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THREE out of every 100 British children have one or more physical disability.
Two-thirds of these children attend an ordinary school, yet when the bell
goes for science class, many are left on the sidelines. In older buildings,
they might not even be able to get their wheelchairs into the laboratory.
Even if they can, they face an endless series of obstacles: benches that
are too high, taps they cannot reach, bottles they cannot lift, switches
and knobs they cannot use and, perhaps worst of all, teachers who are terrified
that they may injure themselves. But following from the 1988 Education L
Reform Act, all secondary L schoolchildren with special L educational needs
must take part in the National Curriculum from this September. And that
includes the core subject science, with its ‘hands on’ approach to learning.
Is it yet another impossible target for teachers to worry about, or an exciting
challenge for which they should be preparing now? To Alan Jones, head of
physical sciences at Nottingham Polytechnic, the recent act is the opportunity
he has been waiting for. ‘At last, we’re saying to these kids, ‘you’re the
same as everyone else’. We’ve got to stop being so overprotective and prepare
them for life in the real world,’ he insists. Jones estimates that only
2 per cent of disabled children in Britain – those who have trouble eating
and drinking – are physically incapable of performing science experiments
in school. Over the past decade Jones has developed dozens of laboratory
aids to help disabled students to take part in science classes. From June,
he will be running 25-day courses for teachers, on science for pupils with
special educational needs.

The Education Act of 1981 made funds available for research into ways
of enabling more disabled children to be integrated into ordinary schools.
As a result, Jones has received over the years some Pounds sterling 250
000 to support his work. But outside Nottingham and the handful of schools
specialising in the education of blind and partially sighted children, progress
has been slow. Even in the US, Jones says, little has been done to make
practical science more accessible to disabled children.

Nevertheless, his enthusiasm is infectious. His motto has become: ‘Give
me a disabled child who has enough manual dexterity to feed himself and
I will show you how to teach him science.’ And Jones sees some hopeful signs.
‘Teachers are getting better all the time. At least they now want to know
what can be done, even if they are still very wary about actually doing
it,’ he says.

His first success was in 1979 with one of his own BEd students, who
had been paralysed from the chest down in an accident. Not only did he complete
his studies, but he was also the first in his year to find a job and is
now head of science in a large secondary school.

Today, Jones proudly demonstrates the range of gadgets he has designed
or developed, many of them using the most basic materials, from leftover
rubber tubing to empty yoghurt pots. But this is no display of Heath Robinson
gadgets: every device has been made in response to a specific need, tried
out by the children who are going to use it, and modified according to their
demands.

‘Schools are littered with things for disabled children that well-meaning
people assumed they needed but which they couldn’t use,’ says Glenn Chaney,
a science teacher in Nottinghamshire. He has collaborated with Jones on
the latest project, to design a clampstand that will suit all children,
able- bodied and disabled.

The clampstand is one of the most common pieces of equipment in science
classes. Yet because conventional clampstands are almost impossible for
disabled children to handle, these children are unable to take part in dozens
of standard scientific experiments. ‘It was very depressing to see disabled
children sitting to one side while the others got on with the experiment.
The teachers really didn’t know what to do with them,’ says Jean Russell-Gebbett,
the Nottingham project’s coordinator.

The new stand, the result of a two-year project funded by the Wolfson
Foundation, replaces stiff bolts and screws with levers and handles. So
pupils can manipulate the device simply by squeezing thumb and middle finger
together, rather than having to turn the entire hand.

Many of the activities that disabled children find difficult, such as
pouring liquids, using a dropping pipette and clamping things, turn out
to be difficult for able-bodied children too. The design of the new clamp
makes it possible for all children to hold, pour and mix things in the laboratory
more quickly and easily. ‘The clamp is just as popular with the able-bodied
children as it is with the disabled ones,’ Jones says.

Jones argues that all pupils can benefit from many of the adaptations
designed for disabled children. For instance, when he devised a series of
Braille-style chemistry diagrams for a child with poor vision, other pupils
in the class clamoured to be given their own set. The tactile pictures,
2.5 times the size of a standard diagram, are made of wire stuck onto a
plastic sheet, to form the outline of flasks, tubes and bunsens, so the
child can ‘feel’ how the equipment for an experiment is set up. Teachers
discovered that most children, especially slow learners, found it easier
to remember information presented in this way, rather than as diagrams in
textbooks.

Jones’s laboratory also has an electrically operated device to raise
and lower a section of work surface to accommodate a student in a wheelchair.
But the same effect can be achieved simply by attaching shelving supports
to a standard bench to create a temporary work surface at the required height
when a disabled student is in class. Benchtops can be covered with non-slip
plastic so that pupils can perform experiments with less fear of toppling
beakers and bottles.

A miniature ‘skate board’ made of Perspex was the ingenious device that
Jones made for a child with muscular dystrophy, to help him to do dissections
in biology class. By leaning his arms on the U-shaped Perspex board, with
the dissecting board resting in the trough of the ‘U’, the child could overcome
the difficulty he had experienced in raising his arms long enough to make
the incisions.

The Royal National Institute for the Blind has produced many gadgets
that enable partially sighted children to take part in experiments. Among
these are a bleeper that sounds when a liquid reaches a given level in a
beaker. Another device with an audible alarm, originally developed to help
the partially sighted to negotiate their way around furniture, can distinguish
between the height, density and colour of chemical solutions.

Devices designed for people with arthritis can also be adapted to the
needs of children with other disabilities, such as cerebral palsy and muscular
dystrophy. Large rubber grips on glass tubing, for example, makes it easier
for children with poor manual dexterity to handle the material. Similarly,
a narrow perforated strip of plastic can bind a test tube onto the hand
of a child who cannot grip things.

The need for special provisions for some schoolchildren has probably
intensified in recent years, due to a shift in the most common types of
disability. Until recently, most disabled schoolchildren had spina bifida.
Although many were paralysed below the waist, their manual dexterity was
often not seriously impaired, and they could perform many traditional class
experiments, provided they could reach the equipment. But the advent of
prenatal testing for spina bifida, with the option of termination of affected
fetuses, has led to a reduction in the number of children born with the
condition. Now, a higher proportion of disabled children starting school
have cerebral palsy. This has been linked to the fact that a growing number
of seriously ill babies are being resuscitated at birth or kept alive in
specialist neonatal units. Sadly, many of these surviving infants have already
suffered irreparable brain damage or will do so soon after birth.

Routes to a steady hand

The degree of cerebral palsy may vary from a mild paralysis affecting
one side of the body to a much more severe paralysis of all the limbs. Children
with cerebral palsy are prone to uncontrollable muscle spasms, often at
moments of stress or tension, such as pouring reagents, when precision is
needed most. So these children need devices such as the Nottingham clamp
that take away some of the requirement for manual dexterity.

David Coleman, a teacher at a special school for disabled children in
Nottingham, is already using the clamps. He finds that they enable his pupils
to do experiments that previously would have been impossible. ‘Often in
the past,’ he says, ‘I have had to spend so much time finding ways of enabling
pupils physically to do experiments that we’ve rather lost sight of the
scientific principles we are testing.’

For most children, Coleman says, it is not the visible handicap that
is the problem, but the underlying attitude which assumes that disabled
children cannot perform normal activities and discourages them from doing
so. And of course, a teacher’s expectations of failure can in itself lead
to low achievement. Coleman says that teachers have to start to see the
world from a disabled person’s perspective. ‘Disabled children don’t explore
from an early age like other children, for instance, so they have very poor
spatial awareness,’ he says. ‘It’s not that they can’t do science but that
they don’t understand the kind of movements needed to perform the experiments.’

As a result, Coleman says, it may take a year to cover ground which
able-bodied children might get through in a couple of months. He is worried
that the assessments required by the National Curriculum will ‘more often
reveal what a child is unable to do than what he or she can do’. But word
processors, enabling children to do written work, have made a huge difference,
and Coleman keeps a photographic record of children’s practical achievements.

Coleman’s first potential university candidate, a child with spina bifida,
has just left the special school to continue her education at an ordinary
school. The staff are understandably delighted but feel that, given the
opportunity, many more children could enter higher education. ‘I am sure
that we seriously underestimate what disabled children can do,’ he says.
‘It’s not a matter simply of making a child boil water over a bunsen burner
or filter acids. We need to build their self esteem so that they feel able
to do it, instead of feeling excluded just because of their physical disability.’

Jenny Bryan is a freelance journalist specialising in health and medicine.