Baroness Warnock

Education is a historical and complex subject, with many philosophical theories and questions that explore ways in which knowledge can be passed on and received. As Bartlett and Burton (2016) speculate, there is no one set meaning to education as everyone has their own views on the subject. The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast the educational and philosophical ideas and theories of two major figures in the educational world. The first thinker will be Baroness Mary Warnock, an English philosopher of morality, education, and writer on existentialism. Baroness Warnock's works most centre around ethics or moral philosophy, though her most well-known works are about special needs education. The second thinker will be Jean-Jacques

Baroness Warnock is one of the leading figures to have been involved in the special educational needs (SEN) process and debate. The SEN system that we have with the individual legal rights that children with SEN and their parents now have been still a recent development. Baroness Warnock's most well know work would be the ‘Warnock Report’ that was named after her. The report laid the structure for the introduction of Statements of Special Educational Need in England and Wales in the early 1980s. The whole purpose of the report, as Warnock states (1978, p.15) was “To review educational provision in England, Scotland and Wales for children and young people handicapped by disabilities of body or mind, taking account of the medical aspects of their needs, together with arrangements to prepare them for entry into employment; to consider the most effective use of resources for these purposes; and to make

The ‘learning difficulty’ includes not only physical and mental disabilities but also any kind of learning dif­ficulty experienced by a child, provided that it is signifi­cantly greater than that of the majority of children of the same age.”

The act the continued stating that the education of children with SEN should be carried out in ordinary schools where possible, therefore the act empha­sised an approach that is in favour of inclusion and integration, rather than separation and isolation. This then shows and supports the idea of equality that children with special needs should be treated as individuals. Due to the improvement that has gone on in society, Warnock (2005) has stated that “she has modified some of her views about educating children with emotional or physical difficulties in mainstream schools.” Though, she argues that even if society has improved with its views toward disability, Warnock deems that many of SEN children are being placed in standard classrooms and not in special schools. However, 5 years later Baroness Warnock (2010) explains that it is only recently that children with severely mentally disabled children had been deemed educable at