Oxford LibGuides: Disability History Resources: Education

Key resources

Key resources
Recommended books

Specialist Education for Children with Disabilities - 'the Happiest Effect'
"This section tells you about some of the inspirational blind and deaf people who fought for the right for children with disabilities to be educated. These people illustrated what disabled children with an education could achieve." Historic England
How Was School?
The ‘How Was School?’ project looks at Disabled People’s experiences of education over the last 100 years through the telling and recording of personal memories and histories of school.
Disability Voices [temporarily unavailable]
The complete oral recordings and transcripts of 98 interviews that chart the experiences of disabled people, made freely available through British Library Sounds. PLEASE NOTE: British Library Sounds is currently unavailable as an ongoing effect of the 2023 cyber attack targeting the library.
Education in the UK: history of our schools, colleges and universities
Useful for historical education legislation and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Includes many documents such as commision and Ofsted reports, official papers, etc.
Historical education policy and administration: childcare, schools for disabled children and other special services (TNA)
A research guide from The National Archives (UK) which is useful for researching the policy and administration of central government services which dealt with special educational needs.
1889 Report of the Royal Commission on the blind, the deaf and dumb, &c., of the United Kingdom
Also known as the Egerton Report.
Report of the Mental Deficiency Committee : being a joint committee of the Board of Education and Board of Control
Also known as the Wood Report.
1978 Warnock Report Special Educational Needs (pdf)
The Report introduced the term special educational need to identify any child needing extra or different support, and argued that 20 per cent of children have special needs at least for some part of their educational career.

Special Educational Needs and Social Policy in 1970s Britain by Catharine Hornby.
Publication Date: 1999

Thesis (M.Phil.)--University of Oxford, 1999.

Useful journals

History of Education Quarterly
Official journal of the field's leading professional society in the United States, the History of Education Society. Coverage: 1961-
Journal of Education
Disseminates knowledge that informs teaching and learning in PK-12 and higher education. Coverage: 1881-