The move to integrated schooling for students with disabilities, begun in the 1960s, initially focused on meeting ‘special needs’ within the mainstream, without consideration of overall system change. Recent policy documents promote respect for diversity but integration remains weighted towards ‘accommodating’ minority needs within an increasingly strained old discourse of normality that serves the interests of the dominant majority and informs school policy and practice in Ireland. An exploratory research project called ‘Hidden Voices’ aimed to register for the first time how young Irish people with disabilities read their experience of mainstream second level schooling. This paper presents findings on two interrelated aspects of their experience – mobility and peer relations. It will emerge that constructs of normality that inform schools’ built environment profoundly distort the school experience, social and academic, of students with disabilities. A new paradigm of normality is called for.
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