education, 1867), before he succeeded and a public education Bill was introduced to parliament (Bessant, 1984).

A reading of the recordings of the parliamentary debates from the lead-up to this point reveals the strong desire Higinbotham and his fellow legislators to tackle societal divisions and rising crime, and shows their belief that providing a universal education for all children might bring about greater social cohesion and equity (Victorian Parliament, 1897). Despite these lofty initial aims, the vision for social justice did not ultimately match the practical outcome for many children. In reality, the new state education system really only provided education for some. Although the Act specified attendance at one of the new state schools was compulsory, there were exemptions built in. These exemptions included: receiving an education elsewhere (e.g., attending a fee-paying school); residing more than two miles from a school (e.g., students in regional or remote areas); or being prevented by ‘sickness, fear of infection, temporary or permanent infirmity’ (e.g., students with disability; paragraph 13).

The birth of segregation: A critical juncture

It could not have been imagined by the legislators at the time that large numbers of students with disability would be excluded from their peers under this policy, nor that these exemption clauses would spark the creation of an elaborate system of segregation. The exclusion of students with ‘permanent infirmity’ was written into the Act when there were only few institutions in existence serving people (including children) with disabilities and these largely provided medical services or served as residential institutions (Newman, 1974). These institutions included the Deaf and Dumb Institution, and the Blind Asylum as well as the Idiots Asylum in Kew. When the Act was introduced, such institutions received land grants and building subsidies from the State Government but were not included in the state system nor provided any form of education regulated under the Department of Education.

Yet the creation of a large and stratified system for segregating students with disability is precisely what followed. With the new State schools set up to operate without catering for students with disability, there was a groundswell of pressure for the Government to make provisions for these students’ education. Rather than extending universal education to all students, this pressure ultimately resulted in the creation of segregated settings. These were slowly introduced and expanded following a series of legislative amendments. The first was the Victorian Education Act 1890 which gave the State the power to set up segregated educational settings for students by inserting the term ‘special school’, although attendance at these was not compulsory. The second was the Education Act 1901 which provided further definition of the term ‘special school’. The original definition of these extended far beyond that which is used today, and which is now reserved for segregated schools for students with disability. At that time, ‘special schools’ also referred to other schools which lay beyond the academic instruction offered for the masses and at which attendance was optional. Some of these were vocational schools such as ‘cookery and domestic economy school, manual training school’ or kindergartens. Others were segregated schools specifically serving a population with a shared disability such as schools for the ‘feeble-minded children, deaf and dumb …[and] blind’ or institutions such as the ‘truant school [and] neglected children’s school’ (section 2 (1)a). The latter gave provisions under the Act for schools to operate as residential institutions and to charge parents fees for residential maintenance (although any education and training therein was legislated as free). It was not until the Education Act 1910 that educating children with disability became compulsory under the same legislative mandate, although exemptions remained if the child was:

in the opinion of a medical officer mentally or physically defective as to prevent such child from profitably taking part in the instruction given in a State school (paragraph 49.1).

For these exempted children, parents were required to provide an education themselves. If this was not provided (or not possible), the parents were compelled to have their child attend a special school or residential institution and to pay for the ‘maintenance’ of the child.

Eugenics and the IQ Assessment

The critical juncture of setting up segregated schooling as compulsory for children with disability was justified on moral grounds against the backdrop of rising eugenic anxiety. This anxiety followed Galton’s work in 1883 suggesting that social control measures such as segregation could repair unwanted physical or mental traits within the human species through isolation and control of ‘deviant’ humans (Galton, 1883). During the early 20th century, when Victoria’s legislative amendments gave rise to the first segregated settings, eugenicist views were actively promoted by the medical profession such as the Australian Medical Association and their state-based counterparts, and which gained particular traction in Victoria (Jones, 1999). Total segregation was recommended for those considered to be mentally deficient and thus a danger to society. They were, it was argued, hereditarily prone to crime, poverty and moral depravity and capable of affecting the wider community (Snow, 1990). The term segregation was used at this time to refer to the confinement of disabled people undertaken for the purpose of protecting society from what were considered to be genetically weaker humans of lesser value.

The language used to describe people with disability included derogatory terms as ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘mentally defective’. This positioned disabled children as inferior humans by virtue of their ‘deviancy’ and was used to legitimise the recommendation for segregation in both schools and also wider society. Achieving this at scale required ‘scientific’ assessment to identify defectives, particularly through intelligence quotient (IQ) assessments that were invented expressly for this purpose. These assessments were developed by eugenicist ‘experts’ in deviance who were lauded at the time such as Goddard, Doll and Burt (Ilyes, 2020; Newman, 1974). Updated versions of the tests they devised remain widely used in assessing children today although their origins are now obscured by time, with notable examples including the Burt Word Reading Test (Burt et al., 1927) and the Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scale, originally published as the Vineland Social Maturity Scale, (Doll, 1937).

At that time, IQ assessments and other measures were developed and enthusiastically used to discern individuals, including children, with such undesirable traits as falling below the ‘normal’ range of IQ scores, and to classify and segregate them accordingly. As more testing was implemented and the number of children classified as ‘subnormal’ rose sharply, the Victorian Department of Education responded by developing a suite of increasingly stratified and segregated options for children with disability based on their IQ scores (Newman, 1974). ‘Dull’ children with IQ scores of 71–85 accessed separate ‘opportunity grades’ (segregated classes within regular schools) while those who were ‘feeble-minded’ with IQ scores of 50–70 were segregated into entirely separate ‘special schools’. Melbourne’s first segregated school, the Bell Street Special School, opened in 1913, followed by others including one at the Travancore Developmental Centre in 1933 and the Janefield Colony for the Treatment of Mental Defectives in 1937, each run under the auspices of the Department of Mental Hygiene with no oversight from the Department of Education.

The use of IQ assessments and other measures for measuring the degree of impairment in children became an integral and ultimately socially sanctified process. It is notable that this continued beyond the end of World War 2 even though the atrocities perpetrated in the name of eugenics were more widely understood and shunned, including the violence perpetrated against children and adults with disability (Davis et al., 2020). Yet the stratified and segregated nature of a dual track system became well established. The educational segregation and exclusion of children with disability remained widespread and the justification remained unquestioned, its roots in eugenicist concepts of ‘mental unfitness’ concealed (Snow, 1990).

Indeed, the legitimisation of segregation was retained as morally appropriate albeit in changed form. This entailed a shift from promoting segregation as a means to protect society from the disabled, instead promoting the segregation of the disabled to protect them from society. Such justification is observable within the series of subsequent treaties and human rights instruments articulating educational rights of children with disability. Notably, these articulated a restricted vision and standard for that education based on a model of benevolent care rather than equitable academic progress on the same basis as other children (Winter and de Brun, 2021).

Accordingly, the segregation and exclusion of children with disability remained entrenched and even expanded. In 1946, two years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 3600 students received an education in segregated schools and classes nationally in Australia: some 20 years later this rose dramatically to 19,000 in 1966. By the time the 1975 Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons was introduced, there were 56,965 students attending segregated schools (Magliocca & Magliocca, 1980). Although these settings were a far cry from the isolating and dehumanising residential institutions of the late 19th and early 20th century (Andrews, 1979), many children residing at or attending these still accessed no education. For example, 15% of Victorian children with disability were deemed ‘ineducable’ were still cared for by voluntary organisations run under the auspices of the Mental Health Authority without oversight of the Department of Education (Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission, 1973).

Early federal government involvement in special education

It was at this moment in history that the radical reform agenda of the Whitlam Government was ushered into Australian education through the creation of the Schools Commission. Historically, the Federal Government played little part in setting policy for education, with constitutional responsibility remaining largely with the States. However, following a Constitutional amendment in 1946, the Federal Government was granted legislative power with respect to benefits for students (Tannock & Birch, 1972). This effectively enabled them to set policy (including educational policy) and make financial grants tied to that policy, although this was rare. Through the creation of the Schools Commission, this changed as recurrent Federal funding was introduced across a suite of programmes that included special education (Lingard, 2000).

The Schools Commission had a lasting impact on the long-standing acceptance of segregation and exclusion of students with disabilities. This stemmed from the first report of the Interim Committee for the Schools Commission (1973) headed by Peter Karmel whose terms of reference were to examine funding arrangements in school education. Within this report were a number of criticisms and recommendations regarding the education of students with disability in a section on ‘special education’. Notably, the Committee took a strong moral stance that posed a strong challenge to the social acceptability of segregating students with disability. The Committee criticised the outdated assumptions about the ineducability of children with intellectual disability. They also criticised the presumption that they required medical care regulated by health authorities rather than an education regulated by the Department of Education. Under their financial terms of reference, the Committee further criticised the wastefulness and inequity of duplication and service gaps under this diffused model and recommended that the Department of Education assume responsibility for educating all children.

The Committee also extended their critique beyond financial matters to a number of elements of the way education was provided for children with disability. These elements included the failure to account for whether students with disability were receiving educational services or where they were placed. Further critique was aimed at the misalignment between States regarding the provision of educational services and support for children with disability, and the limitations and bottlenecks to service provision created by the reliance on assessment and diagnosis. The Committee concluded that there was little transparency in the system and an unknown number of children with disability were under-served or excluded in their education.

The Committee’s challenge to the hitherto unquestioned legitimacy of segregating and excluding students came with a strongly articulated preference for children with disability to be educated in regular classrooms. This challenge undermined the moral approval for segregation. Although the 1973 Karmel Report did not explicitly use the term ‘integration’, it provided the stimulus and the rationale at both Federal and State levels for integration policies in the 1970 and 1980’s, such as that which followed in Victoria (Collins, 1984).

The long shadow of IQ assessments in modern policies

Ultimately, the Committee’s recommendations did not effectively bring about a reduction in segregation. Rather, their focus on recurrent funding gave rise to influential system-level resourcing models for funding the provision of educational services for individual children with disability (Fulcher, 1986). With schools now required under state-based legislation to provide an education for all children, and finally assuming responsibility for those previously placed into care facilities, the focus turned to the cost of educating them. Particular attention was given to the allocation of resources to support schools amidst considerable anxiety about the feasibility of the education of students with disability in regular schools without a substantial investment of funds, most notably voiced by teachers’ unions (Sykes, 1989).

It is here that the historical tools of diagnosis and assessments, particularly those relating to intellectual disability born from the eugenics movement, took on new life, playing a leading role in the state-based funding models of the 1980’s such as Victoria’s Program for Students with Disabilities. These models used disability categories and degrees of impairment to distribute funding along an increasing scale based on: (a) a verified diagnosis of one of the approved categories of disability; (b) whether the degree of impairment met tight eligibility criteria indicated by diagnostic assessment results such as IQ tests (de Bruin et al., 2020). Paradoxically, while this categorical funding model accompanied the integration policies designed to reduce segregation, it ultimately expanded disability categories and the assessment industry. New categories were developed, such as those focused on student behaviour, and gave rise to new segregated settings in which students, such as behaviourally disordered students, were placed (de Bruin, 2019). Thus, while some students gained access to regular education settings under the integration movement, almost double that number, moved from regular to segregated settings (Sykes, 1989).

The initial conditions of the Disability Discrimination Act

At the time in which these models were being developed, the UN Decade of the Disabled took place culminating in the release of the Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities by the UN (United Nations, 1994). Against this backdrop of global advocacy for disability rights and local development of categorical funding models, Australia’s Federal anti-discrimination legislation was written. In 1992, the Federal Government introduced the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA). Contained within the DDA was section 22 which made it unlawful to discriminate against students with disability by denying enrolment or access to learning and participation at school. Also contained within the DDA was an expanded definition of disability, grounded in a biopsychosocial model of disability rather than the medicalised models relying on specific disability assessments and degrees of impairment. This was a progressive move and one with the potential to make schools more aware of their obligations for supporting all students with disability, not just those receiving targeted funding.

The durability of disability assessments and special education

Yet with the States’ pre-existing educational legislation and funding models already in place, the reliance on assessments, particularly (but not exclusively) IQ assessments, remained. This was because, despite the broad definition of disability within the DDA, each state retained legislative and funding models based on categorical resource allocation. Under these models, only students ‘counted’ in official State Education Departmental statistics were students receiving categorical funding. This meant that the number of students eligible for reasonable adjustments under the DDA was counted only using state-based funding statistics and thus was substantially underestimated. For example, in Victoria, under the Program for Students with Disability, 15% of students were estimated eligible for, and needing, reasonable adjustments under the DDA, but only a quarter of those actually received targeted funding and were ‘counted’ in official statistics (Department of Education and Training Victoria, 2016). This lack of funding was often cited by schools as an explanation for not providing additional support or reasonable adjustments for students, highlighting the confusion between a student’s eligibility for support funding versus a school’s obligation to provide that support regardless of funding (Jenkin et al., 2018; Senate Education and Employment Committee, 2016; Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education References Committee, 2002).

The DDA did not offer clear guidance regarding implementation in schools nor did the Federal Government oversee that the States disbursed their allocated funding consistent with the DDA that underpinned that funding. A Senate inquiry into the education of students with disability criticised the Federal Government for giving discretionary power to the states and sectors for the use of Commonwealth recurrent funding. They were also criticised for showing ‘scant regard’ in handing funds to the states without overseeing their distribution in accordance with the obligations under the DDA (Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education References Committee, 2002, p. 18). Twelve years after its passing through parliament, the DDA was reviewed by the Productivity Commission (2004). In their report, the Commission highlighted structural issues within the DDA which meant the continuation of what they identified as ‘one of the most serious forms of disability discrimination (in terms of long-term effects on individuals) … exclusion from, and segregation in, education’ (p. 83). In conjunction with the findings from the previous Senate report (Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education References Committee, 2002), this fuelled the ongoing work that resulted in the Disability Standards for Education 2005 (DSE) offering a set of standards for schools’ compliance with the DDA.

Although the DSE were designed to address identified barriers to inclusion experienced by students with disability, research shows that in fact they did not (de Bruin, 2019; Poed et al., 2020). The Standards offered no incentive to change and the States maintained their funding models and school enrolment policies based on medical assessments, particularly IQ scores. The assessments of disability, and the segregation of students into settings on the basis of those assessments remained operational and even expanded (de Bruin, 2019). In Victoria, for example, the historical practice of assigning ‘dull’ and ‘backward’ children on a sliding scale of segregation remained within the continued existence of segregated schools with enrolment restrictions tied to IQ scores. These include Special Developmental Schools that typically restrict their enrolments to students with an IQ score below 50, and special schools, that typically restrict their enrolments to students with IQ scores below 70.

The path dependency of segregation: How history undermines contemporary reforms

The use of IQ and other disability assessment scores to place children with disability into segregated settings has remained durable despite being antithetical to the human rights and disability rights movements that inspired our discrimination laws. In the contemporary funding models and criteria for placement within segregated schools, these assessments continue to operate as inputs into contemporary policies and undermine change. A slew of reports and reviews have shown that, rather than addressing equity gaps and extending access to services for students who needed them, the maintenance of categorical models served to limit such access to students. These reports have noted that for students whose diagnosis sat outside ‘approved’ categories of disability or who did not meet the criteria for impairment to meet funding eligibility, enrolment refusal or a denial of support services was common (Jenkin et al., 2018; Senate Education and Employment Committee, 2016; Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education References Committee, 2002).

It is clear that while school funding and enrolments have been anchored to assessments of student impairment, the logic of the past continues to operate and undermine contemporary reforms. These assessments ostensibly operate as a utilitarian mechanism based in costs and benefits. Contemporary policies driven by anxiety about the costs of educating students with disability in unreconstructed mainstream schools have essentially been informed by policies and events from history. This exemplifies the very definition of path dependence with state policies that co-exist with the DDA and the DSE yet remain beholden to the diagnostic tools and assessments developed during the darker parts of history. Thus, despite anti-discrimination legislation that the government claims meets our national obligations, contemporary funding and enrolment policies have continued to drive segregation.

A far more promising disruption to the assessment and funding-oriented mechanisms maintaining segregation has been provided since the Federal Government revised their recurrent funding for the States and introduced a needs-based funding model informed by the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD). From 2015, the NCCD has operated as an annual census of students for whom reasonable adjustments are provided under the DDA and the DSE. Every school in every jurisdiction and sector lodges annual data for each student with disability who received reasonable adjustments under the DDA and the DSE and these data are aggregated and provided to the Federal Government. These data capture the number of students served at each of four levels of adjustment intensity. Since 2018, the NCCD has been used to inform the model by which federal funds are disbursed to states and sectors for supporting students with disability. Under this model, the top three of the four levels of support attract an increasingly generous ‘loading’. These data are used by the Federal Government to calculate the recurrent funding from these disability loadings which is then provided to the state and sector authorities for disbursement to schools.

Unfortunately, to date the NCCD has not resulted in a nationally consistent needs-based approach. The Australian Education Act 2013 Cth) and the associated Australian Education Regulation 2013 (Cth) outline the conditions that must be met by system authorities to receive their Commonwealth financial assistance through the NCCD loadings. These have the potential to address the previous failure by the Federal Government to oversee the States use of funds in alignment with the DDA previously mentioned. However, a review by the Australian National Audit Office (2017) found the money provided to State Education Departments was still disbursed using their original categorical funding models. The Federal Government was criticised for their continued failure to monitor States’ compliance in redistributing funds in accordance with the legislative framework. A recommendation was made by the ANAO to amend the legislation to monitor compliance of the fund delivery and use (Parliament of Australia, Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, 2019).This course of action was, however, rejected by the Federal Government both in relation to the ANAO recommendation (Australian Government, 2020) as well as the many submissions petitioning for this change in the recent DSE review (Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 2021).

Discussion

Despite the rhetoric of educating all students within policy and legislation over the past 150 years, some children, most notably those with disability, were excluded from the start. Establishing the mass education system without students with disability in mind left a legacy of fragmented add-on reforms and amendments stipulating additional and separate provisions for these students rather than extending the existing entitlements. This provided the conditions by which segregated schooling has become path dependent. As outlined above, this fragmentation has continued over the past 150 years of Australian education and a dual-track system of segregated and regular schools persists despite Australia’s ratification of the CRPD and the binding obligation to shift to a single inclusive system for all students. It has persisted despite both local and global advocacy for equitable access to quality education for students with disability, despite binding international obligations, and despite legislation prohibiting discrimination and mandating needs-based funding models.

The history of segregation in Australia presented in this article has revealed the nexus between diagnostic assessment, funding and enrolment mechanisms. The development of intelligence testing and associated disability assessments operated as an early critical juncture that set up path dependency in segregated education. This resulted in the systemic embeddedness of diagnostic assessments used to decide educational placements justified on moral and economic grounds through various periods of eugenicist beliefs, surviving unscathed through the post-war era of human rights. Diagnostic assessments remain a primary feature of educational placement and support provision for students with disability through self-reinforcing sequences of events. These events have included the integration movement and the concomitant rise of categorical resource allocation models. Diagnosis even appears to be surviving beyond federal anti-discrimination and needs-based funding legislation ostensibly articulated a shift away from such a model of practice.

There remains some hope for change. Categorical funding models across several states have recently been revised to better align with the needs-based logic of the NCCD and hold some promise for challenging this reliance on diagnostic assessment and diagnosis. These models have already been enacted in South Australia and Tasmania, with a new model being rolled out in Victoria and another currently being designed in Queensland. Several even use the language of inclusion, such as South Australia’s Inclusive Education Support Program model and Victoria’s Disability Inclusion model. There are reasons to be cautious about these policies, especially the use of the terms ‘inclusive’ and ‘inclusion’ in funding models that extend to segregated settings, as in the case of Victoria. Moreover, the Victorian model retains categorical funding eligibility criteria for the highest funding band (Department of Education and Training Victoria, 2022) placing it at odds with other states such as South Australia whose models rely on the broader DDA definition of disability and are thus more closely aligned to the needs-based philosophy of the NCCD and the obligations under federal legislation. These models are still too new to allow a clear picture of their success in closing equity gaps or their impact on the rates of segregation but there is much hope that this will indeed be the result. A clear future research priority is to analyse their impact in precisely these areas.

An additional research priority is to examine how the beliefs and values of the institutional actors who influence the reproduction and maintenance of a segregated system might be changed. Mohoney (2000) suggests that this may be one way to disrupt path dependency based on mechanisms of legitimacy such as have been demonstrated in educational segregation. One priority would be to consider how such a change in beliefs might be achieved in relation to politicians whose stated commitment to maintain segregation is based in the neoliberal argument of ‘school choice’ (Australian Government, Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, 2020). This could also be considered in relation to other institutional actors such as peak bodies representing professionals involved in education. There is considerable advocacy by many such peak bodies who derive an economic or other benefit from the retention of segregated settings. That these groups argue for the expansion of segregation and associated funding for them highlights that they operate as a more utilitarian mechanism, oriented towards costs and benefits, with clear vested interests in maintaining the status quo (Australian Special Education Principals’ Association, 2021; New South Wales Teachers Federation, 2019). This is not a situation isolated to Australia having been observed as a factor in the ongoing justification of segregation in many European countries:

Strong vested interests in the area of education can explain a certain passivity on the part of states in tackling segregated education. Decision makers and political leaders, school administrations, teachers and families can sometimes actively resist changes that may alter situations of relative privilege in education. The capacity of these actors to articulate their demands and to raise their criticism of government policies is much higher than the ability of vulnerable families to fight for the right of their children to education (Council of Europe, Comissioner for Human Rights, 2017, p. 10).

Conclusion

Changing beliefs is key to addressing path dependency where institutional actors such as these play central roles in reproducing the status quo based on their own understandings and values and therefore it is critical to consider how changing these beliefs, values and understandings might be achieved. One suggestion is to conduct research with teachers and school leaders who have moved from segregated to regular education settings and to understand what is involved in this shift in beliefs and how it might be achieved at scale. Ultimately this is vital work. Systemic reform, such as the phased closure of segregated schools and transitioning to a single inclusive system, will need to be achieved with the teachers and leaders from these schools. There will be a valued place for all teachers and leaders in a newly transformed inclusive system, just as there will be for every child.

Much of the information presented in this article draws on darker times from history and in particular the lingering influence of eugenics. Yet the transformative work of Justice George Higinbotham shines like a beacon of hope. Higinbotham convinced the churches to give up their monopoly on educating parish children and hand this responsibility to the state during a time of heightened tension and division between the churches and the state. It is no small irony that achievement took a Royal Commission headed by Higinbotham, given that we are, once again, in the midst of another Royal Commission which is paying close attention to the barriers faced by students in accessing an inclusive education in line with their human rights. Higinbotham’s work shows us that with tenacity, vision and a seat at the table, profound change is possible. Much hope rests on the current Royal Commission succeeding similarly in overcoming the vested interests and social divisions that are so entrenched and convincing those who oppose change to back a vision for a cohesive society and an inclusive education for all children.