Neither confirmed nor denied: special school provision in New Zealand's Special Education 2000 policy

Abstract

Special Education 2000 (SE2000), New Zealand's first official special education policy, declared the aim of achieving a ‘world class inclusive education system’. It would seem that, by implication at least, the intention of the policy was to achieve full inclusion of all disabled children in mainstream educational settings and thus, consequentially, the demise of separate special school provision. Given this, it would be fair to expect that intentions with respect to special school provision would feature prominently in the policy. However, surprisingly, this was not the case; only brief references to special school provision can be found in the policy material and certainly nothing that would constitute a clearly articulated policy objective for this type of provision. In this article, Trish McMenamin of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, argues that a plausible explanation for this somewhat curious absence is that the differing ideological premises of inclusion and neoliberalism that underpinned SE2000 served as boundaries to what could be said and thought in that context and at that time. This, it is suggested, led to a policy position in which a role for special schools could neither be confirmed nor denied.