Deborah Orr: An important factor was left out of special needs education - the child

Mary Warnock, the country's foremost moral philosopher, this week announced that she believes that her support in the 1970s of the policy of educational "inclusion" for children with disabilities may have been mistaken. For very many parents, bruised and furious that the specialist schools their vulnerable children relied on have already been closed down, and their offspring placed in mainstream schools under a "statement" of special educational needs, her second thoughts are long overdue.

Yet what the failures of inclusion, like those of so many other idealistic policies formulated at the time, emphasise most of all is the yawning gap between the high-minded ambitions of "child-centred" education and the bitter quotidian reality. The idea of inclusion was born in reaction to a society that tended to hide away in remote institutions children with all sorts of problems, isolating from the mainstream of life even people whose problems were purely physical, and whose unacceptability was merely in the eye of the beholder.

The principle that a child should not be barred from mainstream education because the local school has no wheelchair access, or has no facilities for catering to the deaf or the blind, is wholly good. The option of mainstream education should be open to all those children who can possibly rise to its challenges. But the truth is that even when a school has obtained a statement of special educational needs for a pupil, the funds are often inadequate for the task. When a child's needs are extremely complex, the mainstream can be a brutal place. At this point inclusion in the mainstream becomes, far from being in the interests of child, an added burden for a child already disadvantaged.

All this, you would think, is just common sense. Not only, however, is common sense rarely subscribed to by ideologues, it is sometimes ignored by those who are far from idealistic. The reality of inclusion is that the mantra whereby everyone is fitted into the "mainstream" has been seized upon not just for the ostensible good of the individual children involved, but for other, less admirable reasons as well.

Just as the nation's playing fields have been sold off because land is a valuable commodity, so too have special schools been closed, not primarily to foster "inclusion" but because they are valuable physical assets. The fact that the educational policy of various governments also encourages their selling off for reasons of supposed social good makes it so much easier for local authorities to override the protests of those who use the facilities.

Even among children considered to be in the mainstream, the tension between the moral rectitude of the principle of comprehensive education and the financial realities of teaching a large number of pupils under inadequate budgets is grimly manifold. The current row over synthetic phonetics is a case in point.

Synthetic phonetics, once the basis of rote literacy teaching, is now used as one of a variety of ways of teaching children to read. The idea is that different people need different approaches, so the latter is considered "child centred". But it just means that a teacher has loads more to teach a class, and therefore has even less time to spend concentrating on one-to-one teaching than in the days of rote learning.

¿ What with the various new laws such as the one banning "Incitement to Religious Hatred", the various charity campaigns such as the one demanding a "Full Stop to Child Abuse", and the coalition movement aiming to "Make Poverty History", I think I can see an opening for an awareness raising campaign more ambitious yet than any of these. What about a huge push to "Say No to Nastiness". I know Christ tried a similar sort of thing, with only limited success. But there weren't any marketing agencies in his day, so he may not have got the branding quite right.

A hero for our times? Hardly

I found it laughable when liberals harrumphed about the supposedly lenient sentence given to Otis Ferry, the pop star's son who has become a poster boy for the Countryside Alliance. Given a sentence of 18 months' conditional discharge, after storming the House of Commons with friends last September, he will be in big trouble if he offends again during that period. So, no more civil disobedience for young Mr Ferry for a while. His sentence seems perfect because it curbs his enthusiasm for recidivist activities. If only all delinquency could be dealt with so efficiently.

Those demanding that Ferry be put in jail for a first offence, or fined hugely as some sort of moral tax on his Marlborough education, displayed the most awful prejudice. Why should he be thrown into jail for a first offence, especially since he is not a danger to the public? And why should he have been punished with an eye to milking the wealth of his parents?

Now, however, a glossy magazine has him on its cover, photographed in front of the Houses of Parliament, fêted as some sort of conquering hero for his crime, and modelling expensive suits. A young man with such a flagrant, strutting, arrogant contempt for the law must surely be more at home in a nice tweedy hoodie.

Put an end to anonymity for rape victims

Earlier this week Merete Underwood was jailed for a year after falsely accusing a man of raping her. Now it has emerged that she falsely accused four other men of the same crime.

In the wake of this shocking and sensational story, the musician Tim Simenon has been cleared of the rape and indecent assault of a trainee teacher, and has told the press that he believes that the accused in rape cases should be afforded the same anonymity as the victim.

I can sympathise with his point. Because he is a former pop star, Simenon was named in the papers almost as soon as he was charged. Yet, granting anonymity to those accused of rape is easier said than done, since the police point out that it would hamper their ability to warn the public if a suspected rapist was on the loose.

Equally, there have been times when a person accused of rape has appeared in the papers, prompting others to come forward offering evidence of other, similar crimes.

Instead, rather than letting anonymity for victims of rape remain an anomaly in a justice system that rightly prizes transparency, it might be time to consider ending anonymity for victims. Being sexually attacked, after all, is not something that any woman should feel shame about. Perhaps the granting of anonymity, instead of protecting victims of rape as it is intended to, actually feeds the myth that they are somehow culpable.

At the moment we are perhaps hearing rather too much about what it's like to be accused of rape and too little about what it's like to be raped, even if the assailant didn't realise that that's what he was doing at the time.