“Equality: Making It Happen” - Interview with Artemi Sakellariadis PhD (2/2)
Tue, 05/05/2015
INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IN THE UK
incluD-ed: You have already touched on this but could you say a bit more about the state of inclusive education in the UK and what challenges and trends there might be in developing inclusive education further?
Artemi Sakellariadis PhD: I would say inclusive education in the UK is very slowly on the rise but, depending on which government is in power, sometimes things are moving faster than others. Change has mostly been from the bottom up, if you like, so from where individual schools change and gradually set the pattern for years to come.
The political will, on the other hand, has been mostly absent. We are just coming to the end of term of a coalition government which is quite well-known for its lukewarm commitment to equality and especially to disability equality. It has brought in many changes, including changing the law on education for disabled children, but big decisions affecting disabled people’s lives have been taken without adequate consultation with disabled people.
When this government came into power five years ago it put forward a very strong rhetoric about reversing the bias to inclusion. In my mind this was harmful in two ways: first it muddied the waters about what inclusion in education actually is, because it spoke as though it is only about where disabled children go to school, and secondly it was misleading, because it gave a hollow promise. The government argued that it wants parents to choose what type of school their disabled child should go to, but did nothing to support ordinary schools to include disabled children. In many areas this left parents with no real choice.
Anyway, it is not just this government. I don’t think the UK has ever had a strong government directive to develop more inclusive education for everybody and certainly not for disabled children. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has repeatedly criticised the UK government about this. Schooling for disabled children is particularly interesting. CSIE has shown, through our Trends reports which date back to the 1980s, that in some areas much larger proportions of children are consistently sent to special schools than in other areas.
It is not clear why this happens, but it seems to be linked to people’s understandings of disability, and of disability equality, and in any case it is intriguing that such a pattern of contrasting responses to diversity exists. You know, I think a lot is being made of so-called contrasting positions to schooling for disabled children, when really the two are not mutually exclusive. Basically there are a lot of people who passionately believe that disabled children should be included in ordinary schools, in the name of children’s rights. And there are many others who believe that disabled children should be sent to special schools because there they find something that isn’t available in ordinary schools. And if you remember what I said at the beginning of this interview, I previously was one of these people. So yes, they do, but if the problem is that ordinary schools are not set up to include disabled children, what is the solution?
In my mind the two positions are not mutually exclusive at all! The first is a human rights position and the second a partial reflection on existing practice. We just need to develop the practice to bring it in line with the human rights position. There is nothing that happens in a special school that cannot take place in an ordinary school, so what we need to do is to rethink how teaching and learning are organised in schools, and make sure that all children can learn and develop alongside their brothers and sisters, friends and potential friends from their local community.
I say all this with significant trepidation because I have a lot of respect for staff in special schools and for the care and commitment they have for the children there. I know that staff there are really committed to doing what is best for the children. What is best for a child, however, is at the very heart of where communication can fall apart, because it is understood in different ways by different people. Schools as we know them have grown out of 19th century ideas about disability. I am not suggesting that we should place disabled children into ordinary schools as we know them. Far from it, a transformation is needed. But in some parts of the world this has already happened and continues to work well, with experienced staff supporting this process every step of the way.
incluD-ed: So you talked about reorganising schools but do you want to say a bit more about what you think is possible and how the education system can change within the next, say, 20 years?
Artemi Sakellariadis PhD: The optimist in me thinks that we don’t need as long as 20 years. What we need is a very strong commitment to raising awareness about equality, and I am talking about all aspects of equality. And once you’ve done that, then more and more people will understand what prejudices still exist and why things need to change, and then the rest will follow. It’s my experience that when you carefully address equality issues with people who have not yet had the time or the energy or the inclination to think about them, they engage in conversation and more often than not can see things from a different perspective, embrace the equality agenda and understand the need, the moral imperative if you like, to better protect children’s rights in schools.
I hope you won’t mind me returning to disability equality one more time, but it is my professional background and one of my personal passions, so I would like to tell you about one more CSIE initiative: we have recently started going into schools and running disability equality workshops for pupils.
In the UK there has been a recent call, from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, for schools to do more to help pupils understand disability and the prejudices disabled people face. The EHRC found that hundreds of thousands of disabled people in the UK face harassment and abuse on a daily basis but have come to accept this because of a kind of collective denial in today’s society. So the EHRC said that schools should do more to help young people understand and embrace disability equality.
So we started offering disability awareness workshops and, although I knew that they could make a difference, it wasn’t until I read the feedback that pupils gave at the end of each workshop that I realised just how powerful an impact they can have. We invite every person who participates to tell us if they found the workshop helpful or unhelpful and why, and almost everyone said that they found it helpful and we’ve put on our website some of the things young people said. Things like: I never knew that disabled people could do so many things, or I won’t laugh at disabled people any more or now I understand disability more, and lots of similar expressions of new insights.
Now I am not going to suggest that for all of those pupils these workshops will have a significant and lasting impact but, just as watching a video about a young lad in a wheelchair had a profound effect on me, I would like to think that our disability awareness workshops can have a lasting impact on some people. They can create a major shift in the thinking of those who attend them and may help them realise that some people whom they had previously considered as mostly different are, in fact, mostly similar to them. So this is why I say I don’t think we need 20 years to change things. All I suggest we need is the goodwill of people to engage with equality issues, have constructive conversations and better understand one another. I am sure that in this way all manner of identities can be better understood and better respond to.
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SHARING GOOD PRACTICE
incluD-ed: This is very interesting. To me it sounds like good practice and I’m wondering whether you come to share what you do with other European organisations, or even worldwide, so that others can learn from your experience in promoting inclusive education?
Artemi Sakellariadis PhD: Well it is interesting you should say that! We do try to attend European and international conferences to spread the word on what we do and hear about interesting developments from others. In the past CSIE has had a presence at ECER, the European Conference on Educational Research, and ISEC, the Inclusive and Supportive Education Conference, among other events. But just in April I’ve had to make the very difficult decision to pull out of this year’s ISEC, which is all the more painful as this event only takes place every five years. I’ve had an abstract accepted to present Equality: Making It Happen but I’m afraid I can’t make it happen because CSIE is a charity and doesn’t have any regular funding and the cost of attending this year was prohibitive. And it really pains me that I cannot go because I was really looking forward to presenting our new guide to an international audience.
To return to your question, yes of course we are in touch with a number of international organisations and have been for many years. As well as our involvement in the IncluD-ed network, we are part of a collaborative project on European Literacy & Citizenship and there is another international project in the pipeline but we won’t know until July if we get the funding for that to go ahead. Also, now that we’ve got the pilot edition of Equality: Making It Happen we have sent it to a number of our overseas contacts and hope they may choose work with us and with schools in their countries to create something similar.
incluD-ed: Thank you very much for this interesting interview! We hope the pilot edition of Equality: Making It Happen will be successful and you continue your inspiring work on advancing inclusive education in the UK.
“Equality: Making It Happen” - Interview with Artemi Sakellariadis PhD (1/2)
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More information on the Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education (CSIE)
