Manager at Riverside Education Simone Kemp is currently studying for a SENDIS Degree with Wolverhampton Open University, complementing her four years of professional experience within the education sector. In the following article for The Leaders Council, Kemp discusses best practice surrounding the inclusion of students with special education needs.
Despite inclusion dominating the educational landscape, there is a lack of clarity regarding its translation in practice (Sikes et al., 2007). Inclusion has been a subject of debate for a long time, where the main issue has focused around what inclusion or inclusive practice should look like in schools and in society in general.
However, in this piece, we will be looking at the inclusion of students with special educational needs in our school, particularly those with autism that we work with on a daily basis.
Riverside Education is an independent alternative school for students with special educational needs, mainly autism. The school caters for students aged fourteen to nineteen and its based in the West Midlands region of England. At Riverside, we believe in inclusion. We work hard to include everyone directly or indirectly in the process of teaching and learning as well as other activities that take place in the school.
This article is a reflection of the work we have done for the past six years where we have been learning about what it looks like to have an inclusive practice in the school and how we think it should feel. Throughout our six-year journey, we have become more and more passionate about what we believe to be inclusion for students with autism in our school.
"Inclusive education means all children in the same classrooms, in the same schools. It means real learning opportunities for groups who have traditionally been excluded – not only children with disabilities, but speakers of minority languages too," read a recent Unicef report, (2020).
In our view, the purpose of inclusion is to make sure that everyone feels that they belong. No one deserves to be judged and to feel any less equal than the person sitting next to them. Witcher (2015), further clarifies that inclusion does not have to mean "the same" but just having equal opportunities to the same resources. We believe that every student, regardless of who they are, has an ambition and a dream to become someone in the future hence they should have equal access to all available resources in our school.
Thomas (2012), argues that if the learning material is not suitable for the individual, learning simply doesn’t take place. Designing appropriate and suitable learning material is a big part of inclusion. As part of the inclusive practice in our school, we decided to create a work-based social enterprise for all students between the ages of 16 and 19 years only in order to increase their chances of future employment. We want them to feel that despite, their disabilities, they belong to their community and that they can contribute meaningfully to the society they live in.
Inclusion demands that we all leave no stone unturned, no door closed and no avenue unexplored. We see inclusion as welcoming everyone regardless of where they come from, who they are or what they look like. If everyone involved in education, from policy makers to policy implementers, believes and supports inclusion, we will all find it easier to remove educational barriers.
In our view, promoting inclusion in the school enables everyone to see education through a whole different lens and possibly develop an ability to always include others who look, think and do things differently to us. Inclusion is not an illusion, to us it is a reality. It is our dream to see all our students with disabilities making a positive contribution in and outside school and feeling that they are active, functional members of their community.
For the future, we are thinking of a whole school approach to inclusion and by this we mean everyone who regularly visits the school. This includes parents, non-teaching staff (including the receptionist and kitchen staff) consultants as well as regular contractors. Maybe something we would call a culture of inclusion? Something that when a visitor walks in, they can see and feel it through our language, behaviour, and approach to everything we do in the school?
References
Sikes, P., Lawson, H. and Parker, M. (2007) Voices on: teachers and teaching assistants talk about inclusion. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 11, 3, 355–370.
Thomas, G. (2012) A review of thinking and research about inclusive education policy, with suggestions for a new kind of inclusive thinking, British Educational Research Journal, iFirst Article: 1-18
Unicef, (2020) https://www.unicef.org/education/inclusive-education Inclusive education: Every child has the right to quality education and learning (Accessed: 09.08.2021)
Witcher, S. (2015) Inclusive Equality: A vision for social justice, Bristol, Policy Press.
