Pathways To Inclusion

There has been a steep rise in the number of assemblies and form time presentations focusing on the issue of climate change. Unless we change course soon, approximately 75% of all assembly time will have been taken away by 2030, caused entirely by man-made climate change school resource packs. It has broken free from Geography and Science lessons, and now all manner of classrooms, from PSHE and RE, to Maths and English, are talking about it. But it feels to me like we haven’t worked out how to tell this particular story. We haven’t figured out the language yet, the tone, the narrative arc. And it’s really important we work this out sooner rather than later. My son, who has just turned four, knows that the Earth is sick. He knows this because he recently got out from the library ‘ Hello, Mr World ’, in which our planet is weirdly personified as a patient being examined by two young children pretending to be doctors. It’s a cute conceit, if you ignore the fact that it leads to a...

"Given the right circumstances, being different is a superpower." Greta Thunberg. Greta Thunberg holding her first climate strike, August 2018, outside the Swedish parliament When Greta Thunberg compared her Autism to a 'superpower', she thrilled a growing movement of neurodiversity advocates, eager for another prominent spokesperson to proudly show the world that autism is a difference not disability. It is an approach that has informed the direction of travel for a great deal of SEN policy and practice in the 21st Century so far. Dyslexic students are described not as having a learning difficulty but as having a dyslexic-type learning preference . The philosophy of neurodiversity is quite simple: Different people's brains work in different ways. For people on the spectrum of dyslexic type difficulties, this will mean a preference for visual, kinaesthetic learning activities. For many on the autistic spectrum, this will mean a preference for rout...