Inclusion 'All present and correct?' A critical analysis of New Labour's inclusive education policy in England

Drawing on Derrida this paper considers how inclusive education in England was defined and operationalised within New Labour's educational policy and by those teachers who reconstructed this policy within the confines of schools and individual classrooms. The paper has two critical ambitions. First it argues that the epistemology of inclusion was mediated by ontological ghosts which moved it away from its creation as a construct of social justice to recreate it on a stage of the phenomenological reduction of competing policy initiatives. Second, the paper demonstrates how teachers although fully accepting of inclusion's theoretic nevertheless interpreted it in such a way that it became nothing more than spectacle where social presence cloaked educational absences. Based upon such findings the paper concludes that New Labour's inclusion policy was illusionary and perhaps was as much about presenting inequity as it was equity.