Abstract
This year marks the anniversaries of two ground-breaking pieces of legislation which form the focus of this Special Issue of the Australian Journal of Education. The first is the Victorian Education Act of 1872, which passed through the Victorian parliament 150 years ago, on December 17th of that year. The second is the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA), which turns 30 this year, having passed through the Australian parliament on 15th October in 1992. Both Acts were developed amid extensive public debate yet ultimately passed through parliament because of strong support for their shared aims to eliminate social inequity and discrimination. The focus of this Special Issue is the progress towards achieving those aims, and the challenges that remain for students with disability. While first planned as a jointly guest-edited issue with Professor Linda Graham, extraordinary circumstances – including floods and a pandemic – have conspired to make it a sole-edited edition. I remain deeply grateful for her involvement in the feedback on abstracts and papers, and note that her published works are highly influential within the papers that follow and that her contribution to research funds made at least one article included here possible.
During the decade leading up to the introduction of the Victorian Education Act 1872, Attorney-General George Higinbotham argued strongly for a free and secular education to be universally provided by the government for every child of school age regardless of religion, wealth, class or postcode. It took many attempts, and a Royal Commission examining education, before this was achieved. Victoria subsequently became the first of the British colonies, and amongst the first jurisdictions in the world, to legislate for such a universal public education system. The Victorian legislation served as a blueprint for the rest of the Australian colonies and formed the foundation of public education in Australia. While elsewhere in the world, the arguments for public education were strongly influenced by the rise of industrialisation, in Australia they were largely focused on a social benefit (Bessant, 1984). It was an extraordinary achievement and is an aspect of Victoria’s history of which we should rightly be very proud. This is why Higinbotham’s face has been chosen for the cover of this Special Issue, peering at us through layers of paint that were stripped away during the renovation of the Old Council Chamber at the Trades Hall in Carlton. I hope that through this Special Issue the writers can revive his original dream of a universal education system in which all children were to belong, regardless of their circumstances.
What followed the introduction of this legislation a series of amendments and concurrent social movements that eclipsed Higinbotham’s vision of social cohesion. These amendments legislated for the creation of separate settings for students with disability and resulted in the large and stratified system of segregated institutions, schools and classrooms solely serving young people with disability that remains a feature of our public education system to this day. For the young people within these settings, what was offered in the name of training often bore little resemblance to the education provided for nondisabled young people and was even sometimes unrecognisable as education at all (Andrews, 1979). These settings, and the curricula within, were all founded upon medicalised and biologically deterministic assumptions about disability as a deficiency in human intellect and potential.
In 1992, the Federal Government introduced the DDA. This Act was developed during the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD; United Nations, 2006) in which Australian Disabled People’s Organisations were heavily involved (Kayess, 2019). Contained within the DDA was a broad definition of disability, as well as section 22 which made it unlawful to discriminate against students with disability by denying enrolment or access to learning and participation at school. The DDA was, in many ways, an innovative piece of legislation and somewhat ground-breaking in its day, particularly in shifting the narrative about disability from one of ‘welfare’ to one of ‘rights’ (Tyler, 1993). It did, however, fall short of specifying a preference for students with disability to access their education within the regular school system, as was being drafted at that time within Article 24 in the CRPD. Similarly, the broad definition of disability within the DDA has had little impact on the medicalised thinking within society and policy-making that remains embedded in the logic and rationale for segregated settings and funding models.
This Special Issue contains a set of articles that answered the call for submissions to commemorate these two legislative birthdays. Collectively they note what has been achieved since public education and nondiscrimination were legislated in Australia, as well as highlighting the remaining challenges. The first article, written by me, details how the rise of eugenics fuelled the growth of an industry of testing and assessment to identify people viewed as ‘mental defectives’. As I show, the resulting intelligence tests and behavioural assessments remain the foundation of educational funding models and segregated school enrolment and, as such, act to undermine reform. The second article by Cátia Malaquias provides an elegant legal analysis of the substantial misalignment between the DDA and the CRPD in both scope and content, in particular noting that the maintenance of a dual system of regular and segregated schools remains the great barrier to be overcome in achieving inclusive education. It is that dual system that is the focus of the analysis by Suzanne Carrington, Carly Lassig, Lara Maia-Pike, Glenys Mann, Sofia Mavropoulou and Beth Saggers in the third article. This article presents an examination of what drives and what hinders the transformation to a single inclusive system in Queensland, the Australian jurisdiction with the most progressive policy for inclusive education in Australia. The following two articles, both by Elizabeth Dickson, examine the legal barriers to inclusive education for school students with disability. The fourth article considers the shortcomings of the DDA itself, while the fifth article examines the adversarial nature of the legal system within which it functions. The sixth article by Tanya Serry, Pamela Snow, Lorraine Hammond, Emina McLean and Jane McCormack considers the preparation for teachers to work in inclusive classrooms through the example of reading instruction. Their findings highlight lingering attitudinal barriers within the teaching workforce, and those who prepare them, as many teachers expressed low confidence in their capability to support students experiencing reading difficulties, low expectations of those students’ capacity to learn and make progress, and a view that the learning of students with disability is the responsibility of specialists beyond the general education classroom. The seventh and final article by Tim Pitman and Matthew Brett considers how inclusion and disability are themselves conceptualised and traces the trajectory of conceptual models over the past 150 years through the example of higher education policy. The authors conclude by noting the lingering traces of historical thinking such as charity and welfarism within contemporary policy and argue for a new model, grounded in what they term (A)ccessibility, that would genuinely support the agency and educational aspirations of students with disability.
Collectively, this set of articles notes considerable progress in educating students with disability. Yet they also show that the persistence of segregated settings and the presumption of an alternative curriculum or set of instructional practices to address ‘special’ needs remain deeply woven into the educational landscape in Australia, including in legislation, school enrolment and placement provisions, educational support and funding models, and initial teacher preparation. Each article offers clear recommendations and affirms the importance of change if education institutions such as schools and universities are to enable all students, without exception, to learn, to flourish and to belong.