Inclusion involves a process of systemic reform embodying changes and modifications in content, teaching methods, approaches, structures and strategies in education to overcome barriers with a vision serving to provide all students of the relevant age range with an equitable and participatory learning experience and environment that best corresponds to their requirements and preferences. Placing students with disabilities within mainstream classes without accompanying structural changes to, for example, organisation, curriculum and teaching and learning strategies, does not constitute inclusion.
(United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disability,
General Comment 4. 2016.)
Hello everyone. Am I really so old that I remember the many different phases of ‘Special Education’ from personal experience? From my own past I can describe ‘visionary’ education settings and misaligned attempts at including everyone. As a 1970’s student in England I was fortunate enough to attend a school where education truly was for everyone and our classes included students of all abilities. With the 1970’s free love culture allowing our small school freedom from curriculum restraints and data collection regimes, we played happily, exploring our world unhindered by the knowledge of difference.
On my arrival to Australia in 1975, however, I found a very different environment where schools were so homogenous that stepping anywhere outside the norm was considered worthy of corporal punishment. To my young eyes, Australia was a land where difference simply didn’t exist. As a Year 10 student in Sydney I remember our ‘streamed’ classes of 10A, 10B, 10C, 10D, and 10R (I won’t tell you what we students thought the R stood for!). The students in this class were educated within our school but in a completely different environment. If it was not for assembly once a week, when this curious small crowd hung around on the verandah for the first ten minutes before vanishing into the background, we wouldn’t have known they existed.
My school in England has since closed down: a little too ahead of its time perhaps? But one would hope that our journey from integration to inclusion has advanced in this country.
The milestones along the road to inclusion in Australia would certainly include the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992, espousing the rights of people with disability, and the Disability Standards for Education (DSE), 2005. The Standards ‘seek to ensure that all students access education on the same basis’, an understanding that I’m not quite sure we have right just yet. These ideas continued to refine and manifest in policy such as The Melbourne Declaration, 2008, where we declared ourselves a country devoted to a goal of ‘successful learners’ and ‘confident and creative individuals’ amongst other ideals. At the same time the journey towards a Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD) started to quantify the number of students and their needs across all school settings nation wide. Meanwhile, The National Disability Strategy, 2010 – 2020 (2011) , announced a vision for ‘An inclusive Australian society that enables people with disability to fulfil their potential as equal citizens.’ (p.22) and a ‘person-centred approach’ (p.23). So it is really only in the last fifteen years that a dawning of understanding of inclusion began?
Australia signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability (UNCRPD) with General Comment 4 (2016) outlining specific definitions and conditions for ensuring the rights of people with disability to an inclusive education, importantly stating that ‘inclusive education can provide both quality education and social development for persons with disabilities, and a guarantee of universality and non-discrimination in the right to education.’ (p.1-2.)
The definition of inclusion was stated at the top of this post, but the General Comment also look at some definitions of the alternatives, including exclusion, segregation and integration. My Year 10 experience definitely demonstrated a model of integration to the point of segregation but this was not the only model that confused inclusion in education with inclusive education. ‘Special Education’ revolved around a medical model of disability or how to educate the disabled. Danforth and Jones explain how the idea of special education provision was found to be ‘deeply flawed’ (Danforth and Jones, 2015. p.3.), provided in a way that limited and pigeon-holed students and families (ibid, p.10.).
The UNCRPD lists a range of essential building blocks for an environment of inclusion including a whole system and school approach, a person centred approach, teachers who are supported and collaborative, a respect for diversity, a safe, supportive and stimulating environment, supportive transition processes, a recognition of the importance of partnerships with the community, parents and others, and ongoing monitoring and review. In other words, inclusion permeates every aspect of the education process.
An example of the holistic nature of true inclusion can be found in Tony Booth and Mel Ainscow’s Index for Inclusion. This volume is now in its fourth edition and provides ideas and monitoring checklists for every conceivable aspect of school life. It’s quite overwhelming to think of the all-encompassing nature of true inclusion that Booth and Ainscow espouse but, as noted in the overview, ‘doing the right thing’ depends on a framework of values, connecting these to beliefs, giving them meaning and acting upon them (Booth & Ainscow, 2016. p.11. Emphasis added.). In Australia, the gradual development of an Australian National Curriculum that explains and values personalised learning in its latest iterations and provides curriculum frameworks that include elements of universal design and a flexibility of application provide yet another tool for inclusive practice.
I’m hopeful that the NCCD will provide a framework for education where school systems embrace inclusion. The Australian Education Council published the 2016 Emergent Data on students in Australia receiving adjustments for disability in 2017. This document listed students with disability as making up 18.1% of the school population nationally (p.2.) in a range of broadly defined categories of disabilities more in tune with the definition of disability under the DDA. The NCCD also requires school based decisions about levels of adjustment and a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to funding based on assessed need and auditing based on evidence of adjustments. Perhaps this approach is still at odds with the system-wide, ethics and values driven approaches of the Index for Inclusion or the UNCRPD, but it is surely a step towards inclusive practice as an agreed basis for forward planning?
Inclusion Zone 