Pathways To Inclusion

You tend to hear parrotfish before you see them. They nibble loudly on the coral, chewing off the hardened algae with their ‘beak’. I developed a habit of choosing one and following it for as long as my air supply permitted. I was fascinated by them. Apparently they can change sex several times during their lives, which was very progressive 20 years ago. Their pedestrian pace meant I could normally keep up, and their scales glimmered with colours I never knew existed. I was in the lazy summer of my early 20s, lounging in cheap hostel dorms on the Honduran island of Utila while I waited for the new term of adulthood to start. A parrotfish “How was the dive?” “Good!” I replied. “Amazing… beautiful.” “Really?” She shot me a look of weary bemusement that caught me off guard. She was probably in her 50s, and was revisiting some of the haunts of her earlier travels. She'd been gazing out to sea when I came back. “Yeah. Why?” “It’s a graveyard,” she said, sighing. “Last time I was here th...

In all the talk about selective admission tests recently, with Northern Ireland quietly dropping theirs this year, one question has been floating around my head. Are the tests even lawful to begin with? They openly discriminate against children with learning disabilities (a protected characteristic since the 2010 Equalities Act), so how do they comply with this? Is there an exemption I didn't know about? This is not, it seems, a widely asked question, so I'd assumed the issue must have been dealt with a long time ago. The more I've been looking into it however, the more I feel it's just been swept under the rug in the hope that no-one will ask any difficult questions. Some were raised last September, when the parents of a visually impaired boy, with the support of the EHRC, took their nearby grammar school to court for failing to take his impairment into consideration during the admissions tests. They won their case, on the grounds that the school in question failed t...

I hate my job title. If it’s not offensive already then it surely soon will be. In fact I’ll wager good money that the term will have become obsolete by the time I retire. I am a Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator. ‘Special’ here refers to the needs that some students have in the classroom. The ones who are on the SEN register. The needs of all the other students are, by this definition, not  special. Presumably their needs are... what? Ordinary? They must be, because they are not on the register of children whose needs are special. Teachers can educate all those other students in a regular humdrum fashion. They reserve their special teaching for my students. It’s a horrible term. It manages to be both patronising, offensive, but also antithetical to the goal of meaningful inclusion that we are trying to achieve. To define someone by their ‘special’ needs is the quickest way to other them. To establish that they are in a category removed from the commonplace. To define their ...

When Tom Hunt MP suggested that it should be 'compulsory' for all schools to fly the British flag, all I wanted was to avoid the trap that he clearly wanted teachers to fall into. The one where he gets to cast teachers off as a washy blob of unpatriotic liberals for not wanting to plaster our schools in massive Union Jacks. Why not call his bluff? All turn up at Tom Hunt’s office demanding multiple enormous flags for all schools, one for each office, a portrait of the Queen in every classroom and 12ft marble statue of Boris Johnson in every lobby? But no, best to retain a dignified silence on the matter. He won't get as much joy from his petty culture war if he's the only one playing. I think. But my very first post on this Blog was about Belonging. So... could a sense of patriotism be a helpful thing? Would it not be good if our children were possessed with a reassuring sense of belonging to the nation of which they are a citizen? Well, perhaps. But there are differen...

“I do, often, wish I was like... more normal, you know?” (BH, Year 9) The Pantheon, Rome (architectural cross-section) Normal. What does it even mean? And why does it mean that? There’s quite a history to the word, it turns out. But untangling the history of the word ‘normal’ has helped me to better understand the history of subjugation that ‘abnormal’ or neurodiverse people have faced for centuries. And it could help us figure out what we should do next. When Anaximander of Miletus travelled from Greece to Sparta two and a half thousand years ago he brought with him an idea. If you place a rod, he said, perpendicular to the base of an upright hemisphere, then when the sun was out the shadow cast by the rod would tell you how far through the day you were. The rod was known as a gnōmōn , with the prefix gno-: to know; the shaft of the sundial was the part that knew the time of day. Later, when Roman carpenters were describing the set square used to build their grand edifices (many of...

“Man can and should make himself master over nature by his knowledge of the subject” (F. Mitterrand) Trigger Warning: Contains graphic depictions of animal cruelty and Michael Gove Last Spring I started noticing this bird sitting on a tree outside our bedroom window. At about 8am it would sing, patiently, to this other, similar looking bird perched on an antennae on the roof of the house opposite. Every morning for about a month it did this. This might happen every year, I don't know. The roads were a lot quieter than usual, and I had a bit more time around the house to notice. And then they went somewhere else. Maybe they got freaked out by the saucepan banging, who knows. But one day I realised they weren't there any more. And all that was left echoing down our empty street was a fading, imperfect memory of their song, and my lingering regret that I never found out what they were called. Anatomy of a songbird Dominion 25 years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1995, François Mitterrand ...