THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF SPECIAL EDUCATION POLICY: WHERE DID THE 1981 ACT FIT IN?
| Published date | 01 June 1986 |
| Date | 01 June 1986 |
| Author | JOHN WELTON,JENNIFER EVANS |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1986.tb00617.x |
THE DEVELOPMENT
AND
IMPLEMENTATION
OF
SPECIAL EDUCATION POLICY: WHERE DID THE
19$P
ACT FIT IN?
JOHN
WELTON
AND
JENNIFER EVANS
The passage of legislation is just one point in the process of negotiation and bargaining
which formed the will to legislate and continues throughout the period of policy implemen-
tation. Using the
1981
Education Act as a case study, this paper develops a conceptual
framework which sees education legislation as a significant reference point, a statement
of government intent, but implementation as a political process involving negotiation,
bargaining and compromise between different sectors of government, between central and
local government, between education, health and social services, between administrators
and professionals, and with parents.
INTRODUCTION
The White Paper on Special Needs in Education, the 1981 Education Act and its
associated regulations and circulars may be seen as the definitive government state-
ment of assumptions and intentions about the education of a section
of
the pupil
population of England and Wales. In this sense they could be called 'government
policy', and all actions consequent upon the passage of the legislation could be
called 'implementation
of
government policy'. Such a simple view
of
the relation-
ship between policy and implementation, and the relationship between legislation
and administrative and professional behaviour, presumes a linearity
of
cause and
effect rather than a process which investigation shows to be inherently interactive
and recursive.
As
Welton (1981) noted: 'New laws do not arise in a vacuum nor
do they create entirely new forms of practice'.
It is widely acknowledged that legislation is rarely implemented as its architects
intended. British educational legislation is broadly enabling rather than minutely
prescriptive. Where there is consensus, such legislation enables and encourages the
John
Welton is Senior Lecturer
iti
Educational Administration, and Jennifer Evans is Research Officer,
at the University of London Institute
of
Education.
This paper draws from the findings of the Pilot Project on Assessment of Special Educational Need,
as well as from the current research project on the 1981 Education Act. The authors wish to acknowledge
and thank Gwynne Vorhaus for her contribution to the Pilot
Project;
and
Brian
Goacher, Klaus Wedell
and participants at a project research seminar
for
their comments on an earlier draft. While each
of the two research projects has been funded by the Department
of
Education and Science, the views
expressed in this paper are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those
of
the Department.
Public Administration Vol. 64 Summer 1986 (209-227)
0
1986 Royal Institute
of
Public Administration
ISSN
0033-3298 $3.00.
210
JOHN
WELTON
AND JENNIFER EVANS
’reasonable person’, ’the enlightened local authority’
-
i.e. one which implements
policy along the lines promoted by the prevailing (government sponsored) model
of good practice. Where there is dissension, legislation inhibits the ’unreasonable
person‘ or ‘rebel local authority’ (Welton 1982).
Weatherley and Lipsky (1977), reporting on the implementation of equivalent
special education legislation in the State of Massachusetts, described the way in
which at the point of sei-vice delivery various school personnel (or ’street level
bureaucrats’) developed coping mechanisms to manage the demands of their job,
which ‘may in the aggregate, constrain and distort the implementation of the special-
education reform’. However, while the power
of
the professionals and adminis-
trators who operate at the interface between an organization and its clients is difficult
to control, nevertheless they are constrained by dependence on both the organiza-
tion and their clients for the continued existence of their roles (Barrett and
Hill
1984).
All policy has a history and the 1981 Education Act can be seen as one point
in
the development of ideas about handicap and the management of handicap in
the education system. The Act had its roots as far back as 1966 when various
organizations asked the then government to set up a committee of enquiry into
special education
-
a committee which was established eight years later in 1974,
producing the Warnock Report on Special Educational Needs in 1978. In the
following year, not waiting for the Wamock Committee to report, the govern-
ment issued its Circular 2/75 which, through its recommended procedure for
identlfylng and assessing children with special educational needs, formalized the
changing relationship between education and health service personnel in the assess-
ment and placement
of
children with various categories of handicap.
The Education Act which reached the statute book in 1981 and was brought
into force on
1
April 1983 had a very long gestation period. Its principles were
formed in a climate
of
educational thinking and government policies very different
from those which prevailed at the time of its implementation. The changes in
professional thought about the education of children with special educational needs
were reflected in the shift of responsibility for severely subnormal children from
Health to Education in 1970, and the espousal by the Wamock Committee of the
relative principle of need. The policy of integrating children with special educa-
tional needs in ordinary schools had roots in the wider move to incorporate
’minority groups‘ within mainstream institutions and can be seen as a logical
development of the principle
of
comprehensive education. Similarly the rights given
to parents in the 1981 Act to see the written professional advice on which local
education authorities make decisions about children’s needs and provision had its
origin in the broader movement for a citizens’ rights to information and to be
involved in decision-making about their own future. Even the way in which the
Act failed to take any explicit account of resource provision reflects a style of
education management reminiscent of the 1960s period of expansion rather than
the financial stringencies which were to accompany the Act’s implementation.
The point at which the main tenets of new government policy crystallize are
unclear. The principal officer (civil servant) in the Department of Education and
Science responsible for co-ordinating work on the Education Bill claimed in a radio
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