Raising awareness isn’t enough: The role of the psychology of education in disability-related justice and inclusion in primary classrooms

Abstract

What: When it comes to education, disability inequality is arguably a structural and systemic issue. The social model of disability, enshrined in teacher education programmes in the UK espouses the ways in which school environments rather than disabled children themselves, need to adapt and change. However, the role of psychology in addressing disability-related systemic injustice is less clear. The aim of this paper is to consider the potential role of the psychology of education in working towards disability justice in schools. Why? Many inclusive teacher-education programmes set out the ways in which environments may be created to include disabled children. Psychologists have focused on disabled children’s needs to access and participate in the classroom, but often do not consider their exclusion in social model terms, from curriculum materials, classroom displays, or material culture more generally. Favazza and colleagues (e.g. 2017) now offer a sizeable body of research showing that disability representation in school classrooms is negligible. This lack of representation is reflected among the staff in the teaching profession, where the 2016 census suggests that 0.5% of English teaching staff declared a disability (DfE, 2017) and more recent census data shows disability data were not collected (DfE, 2023a). It is this lack of representation of disabled people, and its possible psychological underpinnings, that this paper addresses. How? This paper uses social and affirmative model lenses to (a) explore the ways in which disability may be seen as a structural inequality in contemporary UK education, and (b) suggest ways in which researchers and practitioners in the Psychology of Education may work to towards disability justice. This may be achieved by considering extant research practice, and through research focusing on perceptions of and attitudes towards disability, alongside existing psychological work that focuses on disabled children’s individual needs.