Klaus Werner Wedell

Klaus Wedell CBE was a British educational psychologist and innovator of national and international importance in educational psychology and in special educational needs (SEN), with respect to theoretical and conceptual developments, professional practice and policy.

Early life Klaus Wedell was born in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1931 and came with his family to Britain as a refugee from Nazi Germany aged seven. He started school in England without speaking English and began a sojourn from place to place and school to school. The family, classed as ‘enemy aliens’, lived from hand to mouth with acute privations. Eventually in August 1943 circumstances became more stable as they moved to Wistow, a residential training college for Germans preparing to return to Germany to help rebuild the country after the war. Private funding enabled the teenage Klaus to continue his education at Bryanston School.

From Bryanston, Wedell went on to study Psychology and Philosophy at King's College University of Cambridge (1950–53).

Work After completing his PhD, Wedell worked as an educational psychologist for the City of Bristol (1960–64), where he set up a unit for children with hearing impairment. From 1964-65 he was the senior educational psychologist for the City of Hull. In 1979, he was appointed to the inaugural Chair in Educational Psychology (Children with Special Educational Needs) at the Institute of Education University College London, from which he retired in 1995. co-authoring a report in 1980 and gave evidence to the Warnock Committee. He served on the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) committee, chaired by John Fish, to review its provision for pupils with special educational needs. The committee recommended that schools should form 'clusters' to collaborate to serve the needs of pupils with SEN. Wedell worked with a 'cluster' of schools in Camden (visiting them by bicycle from his office at the Institute of Education). He served as a consultant to the DES/Department of Health Management Development Project, which applied management of change concepts to the development of inter-service decision-making on SEN provision, and explored the use of clusters as a strategy. Wedell then obtained ESRC-grant funding for a research project to collaborate with colleagues to study the impact of clusters in relation to SEN provision.

Organising Education for Diversity and Inclusion

In the mid 1980s Wedell directed a major research project looking at curriculum modification practices in special and mainstream schools, one result of which was the training resource Pathways to Progress (Evans et al, 1990).

The SENCO Forum

In 1995 Wedell founded the SENCo Forum, an email chatroom for Special Needs Co-ordinators in schools to share problems and solutions. He set this up in collaboration with BECTA, seizing the innovative opportunities which email provided at the time. In 1998 he was asked by the Editor of the British Journal of Special Education (BJSE) to write a quarterly column, discussing key themes and concerns arising from SENCos' posts on the Forum. These were published over 23 years as 'Points from the SENCo Forum', Wedell's last column published in October 2021, just short of his 90th birthday. Themes arising included a wide range of issues, many of which focussed on government policy, such as those discussed in the 'Points from the SENCo Forum: Putting the 2014 Code of Practice into practice', which was submitted as evidence for parliamentary select committee deliberation.

Key Ideas in Wedell's Conceptual Development

PhD research and move away from classification

Wedell's PhD research was framed within the prevailing model of classification: analysing children's learning difficulties by starting from predetermined classifications of difficulty, located within the child. From this research, Wedell concluded that such classification could not adequately address children's learning needs. In his 1973 book Learning and Perceptuo-motor Disabilities in Children, he expressed frustration with the concept of classifying children with learning disabilities, describing it as 'an exercise of limited value', and instead discussed the importance of the interaction between the learner's strengths and needs and their school and home environment.

Towards compensatory interaction

From these findings, the concept of 'compensatory interaction' emerged as a model for assessing children's special educational needs. This model moved away from both classifications of learning difficulty and seeing learning difficulties wholly as deficits within the child. Instead, compensatory interaction conceptualised learning difficulties as interactions between strengths and needs within the child and advantages and disadvantages in their environment, considered over time.

The 'I and I' Strategy

At the Institute of Education, Wedell promoted and refined what he called the 'I and I Strategy' - to investigate and intervene in the individual case': an approach opposed to the use of generalisations and the fitting of pupils to general patterns. What was generally applicable for Wedell was the process of investigation and intervention. The starting point was the learning objective; and the strategy was one of investigating the strengths and needs of the individual and their environment in relation to the learning objective, and in the light of those strengths and needs to find interventions that would work for that individual, rather than applying generalised, ready-made solutions.

Special educational needs are relative

Wedell promoted the concept of special educational needs as relative: a learner's needs depend on the learning objectives, and if the objective is changed, the special educational need may change or disappear. Additionally, a learner's difficulties may be relative to their other learning characteristics and their learning environment. He advocated that educational provision should maximise organisational and pedagogical flexibility

Collaboration

Collaboration was a key concept in all of Wedell's thinking about the delivery of special educational needs provision. The 1981 Education Act required education, health and social services to work together to address the needs of young people with a Statement of Special Educational Need. Wedell not only focused on the practical implications of this requirement but went further. He stressed the need for collaboration at all levels as a basic principle of good practice. For example, at the Institute of Education he collaborated with local authorities in the disbanded ILEA to provide in-service training; he was very active in the SEN Policy Research forum, a broad network of all concerned with SEN, including families, to examine and debate SEN policy issues; and he developed links between statutory, professional, and voluntary organisations, both in lobbying and in service delivery.

'Points from the SENCo Forum': regular column in the British Journal of Special Education from 1997 to 2021.

Wedell, K. (2005). Dilemmas in the quest for inclusion. British Journal of Special Education.

Wedell, K. (2008). Confusion about inclusion: patching up or system change? British Journal of Special Education.

Awards In 1992 Wedell was awarded the CBE In 1993 he was made Honorary Fellow, British Psychological Society