This revised edition of a popular text offers students an updated and comprehensive overview across special education. It critically examines the intellectual foundations of special education and considers the consequences of their influence for professional and popular thinking about learning difficulties. The chapters place inclusion within a social and political context to highlight how concepts have been influences by theory and ideology across the years.
The book offers guidance to students on specific issues such as reading and behavioural difficulties with theoretically grounded information. With a fresh chapter discussing current research, intersectionality and increased marketisation within education this book reflects the new landscape and legislation of special education.
“Essential reading for anyone studying or working in either special or inclusive education… Few could build the case as well as Thomas and Loxley.”
Melanie Nind, Professor of Education, University of Southampton, UK
“Few books in the field of education merit the soubriquet 'must read'. This is one such."
Philip Garner, Professor, Brunel University, UK
“An absolute must-read for all of us committed to realising genuine inclusion within schools and society!”
Jan Valle, The City College of New York, USA
"Finishing your first reading of their book makes you realise that you must return to it, such is the richness of the analysis and reach of its detail. This is a tour de force, a line in the sand for all successive work in the field of inclusive education."
Roger Slee, Diamond Jubilee Professor of Disability Studies, University of Leeds, UK
Gary Thomas took up the post of chair in education at Birmingham in 2005. Before university teaching, he worked as a teacher and as an educational psychologist. In higher education – at the University of Leeds, at Oxford Brookes University, UWE and University College London – his teaching and research have focused on inclusion, special education, and research methodology in education. He has received awards from the ESRC, the Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the DfES, Barnardos, the Cadmean Trust, local authorities and a range of other organisations. Most of his funded research has been on inclusive or special education, though his Leverhulme Research Fellowship was awarded to examine the role of theory in education. He currently leads an ESRC thematic seminar competition in the Teaching and Learning Research Programme on the assessment of quality in educational research. He is the founding co-editor of a Taylor & Francis Carfax journal, the International Journal of Research and Method in Education and he is an editorial board member of the British Educational Research Journal.
Andrew Loxley is now a lecturer in education at Trinity College,, having previously worked at the University of Leeds and the Open University as a research fellow. Prior to undertaking his PhD in quasi-markets and special education, he worked as a teacher in a residential school for children with behaviour problems.
