I HAVE come across a question from next year’s Standard Assessment Tests for 11-year-olds: if Miss Mopps spends eight minutes changing A’s nappy and thirteen minutes cleaning out B’s tracheotomy tube, how many minutes of the literacy hour does she have left to teach the rest of class how to read and write? Answer: rather less than is ideal.

I have every sympathy with the primary school teacher quoted by Cambridge educationists in a report published today that, thanks to the Government’s policy of closing special schools and including special needs children in mainstream schools, her job has become “more like nursing than teaching”. My nine-year-old daughter, Eliza, is mentally handicapped, and has attended both a mainstream and a special school. I have seen enough to conclude that the Government’s policy of inclusion is rather stronger on ideology than it is on common sense.

I have the right to insist that Eliza is taught in a mainstream school right up until the age of 16. But to what purpose? Maybe it would add to the self-esteem of disability rights campaigners, but it wouldn’t help Eliza. And it certainly wouldn’t help children of normal ability who just wanted to get on with their studies as Eliza giggled in the corner. Far from benefiting from inclusion, Eliza would simply earn a reputation as “the girl who ruined my GCSEs”.

There is a lot to be said for some forms of inclusion. Nobody wants to go back to the days when blind children were taught how to be piano tuners because no one imagined they could benefit from any other kind of education. Physically disabled children of normal intelligence should of course be taught in mainstream schools. It is right, too, that mentally handicapped children should be included with ordinary children in nursery and the early years of primary school. There is a big difference between the kindness that Eliza’s classmates have shown towards her and the rather cruel language in which school children used to speak of the mentally handicapped.

But beyond the age of about 7, when serious academic education begins, it is nonsense to pretend that you can teach a child with an IQ of 50 alongside one with an IQ of 120. Good special schools, like good grammar schools, have been sacrificed to fulfil a misplaced egalitarian philosophy — to the detriment of all children.