Towards an inclusive school culture — but what happened to Elton's ‘affective curriculum’?

The inclusion debate is no longer concerned merely with the extent to which mainstream schools are able to accommodate all children regardless of need but increasingly focuses on institutional improvement in understanding the range of their needs. In spite of our better understanding of how children learn and of how their emotional and social realities can be used as a source of learning that is relevant to the needs of all, ‘difficult’ children continue to be seen by many as impeding their teachers' pedagogical effectiveness and as damaging the educational chances of others. In this article, Gerda Hanko, an education consultant and staff development tutor who has substantial experience in teaching and teacher training, offers an overview of the development of practical approaches to professional development which, by deepening teachers' insight into emotional and social factors in children's learning, have been shown to supersede the need to exclude the disaffected — as already suggested in the Elton Report. Gerda Hanko's own publications, initially developed under the auspices of a London Institute of Education associateship when she was Head of Education at a teacher training institution, promote collaborative problem‐solving approaches among staff — ideas that she takes forward in this paper.