The role of social work in inclusive education

This Chapter explores the relationship between social work and inclusive education. Historically social work has been concerned with giving oppressed minorities a voice, facilitating empowerment for the devalued, challenging discrimination for outsiders and supporting diversity within communities. On the face of it the inclusion of disabled children into mainstream schools fits well with this, however inclusion is both a complex and contested interaction of factors bound by history, culture, policy and social theory and social work in many ways is relativity new to education. Social work in the last twenty years has been undergoing profound changes in terms of its practice, values and ideology and this chapter explores these in parallel to different models of disability.