Mad Studies, Inclusive Education and Higher Education Participation – Critiquing Fitness to Teach

This article focuses on a critique of the UK’s policy directive related to fitness to teach particularly in relation to the experiences of disabled people attending teacher education. It utilises Mad Studies to raise a different set of questions in relation to teacher education and higher education participation. As ‘madness’ is ‘beginning to be reclaimed by the user/survivor movement’ (Spandler et al., 2015, p.6), and in conjunction with the struggle for an inclusive higher education system, this article drawing upon experiential knowledge, explores issues of access to support, disclosure, and recounts the coercive power relations that position mad students – students experiencing distress and anxiety aspiring to be teachers in disadvantaged and marginal spaces. It recognises that there are tensions in using various terminological descriptors that shape and reshape discourses of power/knowledge. Given the increasing number of students being and becoming identified as having mental health difficulties (an official term in the higher education lexicon of name-calling) the university is coming under increasing scrutiny. Policy directives such as ‘fit to study’, and ‘fitness to teach’ pose specific barriers and challenges. Alternatively, the disciplinary fields of Mad Studies, (Critical) Disability Studies, and Inclusive Education, offer different insights and questions about how institutions can disrupt traditional ableist/disablist structures of normalcy and systems of discrimination. Rather than typical ‘curative’ policy directives related to ‘self-help’, ‘self-improvement’, ‘self-confidence’, ‘self-efficacy’ and notions of ‘well-being’, this article argues that such discovery/recovery policies are inherently discriminatory and deficient. This article builds upon the findings from a postgraduate research study which explored the experiences of Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) trainee students in terms of their interactions with different staff whilst on school placements (Pattinson, 2021). This previous small-scale study specifically utilised the use of questionnaires and interviews with university tutors, school teachers and students situated within the Southwest of England. Alongside drawing upon the lived experiences of trainee students and university teachers, it includes a personal narrative of one of the authors, Sarah, who shares her own previous teacher training experiences which are situated alongside emerging concerns with ableist/disablist policy directives. Within this context, this article examines these interactions in context of the so-called ‘fitness to teach’ policy, a current disciplinary requirement under legislative duties.