Disability and Social Change By ShahS, PriestleyMPolicy Press: Bristol, 2012 ISBN 978‐1‐84742‐786‐1, 217 p. Price: £19.99 (paperback)

Abstract

I was delighted to be invited to review this book as it sets out to achieve an elusive goal — an assessment of the impact of changing policy on people's lives in an area of growing interest, the history of disability. At the centre of the book are the stories of 50 individuals with physical impairments who narrated their experiences to the authors, divided into three age cohorts, those born in the 1940s, 1960s and 1980s. Arguably policy relating to disabled people, and children, has changed dramatically since the 1940s. Although the 40s saw the ushering in of the UK welfare state, there was, for example, no public challenge to the assumption that disabled children needed separate schooling; there was no legislation to address physical barriers, like step-free access and low floor buses; and there was no overt political commitment to social inclusion. Studies like the one reported in this book help us evaluate the extent to which policy change really has made a difference to young disabled people growing up in Britain today. The book is divided into seven chapters, the most overtly relevant to readers of this journal being chapter 5 ‘learning about life’, the focus of which is education and schooling, and this is where I will start. It gives a nuanced picture, far more complex than a Whiggish progression from segregated schooling to real inclusion in schools and colleges. The authors observe ‘there has been no steady trend towards inclusion over the historical period in question’ (p. 117). But there have been changes. In the early period, many people's experiences were shaped by institutional frameworks for healthcare and provision of therapy, with education for independence focussing on overcoming the impairment by learning how to walk or dress without assistance, for example. But the growth of special schools in the 1970s appears to have increased rather than decreased segregated life pathways; while a recent growth in specialist residential colleges ‘has introduced new forms of segregation and surveillance under the guise of “further education”’ (p. 118). This mixed picture characterises the book overall, across the dimensions of family life, health care and employment. Policy may look more enlightened, but peoples' lives have not necessarily changed in line with political reform. Public policy can still drive a wedge between disabled children and young people and their local communities, by, for example bussing children to distant specialist schools or residential colleges; though this was more prevalent and all encompassing for some in the earlier generation, subject to long stays in hospital with no parental visits, open air and residential specialist schools in remote locations. However, the authors do note one unambiguous set of changes; an increasing range of life scripts available to young disabled people now compared to those born in the 1940s. The pressure to ‘pass’ as normal has decreased, the option to stand up with pride and celebrate difference is available, and taken by many. There are disabled role models. There have been real opportunities opened up in employment and related activity by the emergent disability arts movement; by new kinds of ‘disability work’ in organisations controlled by disabled people; in local authorities as access officers and in universities as disabled student advisors; and in government quangos like the Disability Rights Commission. IT opens up employment which is not reliant on physical accessibility in ways inconceivable to earlier generations. The irony is noted that disability activism was made possible by segregated environments which clustered young disabled people together, these settings ‘marked impairment in very negative ways’ (p. 172), but also ‘sometimes acted as a catalyst for resistance and consciousness raising about the commonality of disability as oppression’ (p. 172). The book ends with a consideration of the value and the limitations of biographical narratives. The value, the authors argue, is that they enable the reader to consider the personal as political, to challenge assumptions, for example that the earliest generations experienced the most segregated childhoods. Some did, but equally some did not. Mindful of the disabled people's movement's well-documented suspicion of using personal tragedy to elicit charitable sympathy, the authors contend, with justification in my view that personal narratives must be read with a focus on social relations, and institutional practices rather than as ends in themselves. It's a narrow line, to give individual stories credibility and prominence and at the same time to use those stories to illuminate public issues. I think Shah and Priestley do it pretty well here, and have produced a book that is well worth reading.