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Special Education Competence in a School for All –­ Ideals and Actualities

The broad aims of this paper are to discuss how ‘special needs’ are constructed and constituted as a particular type of problem in the school context. Even though education of ‘abnormal’ children has a long history, the demand for special education in Swedish schools first arose in the 1920–30s as a side issue to general education in schools. Not surprisingly, it occurred at the same time as what were being seen as reliable and objective methods of measurement of intelligence were being developed. Even though educational research was in its infancy in those days, placement in schools especially designed to meet the needs of pupils belonging to the same category of disability was seen as the best solution also from the point of view of research. Consequently, special schools were established throughout the country, but they were clustered in urban regions and many children had to live separated from their families for months and sometimes even years. Elementary school systems were established in the Nordic countries during the 1950s and 1960s, slowly replacing the former dualistic school systems. This involved integrating special school pupils into the new schools. However, grounded in a value system celebrating ‘education for all’ as part of the emerging welfare state, the process provoked opposition, especially from secondary school teachers, who were used to strongly differentiated groups of pupils in their classes. In the late 1950s, around 30 per cent of each age group attended junior secondary school, with only onethird continuing on to high school. Interestingly, the number of pupils dropping out from these schools was remarkably high despite their restrictive admission regulations and positively selected classes. Marklund (1984) wrote that around 25 per cent of the pupils were excluded due to poor results in their studies. An interesting phenomenon in the wake of the elementary school reforms was the emergence of special needs education as a kind of ‘withinschool-differentiation’. Teachers experienced insuperable difficulties teaching heterogeneous groups of pupils, which called for a kind of twin-track F O R F A T T E R