ABSTRACT
Many people will be familiar with the opening sentence of Charles Dickens’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
(Dickens [1859] 2007) Perhaps Dickens’s comparison of the London and Paris of 1775 with his own world in the middle of the nineteenth century holds. However, from the present vantage point of marginalised and disadvantaged people in England, and beyond, the vista sheds little light, offers no wellspring of hope. As we reflect on the vulnerability of disabled children and their families in an age of inclusive education, we observe the simultaneous advance of national human rights legislation and international conventions on the rights of disabled people and the systematic growth of exclusion under the liberal veneer of inclusion discourse.