Pathways To Inclusion

“As with almost everything, the impact will be felt most by low-income communities and families, and we as a nation will have to ask ourselves how we view our role as a society. Is it to support those in need? Is education a public good or a positional good?” (Akil Bello) Now is patently not the right time to be putting children through the 11-plus. While all other exams have been cancelled, schools will be ploughing ahead mercilessly with the 11-plus tests in September as planned. These are exams which will determine the path of these children’s education, their friendships, their careers, their lives. The highest of stakes, the greatest of pressures, and a level of stress most 9-10 year olds probably don't need in their lives right now, let alone their parents. What's more, this year will inevitably see the widest gulf between those children fortunate enough to live in comfortable, well-resourced homes, and those who do not share these advantages. Between those who can offer ...

Urban Myth by David Antonides I miss the undulating flow of a varied existence, the rhythmic passing between spaces, the rituals that celebrate the demarcation of time and place. The experiences, for the most part, remain largely similar. But they are no longer physically or temporally distinct from each other. And I'm finding this problematic. So yes, I miss going to the pub, and going to soft play with my children. I even miss going to work. But it’s not the places themselves that I miss, rather it’s the ability to pass from one space to another. And, crucially, the ability to leave them. To return to a place that is not them. Or, to put it another way, since pretty much all of our shopping has moved online, I don’t miss the feeling of being in a shop so much as I miss the feeling of not being in a shop. Just like, since all our social drinking now takes place on our sofa, I miss the time when our lounge wasn’t also a pub. And now that I am fielding my work on devices that are a...

“Thomas Gradgrind, sir. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures. A case of simple arithmetic.” (Hard Times) Falling by Matej Anzin Reducing people to numbers, so as to decide what treatment they might receive, may give off the appearance of striving for objectivity and fairness. But the simplicity of the numbers belies the messy, human complexity of people's lived experiences sidelined by this approach. Here I'm arguing that it's only through being receptive to this complexity that we can ever hope to achieve real health justice for people with learning disabilities. Making hard decisions easier, not fairer Assigning numbers to people is of course an inherently dehumanising act. The Nazis knew this, prison wardens know it too. But it's also something that happens when well intention...

Stay safe. I found it strange at first when this became our new sign-off. Shouldn’t it be 'keep well'? Or 'stay healthy'? But no, it's our safety that appears to be under threat. An intruder has broken in, past the defences we naively thought might have protected us. Over the last couple of weeks, I have started to reflect on how losing our safety net might help us better understand those who've never had one. The Fountain by Juliano Kaglis After my wife and I were burgled a few years ago, the thing we lost that hurt the most was not any of the possessions that were taken, but the underlying feeling that our front door marked the point at which outsiders could not enter. It has since taken time (and some heavy duty locks) to rebuild this psychological sense of security, for that is what we needed to do. We as humans need to kid ourselves every day into thinking that the walls around us will keep out any potential dangers, just so that we can go on...

In the 1940s, Americans were encouraged to smoke Camels as an aid to digestion. The ‘increased alkalinity’ was particularly good for you, apparently. Smoking wasn’t just regarded as innocuous, it was seen as positively beneficial . Light up on any street today, and you become a social pariah, polluting the air and draining the NHS of resources, selfishly taking doctors away from the sick kid who needs a heart transplant and making them tend to your odious blackened lungs instead. My point is, social attitudes change over time. And what one generation regards as harmless, even a force for good, future generations may come to view as socially undesirable. Last night I attended a debate put on by the Private School Policy Reform (PSPR) group, who are valiantly trying to establish some kind of meaningful direction for future reform of the independent education sector. Six speakers offered their proposals for how they would level the playing field. There was a brief discussion, follo...

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...

"Exclusion and seclusion can echo relational trauma and systemic trauma; physical restraint can echo physical and sexual abuse. Retraumatisation... may drive even more challenging behaviour." (Centre for Mental Health: Briefing 54) Trapped by Ashley Huisman A number of cases recently have seen mothers taking, or threatening to take their child's school to court for the seemingly barbaric systems of internal exclusion that are in use. Mothers of children with ADHD, with ASD, with mental health difficulties, with family trauma. The mother of a son who spent a third of his school year in ‘isolation’. The mother of a daughter who attempted suicide while she was in an isolation booth. I'm glad that it’s been widely reported on the BBC and even made the front page of the Guardian a couple of weeks ago; we downplay cases like this at our peril. There is now an active ‘ ban the booths ’ campaign group, and the first ‘ lose the booths ’ conference took place in L...