New MP Reignites Education Debate.

Special Schools for disabled people should not be closed, according to the UK’s first MP with cerebral palsy.

In an interview with The Independent, Blackpool North and Cleveleys MP, the Conservative’s Paul Maynard, insisted that the two years he spent in a specialist school proved vital because of the specialist speech therapy and physiotherapy he received.

Mr Maynard transferred to mainstream education at the age of five and went on to obtain a first-class degree from Oxford University before working as a management consultant.

The MP admitted he had become ‘dismayed’ by the drive during the last two decades to integrate children with special needs into mainstream education, and urged ministers to prevent more special schools closing.

While he accepted that special schools were wrong for some people, he insisted that they were not wrong for everyone simply because they separated disabled children from their non-disabled peers. “Sometimes that what’s needed,” he said.

However, in a letter to the newspaper, the co-director of thinktank Ekklesia, Jonathan Bartley, insisted that children who attend segregated schools were significantly less likely to enter mainstream work or enjoy a career – and wondered if the MPs progress was due more to the majority of his education being in the mainstream system.

“Both the Conservative Party manifesto and the Coalition Government agreement pledge to ‘remove the bias towards inclusion’ of children with special educational needs in mainstream schooling,” he wrote. “It is not ‘bias’ routinely to include gay and lesbian children or those from ethnic minorities in mainstream education. It is not ‘bias’ to routinely include disabled children in local schools either. It should be the norm.

“Until we accept this, and make it easier for disabled children to access and remain in mainstream education, we will continue to see few people with disabilities both inside Parliament, and in other careers outside it too,” he added.

SOURCE: The Independent

MORE: http://paulmaynard.co.uk, www.ekklesia.co.uk