The following article appears in Issue 37 Nov/Dec 2008 of SEN: The Journal for Special Needs. Comments on the issues raised in the article are most welcome.
Talking about the Education of Children with Cerebral Palsy
“The problem, Norman,” said the Education Officer (SEN), “is that we do not agree with your view of cerebral palsy, so we do not see that conductive education has anything to offer us.”
She added that in making placements at schools, her LEA relied on assessments by paediatricians and therapists. I did not at all find that reliance surprising as there is, as far as I can tell, little or no national debate among education professionals about the education of children with cerebral palsy nor about the criteria, based in any theory of learning, that determines school placements: as with schools, so with children’s centres. At bottom, the Education Officer was content that we have the education of children with cerebral palsy about right, no further discussion being necessary.
In the July/August edition of this journal, two articles were specifically relevant to the education of children with cerebral palsy. The first “Cerebral Palsy” (p30) presented an almost entirely medical view. Only towards the end was the education of a child with cerebral palsy obliquely addressed: “Teachers should be aware that learning difficulties may be present but this is not the rule.” The second article “Inclusion and Special Education” (p74) made a similar point, but largely ignored questions about the education of children with cerebral palsy, instead making a series of rather general points about the benefits of inclusion as ‘the absolute key to true equality and tolerance”.
This may well be true. Certainly, my Education Officer would have felt entirely comfortable with and justified by these two articles: the view presented of cerebral palsy and the education issues limited to setting out the pro-inclusion case, as if that was all that mattered.
What else matters, for all children, are important questions about teaching and learning and about how we know what works: the quality of training of their teachers, the curriculum and pedagogy, that together define children’s learning experience. As for children with cerebral palsy, such discussions have been largely absent from the national educational debate, at least since the 1980s, when, for me, SEN became personal and professional.
Recently, demand has rightly increased for evidence-led policy and practice in education, as in medicine. However, the OECD [Fn.1] has this warning: “Education is not an autonomous discipline. Like medicine or architecture, it relies on other disciplines for its theoretical foundation. But unlike architecture or medicine, education is still in a primitive stage of development. It is an art, not a science” and “We do not understand sufficiently well how children and adults learn to dare to offer an educational or training guarantee”. If true, where does that leave my Education Officer and her certainty in her view of the education of children with cerebral palsy?
Conductive Education offers an alternative perspective: an integrated system and practice of education that addresses simultaneously, the cognitive, emotional and physical development and learning of the child. Conductive Education recognises that cerebral palsy is an injury to the developing brain and that whilst the primary problem is physical and non-progressive, asserts that the effect upon all areas of development may be constantly changing and may result in a generalised dysfunction that can and should be addressed as problems of learning. Conductive education welcomes the contribution of professional colleagues in the education of the child, yet does not require multi-professional teams, rather, as with the teacher in any other classroom, giving the prime role to the conductor; a professional with four years theoretical and practical training. Conductive education, therefore, not only provides a different viewpoint about the nature of cerebral palsy, it has something to say about the training of those charged with the education of children with cerebral palsy and about the structured environment (including pedagogy and curriculum) in which their learning takes place.
Let’s start talking .
Norman Perrin [Fn.2]
Footnotes
Fn.1 Understanding the Brain: Towards a new learning science. Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2002. Readers might also be interested in Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science and Evidence in Education: Linking Research and Policy, both also published by the OECD 2007.
Fn.2 Norman qualified as a teacher in 1968, afterwards working in Kenya and the UK. In 1990, following the birth of a daughter with cerebral palsy, he learned of conductive education. In 1997, helped by Sheffield Council, he co-founded Paces School and Campus. In 2007, a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship, enabled him to research innovation in the education and training of children and adults with cerebral palsy in Canada and America.
