Limbrick’s campus model for including all children in their local education system. Part 2

There is a tendency and probably a necessity in the West and other parts of the world to categorise children for their education provision. Children, once categorised, are sent to different education settings depending on what is available. The categories are never clear-cut and are therefore open for discussion and dispute involving parents, schools and education authorities.

As an example, the UK’s new proposals for special needs education has three categories: (1) children with special needs who can be helped to cope in mainstream schools with their peers; (2) children who will be put in special units attached to mainstream schools; (3) children who will need to be in special schools separate from mainstream schools. Existing special schools in England have a fourth category of children (4) in special classrooms whose school day has to be a very careful mix of education, care and health support. So now a country’s children can be divided into five categories if we start with children who have no special needs (0). Are these categories real or are they a mere institutional convenience? I am going to argue for the latter.

In Part 1, I imagined a family getting ready for visitors. I find I have to exercise my powers of imagination to break out of the ‘inclusive versus special education’ conundrum. Perhaps the present exclusive institutional systems that have never properly considered the needs of all children and families are themselves a failure of our imagination.

So now I want to imagine a remarkable family whose life’s work is to adopt children. This might include fostering and just picking up unwanted or orphaned children. They might be in your country or mine.  The children span all five categories listed above. If we visit them in the summer months to see what the ten or twenty children are doing we see activities include swimming, reading, nature study, gardening, bonfire, cycling, homework projects, drawing, screen time, games and chores around the house. There might need to be visits to doctor or dentist. Some children will have a sleep during the day and some children will be tasked with helping look after others in particular activities. This all goes as smoothly as days with this many children can. Children are doing what they want to do or need to do and choosing who they want to do it with. They are each taking some responsibility as far as they can for the smooth running of the family unit. Perhaps at the end of the summer holiday, these children go off to separate mainstream schools, units and special schools or just stay at home if nothing else is available.

The point of this story is to remind us all that categorising and dividing children is not a natural law and in some situations is not necessary or desirable. Families do not need to categorise their children. The children in my imagined family stay together, live their varied lives in the family group and learn about each other. But schools and classrooms are a necessary fact of life in very many places and children are measured, formally or informally, for their potential ability to cope in them and benefit from them. While integration is generally held as an ideal, I doubt anyone is going to suggest children in my third and fourth categories above would automatically benefit from being with their peers for lessons in chemistry and geometry. So compromise is necessary.

A common but limited compromise is for some children (probably in the second category above) to go into special units in the grounds of mainstream schools as is planned in the UK.  The validity of this compromise would depend on how segregated these children are from those in the mainstream. Taking the compromise further, following a logical approach, there could be additional units for children in the third and fourth categories. What was a school now becomes a campus and is the integrated education setting for all children in the area, special needs or not. It would be a big change in how we think about schools, but I cannot see any logical argument against the campus model being an ideal to work towards.

Peter Limbrick, July 2025