​Mr.Keith A. Humphreys
SAME Project Consultant​​

Keith A. Humphreys is a Special Education Consultant from the UK who works in several different countries to support inclusive practices to overlap between mainstream and special school education. His expertise is in the writing and management of curriculum and working with teachers to enhance school development and raise standards of education. He has been Head of Special Education at the University of Northumbria and also a government inspector of schools in England. He has served as the overseas consultant of the SAME Curriculum Project since 2006.

​The Question of Inclusion or Diversity : Responding to the challenge of students’ learning needs
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Abstract
Teachers are the professionals with responsibility for delivering education reform, politicians and administrators create the aims to guide the opportunities to which they aspire. As trends in mainstream education have evolved, so too have the responses to special education in different countries. The development of special education and effective responses to needs of pupils who are low attaining is on-going and has accelerated since the turn of the twenty first century. For politicians and administrators the broad sweep issue may be inclusion but for teachers in mainstream and special schools, the classroom management issue is how to cope with diversity. There is greater equality of opportunity for learning if there is a common educational diversity approach to teaching and learning for all students rather than an exclusive approach to an inclusive minority. This paper explores critical outcomes of two case study approaches to the meeting of special needs both of which follow the mainstream curriculum model of development, one from a special school perspective and one from a mainstream school perspective. The paper explores the paradigms that underpin both approaches to diversity based curriculum and how pedagogical support can be given within writing of the curriculum. The different curricula are compared and the challenges for the teachers are discussed. The evidence from these two case studies suggests that for teachers, the professional challenge is not to understand the principles of inclusion but rather how to cope with the paradigms of meeting diversity in their pedagogical practice.

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Key Words
Diversity, pedagogy, inclusion, paradigm shifts, quality education, student-centred learning, continuum of ability, attainment levels, subject knowledge, curriculum management.