Disabling Policies?: A Comparative Approach to Education Policy and Disability

First published in 1989, this book is about integrating or mainstreaming policies, looking specifically at how to improve circumstances for schoolchildren with disabilities or handicaps, and their teachers. The author draws on her experiences, both within and outside the academic institution, to conceptualise and theorise policy, so as to place this policy in a political framework and locate it in a wider model of social life. This model is then used to disentangle the nature and effects of policy practices surrounding integration and mainstreaming, looking at practice in various parts of Europe, the US and Australia, at that time. Although written at the end of the 1980s, this book discusses topics that are still relevant today.