A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

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Grange Hill used to scare the willies out of me… Grange Hill compared to my
special school… Grange Hill was like… a war zone… (laughs)… do you know
what I mean… just seemed like a completely different world… (l.1.26ff.)
Speaking as someone who attended a mainstream school, whose impairment had not yet
been identified, Helen remarks of growing up in the highlands:
About five miles from my village there‟s a town which has a special school… if you
went oh, and this person went to St Mark‟s… everyone knew what that
meant… I guess the thing was cos it was separate, you didn‟t end up mixing with the
kids who went there, especially as you got older, because… depending on the type
of problems they had, they tended to be learning difficulties and stuff, you might not
have a sort of peer group interest in stuff… (l.1.160ff.)
For those attending mainstream school, disability is regarded as not their problem and as
having nothing to do with them. As Keith Ballard and Trevor McDonald suggest, being
disabled is:
to be at risk of labelling that can exclude you from learning opportunities and
segregate you from your friends and community. To be segregated can mean that you
are treated as less than human (Ballard and McDonald, 1999:112).
Mary describes the steady erosion of contact with the children she had formerly played with,
the result of the fact that she now saw them rarely and recognised that she had little in
common with them:
Gradually the relationships I had with children who lived in the neighbourhood
became less and less… and by the time I got to about… ten or eleven… erm… in
summer holidays I didn‟t really play outside at all… didn‟t go out and play with
anybody… (l.1.224ff.)
Absence of friendship
If it is assumed that children removed in this way will naturally and easily form friendships
with „others of their kind‟ at special school, participants suggest otherwise. Speaking about
the London special school she attended, Lola recalls that: