All Different, All Together, All Involved, All Successful
What is "Inclusion"?
"Inclusion" - a current buzz word. In education, raising achievement and promoting inclusion are the two principal goals emphasised by government. Yet there are many different interpretations and understandings.
For decades, parents and educationalists have talked about the pros and cons of "integrating" children with special needs in mainstream schools. Recent international legislation now specifies this as the normal or default expectation. However, children can be physically located in a mainstream school without being truly integrated into the life of the school.
Educationalists then re-conceptualised Inclusion as requiring effective functional access to the mainstream curriculum for all pupils (students). This demands great efforts from teachers to differentiate (individualise) the curriculum for pupils of very different abilities and starting points. This was coupled with the idea of social and emotional inclusion in the school l community - pupils with special needs had to feel and be treated as if they belonged.
As if this was not difficult enough, the concept of Inclusion continued to expand, linking to the wider notion of Social Inclusion throughout society. Not only were children to be educationally included, but also their parents and other family and community members. Both children and adults had to be offered opportunities to effectively access learning, and to do this successfully and actually achieve. Learning in school was increasingly seen as only one possible venue and source for learning, as many different forms and formats of learning became available. The expansion of online sources and the rediscovery of the concept of "full service" and "community" schools led to the notion of the "virtual school" serving the whole community..
A large agenda. More simply, Inclusion is about: