The Backward Pupil over a Cycle of a Century

Over the past 120 years, successive governments have failed to make inroads into the problem of the substantial minority of pupils in our schools with poor literacy and/or numeracy skills. Ian Copeland examines the root causes of this failure and explains how, as early as 1880, thinking about the education of backward pupils became divorced from mainstream thinking. He discusses the idea of the primacy of innate mental ability as an explanation and organising principle, the inadequacy of our definition of terms and the confusion of the technical lexicon of backwardness with the vernacular. In a final chapter he argues that the British Prime Minister’s view that ‘a long tail of poor achievers has consistently marked us out from our economic competitors’ is correct and set to continue. He says that this is due to the inclusion and exclusion inherent in our social class system and the dividing practices in our education system. Over the cycle of a century he notes that we have effectively closed off a solution to the problem of the education of pupils with learning difficulties through mainstream modifications to the curriculum, teaching style or class size.