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Inclusion: A Price Too High? A Study Of The Correlation Between Stress And ...

A study of the correlation between stress and inclusion practices in a large urban primary school.

1. Introduction

Ainscow et al (1999) show that the Green Paper Excellence for all Children and the follow-up document Meeting Special Educational Needs: A Programme of Action function to place inclusion firmly at the centre of educational policy and practice. This centrality of inclusion has led to a move away from separate special needs provision to a predominance of inclusion for all children into mainstream schools and classrooms. Such inclusion takes place alongside SEN provision which identifies, diagnoses and plans for the individual needs of the SEN child, whilst ideally also identifying ways in which they can be best integrated into mainstream classes.

Teachers in mainstream education must now address an ever-widening diverse spectrum of special educational needs in the children that they teach, which can be viewed as positive from the point of view of social inclusion and egalitarianism, but negative from the point of views of teachers' workloads, skills, abilities and potential stressors in their working environment. Organisational and work-related stress is recognised as a major feature of modern life (Dobson, 2006) not least in the field of education, (Kyriacou,2001; Boyle et al 1995). Figures from the Health and Safety Executive suggest that up to five million people in the United Kingdom admit to feeling ‘very' or ‘extremely' stressed by their jobs (HSE, 2006) and, according to Janet Murray (2005), schools are ‘the worst places' of all for stress - an impression that is corroborated by voluminous survey data (Dunham & Varma,1998). Whilst some of the research findings suggest that teachers thrive under stressful conditions (Pithers,1995), most demonstrate that its effect is negative (van Dick et al 2001).

In considering the implementation of a top-down directive that inclusion should be the norm in UK schools, it is appropriate to consider what aspects of this initiative might affect teachers and how. The UK government is currently concerned with the levels of retention within the teaching profession (Jepson and Forrest, 2006). This may be partly due to representations of the profession as a highly stressful occupation (Jepson and Forrest, 2006). There appears to be very little research which examines and explores certain factors in the current education environment which directly affect stress, the most pertinent of which is SEN inclusion. This paper sets out to investigate whether there are any links between SEN inclusion and teacher stress, and how this stress is caused and manifested.


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