Included but Not Supported (Part 2): An Honest Conversation About Inclusion

Blog #18 | The System and the Child series

TL;DR: Inclusion is not a place; it is about matching a child with the environment and support they need to succeed. Through two contrasting student stories, this article shows that when children receive the right support at the right time, they can build the skills needed to thrive and even transition successfully to mainstream settings. But when placement decisions are driven by fear, stigma, or adult expectations rather than readiness, children can lose hard-won progress. At the same time, not every struggling child belongs in special education. Misidentification can be just as harmful as denying support. Good inclusion requires evidence-based decisions, meaningful support, and a willingness to focus on the child's actual needs rather than what feels most comfortable for the adults involved.

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Last week, I shared about least restrictive environment (LRE), special education set up in the US and the Netherlands. And how inclusion is one of the most important ideas in special education and, yet, one of the most misapplied. This week we will dive a littler deeper.

I also want to share two more classroom stories. Because the inclusion conversation is not complete without them.

When the conditions are right

He was bright. That was the first thing you noticed. Eager, curious, quick to light up when something clicked. What he did not have (yet), was much in the way of academic skills and social emotional skills. He also came with behaviour challenges and a previous school experience that had not been kind to him. Despite the history, autism and speech disorder, with the right support, challenge and time, this student made quantum leap all within a year.

But here is what I noticed more than any of that: he was resilient. He wanted to learn. He wanted to show you what he could do the moment he felt safe enough to try.

He had an AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) device, which he was hesitant to use at first. I have worked with AAC long enough to know that the device is only as useful as the relationship around it. I modelled using the device as much as I could throughout the day. Across story time, literacy, math, social skills. Slowly, he started finding words on his own. And then more words. And then short sentence.

His mother was clear from the beginning: she was not focused on mainstream. She understood her son’s needs and wanted him to get the right support first. That clarity and that absence of pressure to place him somewhere he was not ready for, freed us to actually do the work.

Over the course of that school year, I watched this child build a foundation that his previous experience had never given him. Letters, numbers, reading, writing, communication. The skills came because the environment was right, the support was consistent, and nobody rushed what needed time.

Even after I left the school, what we had built together was solid enough that it carried him forward all the way to mainstream.

That is what inclusion looks like when the groundwork has been laid.

When fear drives the decision

Many years ago, I had a student.

Earlier that school year, her school work had suffered terribly and not because she was not capable, but because she she was in a mainstream classroom and the school had not assessed her adequately, had not identified what she needed, and had not put anything meaningful in place to support her. She was simply forced to be like her peers. When she arrived at our centre. She was behind, struggling, and clearly in need of consistent specialist input.

She had been in our special education centre for less than a year. She was beginning to find her footing. Slowly, but it was there. Then, the family decided to move her back to mainstream.

I understood the impulse. Watching your child in a specialist setting when you had imagined something different is hard. The feelings that come with that grief, fear, denial, the weight of what it means. It is very real and they deserve to be taken seriously.

But she was not ready. And I said so.

I asked the family to let me continue working with her through the end of the school year. To give her a few more months of consolidation before the transition. They declined. We didn't hear back from the family, so, we assumed that her transition back to mainstream went well.

Within months into the new school year, she had regressed drastically. The family was devastated that she had lost skills that had taken considerable work to build.

The question nobody wants to ask

Put those two stories side by side and a question starts to form. One, that I think gets avoided because it is uncomfortable.

When we push a child into an environment before they are ready, whose needs are we actually serving?

Last week, I shared the story of a mother who learned to accept her daughter's diagnosis after having to sit with a difficult question: was her resistance really about her daughter's diagnosis or was it about her own sense of herself? The grief, the fear, the stigma she had absorbed without even realising it.

She shared that conversation with me. And it stayed with me.

When these unprocessed emotion drive placement decision making, it doesn't end well.

The fears often go something like this:

They will fall behind their peers. I understand why this feels true. But a child who is already struggling will fall further behind in an environment that cannot meet their needs. And worse, they risk developing learned helplessness along the way. Getting the right support now is what keeps them in the game long term.

They will not learn like their peers. They are already not learning like their peers. That is precisely why we are having this conversation. The question is not whether they learn differently. The question is whether they get the support that helps them learn at all.

They will pick up bad behaviours in special education. Children pick up behaviours in every setting. Mainstream classrooms included. Difficult behaviours come from a child who is lost, overwhelmed, and has no other way to cope. The setting is not the risk. Being set up to fail is.

Special education is for children who are not smart. This one makes my blood boil every time. A child in special education is not less intelligent. They have a different profile of needs. Equity is not the same as equality. Giving every child the same thing is not the same as giving every child what they actually need. With the right support, these children are just as capable as any other.

A word on misidentification

Before I close, I want to name something that does not get discussed enough in the inclusion conversation: not every child who ends up in special education should be there.

I said, what I said.

Special education exists for children with a genuine educational need or a disability. It is not a solution for poor teaching, under-resourced classrooms, or a failure of cultural responsiveness.

This example may sound oversimplified, but you get the idea. Consider a child, let us call him Arjun. Arjun and his family had recently immigrated. Arjun does not understand a story about children running a lemonade stand, because lemonade stands are not part of his world. But he understands exactly the same economic concept when it involves a nimbu pani vendor (lemonade) at a local market. This is not a learning disability. This is a child whose context and lived experience has not been accounted for.

The threshold for identifying a genuine learning disability is high and deliberate. It requires consistent evidence of learning and progress deficits over time, across contexts, despite quality interventions and confirmed through a proper battery of assessments.

One test result, one difficult year, one teacher's concern, none of that is sufficient. And placing a child in special education on that basis does not help them. It misuses a resource that exists for children who genuinely need it, and it can cause real harm to a child who needed something else entirely like sound and culturally responsive teaching practice.

Inclusion goes wrong in both directions. Keeping children out of specialist support when they need it. And pulling children into it when what they actually need is better teaching.

What good inclusion actually requires

So what does it look like when it works?

• It looks like a placement decision that starts with the child. Their specific profile, their current skills, what the evidence says about what they need right now and not with what feels most comfortable or least stigmatising for the adults around them.

• It looks like real support. Not a shadow teacher with no training. Not a mainstream classroom with thirty students and a vague instruction to differentiate. Actual, meaningful, consistently delivered support from people who know what they are doing.

• It looks like a continuum that is used as a continuum. Where a child can move toward mainstream as they build readiness, and where staying in a specialist setting is understood as a legitimate and valuable outcome, not a consolation prize.

  
  

• Finally, it looks like adults, parents, teachers, school leaders, specialists who are willing to ask themselves honestly: is this decision about the child in front of me, or is it about something else? This is not an easy question. But it is the right one.

Conclusion

Inclusion is important work. Most school professionals and parents approach it with the best of intentions. They want the child in front of them to belong, to thrive, to have every opportunity their peers have. That instinct is not wrong. It is, in many ways, the right instinct.

But good intentions are not enough on their own. A child needs more than to be in the room. They need the room to be ready for them, the teacher prepared, the support in place, the plan thought through. Without those conditions, inclusion becomes a gesture. And gestures, however well-meaning, do not teach a child to read, regulate, or reach their potential.

The children I have worked with over the course of my career have not needed anyone to lower expectations for them. They needed the right environment, the right support, and enough time to show what they are capable of. When those things are in place, the outcomes speak for themselves.

That is the inclusion worth fighting for.

See you next Thursday!

Sources & Further Reading

• Artiles, A. J., Kozleski, E. B., Trent, S. C., Osher, D., & Ortiz, A. (2010). Justifying and explaining disproportionality, 1968–2008: A critique of underlying views of culture. Exceptional Children, 76(3), 279–299. https://doi.org/10.1177/001440290907600303

• Mastergeorge, A. M., & Fielding-Barnsley, R. (2009). The role of early intervention in the prevention of learning disabilities. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 7(2), 1–11.

• Odom, S. L., Buysse, V., & Soukakou, E. (2011). Inclusion for young children with disabilities: A quarter century of research perspectives. Journal of Early Intervention, 33(4), 344–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/1053815111430094

• Waitoller, F. R., & Artiles, A. J. (2013). A decade of professional development research for inclusive education. Review of Educational Research, 83(3), 319–356. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654313483905