Genteel revolutionaries: the lives of Anna and Thomas Haslam

The lives of Thomas and Anna Haslam were dedicated to the attainment of women's equality. They were feminists before the word was coined. In an era when respectable women were not supposed to know of the existence of prostitutes, Anna became empowered to do the unthinkable, not only to speak in public but to discuss openly matters sexual and to attack the double standard of sexuality which was enshrined in the official treatment of prostitutes. Their life-long commitment to the cause of women's suffrage never faltered, despite the repeated discouragement of the fate of bills defeated in the House of Commons. The Haslams represented an Ireland which did not survive them. While they were dedicated to the union with Westminster, they worked happily with those who applied themselves to its destruction. Although in many ways they exemplified the virtues of their Quaker backgrounds, they did not subscribe to any organised religion. Despite living in straitened circumstances, they were part of an urban intellectual elite and participated in the social and cultural life of Dublin for over fifty years. It is tempting to speculate how the Haslams would have fared in post independence Ireland. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington who had impeccable nationalist credentials, was effectively marginalised. It is likely that they would have protested against discriminatory legislation in their usual law abiding manner but, in a country which quickly developed an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic ethos, would they have had a voice or a constituency? Ironically, Thomas's teaching on chastity would have found favour with the hierarchy; his message was disseminated in a simple and more pious manner in numerous Catholic Truth Society pamphlets. The Protestant minority never sought to subvert the institutions of the state, was careful not to criticise and kept its collective head down. Dáil Éireann was not bombarded with petitions for the restoration of divorce facilities or the unbanning of birth control. Those who sought such amenities obtained them quietly 'in another jurisdiction.' Fifty years were to pass before the condom wielding 'comely maidens' erupted on to the front pages of the Sunday papers. They were, one imagines, the spiritual descendants of the militant rather than the constitutional suffrage movement. "Once and for all we need to commit ourselves to the concept that women's rights are not factional or sectional privileges, bestowed on the few at the whim of the many. They are human rights. In a society in which the rights and potential of women are constrained no man can be truly free." These words spoken by Mary Robinson as President of Ireland are an echo of the principles to which the Haslams dedicated their lives and are, perhaps, a tribute to their efforts.

Inclusive education policy, the general allocation model and dilemmas of practice in primary schools

Background: Inclusive education is central to contemporary discourse internationally reflecting societies’ wider commitment to social inclusion. Education has witnessed transforming approaches that have created differing distributions of power, resource allocation and accountability. Multiple actors are being forced to consider changes to how key services and supports are organised. This research constitutes a case study situated within this broader social service dilemma of how to distribute finite resources equitably to meet individual need, while advancing inclusion. It focuses on the national directive with regard to inclusive educational practice for primary schools, Department of Education and Science Special Education Circular 02/05, which introduced the General Allocation Model (GAM) within the legislative context of the Education of Persons with Special Educational Needs (EPSEN) Act (Government of Ireland, 2004). This research could help to inform policy with ‘facts about what is happening on the ground’ (Quinn, 2013). Research Aims: The research set out to unearth the assumptions and definitions embedded within the policy document, to analyse how those who are at the coalface of policy, and who interface with multiple interests in primary schools, understand the GAM and respond to it, and to investigate its effects on students and their education. It examines student outcomes in the primary schools where the GAM was investigated. Methods and Sample The post-structural study acknowledges the importance of policy analysis which explicitly links the ‘bigger worlds’ of global and national policy contexts to the ‘smaller worlds’ of policies and practices within schools and classrooms. This study insists upon taking the detail seriously (Ozga, 1990). A mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis is applied. In order to secure the perspectives of key stakeholders, semi-structured interviews were conducted with primary school principals, class teachers and learning support/resource teachers (n=14) in three distinct mainstream, non-DEIS schools. Data from the schools and their environs provided a profile of students. The researcher then used the Pobal Maps Facility (available at www.pobal.ie) to identify the Small Area (SA) in which each student resides, and to assign values to each address based on the Pobal HP Deprivation Index (Haase and Pratschke, 2012). Analysis of the datasets, guided by the conceptual framework of the policy cycle (Ball, 1994), revealed a number of significant themes. Results: Data illustrate that the main model to support student need is withdrawal from the classroom under policy that espouses inclusion. Quantitative data, in particular, highlighted an association between segregated practice and lower socioeconomic status (LSES) backgrounds of students. Up to 83% of the students in special education programmes are from lower socio-economic status (LSES) backgrounds. In some schools 94% of students from LSES backgrounds are withdrawn from classrooms daily for special education. While the internal processes of schooling are not solely to blame for class inequalities, this study reveals the power of professionals to order children in school, which has implications for segregated special education practice. Such agency on the part of key actors in the context of practice relates to ‘local constructions of dis/ability’, which is influenced by teacher habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). The researcher contends that inclusive education has not resulted in positive outcomes for students from LSES backgrounds because it is built on faulty assumptions that focus on a psycho-medical perspective of dis/ability, that is, placement decisions do not consider the intersectionality of dis/ability with class or culture. This study argues that the student need for support is better understood as ‘home/school discontinuity’ not ‘disability’. Moreover, the study unearths the power of some parents to use social and cultural capital to ensure eligibility to enhanced resources. Therefore, a hierarchical system has developed in mainstream schools as a result of funding models to support need in inclusive settings. Furthermore, all schools in the study are ‘ordinary’ schools yet participants acknowledged that some schools are more ‘advantaged’, which may suggest that ‘ordinary’ schools serve to ‘bury class’ (Reay, 2010) as a key marker in allocating resources. The research suggests that general allocation models of funding to meet the needs of students demands a systematic approach grounded in reallocating funds from where they have less benefit to where they have more. The calculation of the composite Haase Value in respect of the student cohort in receipt of special education support adopted for this study could be usefully applied at a national level to ensure that the greatest level of support is targeted at greatest need. Conclusion: In summary, the study reveals that existing structures constrain and enable agents, whose interactions produce intended and unintended consequences. The study suggests that policy should be viewed as a continuous and evolving cycle (Ball, 1994) where actors in each of the social contexts have a shared responsibility in the evolution of education that is equitable, excellent and inclusive.

Community workers' understandings and practices of resistance

This research is focused on Community Workers located in Southern Ireland, and their understandings and practices of resistance. It is an attempt to explore the ways in which community workers’ understandings and practices of resistance are formed and, in turn, inform their sense of identity and their responses to the wider context of community development work in Ireland today. This study is specifically located but also has wider application and relevance because of the extended international reach of neo-liberal and managerial rationalities, and their implications for politics, policy and practice. The study considers resistance in a number of inter-related ways: as a collective oppositional position (with negative and positive dimensions); a personal and/or professional value (associated with the ‘expansion of contention’); a strategy for negotiating unequal power relations (in a range of levels and spaces of power); an identity (in relation to the sustaining of ‘reflexive subjectivities’); a set of practices, (which take into account the interplay between economic, political and cultural influences); and an educational process through which practitioners assess and enact personal and professional agency. Critical theorisations of community development and of the Irish state over time, trace the ways in which neo-liberalism and managerialism has inflected community development practice and the positions of community workers and communities in that process. The study draws on James C. Scott, Gramsci, Barnes and Prior, among others, which enabled the interrogation of resistance in relation to everyday practices through engaging with ‘hidden transcripts’ and spaces. The method chosen was focus group discussions with three groups of community workers located in different counties in Southern Ireland. This method facilitated a deep discourse analysis of practitioners’ encounters with resistance in the field of community work. Key findings relate to the various interpretations of the role of resistance, practices of resistance (including current restrictions), the value of resistance work and the conditions that may be conducive to practising resistance.