Developing an Inclusive School

To establish an inclusion policy for (a.n. other) school which meets the needs of pupils and parents, sets clear guidance for staff and other agencies, and ensures the school meets its legal requirements in relation to SEN guidance, Every Child Matters and the Children s Services framework. 

For each of the following key issues, there needs to be a broad set of key actions with performance measures and targets as appropriate. 

In the context of inclusive learning, access needs to be seen in terms of physical access, access to the curriculum and access to information. 

Quality of support - monitoring of usage. Service Level Agreements with outside agencies. BEST, therapists and so an. 

Key Principles underlying the strategy (to be set within the context of the school) 

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These key characteristics can provide a useful checklist for schools (see the CD, Chapter 3 Example 6) in measuring how far they have progressed towards developing an inclusive school. There are a number of useful checklists and inclusion standards that schools can use to help establish and review inclusive practices for example. Inclusion Standard - High Standards for All - Manchester Education Department, www.manchester.gov.uk/education, and Index for Inclusion, www.inclusion.org.uk and www.csie.org.uk. It is also important to remember that working in isolation is not an option - all schools need the involvement and support of the local authority, special schools and services, statutory, voluntary and other agencies if their school is to become tmly inclusive. 

The school describes itself as an inclusive school in its mission statement and it has developed admission, attendance and exclusion policies as well as a code of conduct in hue with this ethos. As one member of staff summed it up ... 

Developing an Inclusive Policy for your School A CSIE Guide, Bristol Centre for Studies... 

Through use of grounded theory, we developed an emergent model of Ubuntic inclusion. Its content arose from analyses of the experiences of thousands of employees and leaders we encountered at Big Bank, Big School, and Big Store. In this chapter, we share with you other real-life examples of Ubuntic inclusion that we have observed. 

Any investigation of the achievement of students depends on a set of outcome measures against which schools can be held accountable and decisions need to be made about what outcomes are important and how they will be assessed. As we have argued, the selection of these outcome measures enables different stories about the effects of inclusion on the education of all students to be told. Notably, the quality of students social participation is an area of ongoing concern. The one disabled member of staff who herself had attended a mainsiream school raised a number of issues about loneliness and fiiendship and listening to her voice may open up new opportunities for the further development of inclusive practice. 

Promote an inclusive, rather than exclusive, school environment through adopting mission and service statements, developing linguistic and cultural capability, having culturally responsive accessibility, and culturally representative staffing. 

We used a balanced mixed methods approach to collect data from members of three organizations Big Bank, Big Store, and Big School. Two studies were strictly quaUtative (Big Bank and Big School). One study was both quaUtative and quantitative (Big Store). Two studies used a strictly appreciative frame (Big Store and Big School). Two studies inquiry focus was on individual experience (Big Bank and Big Store) the inquiry focus for Big School was the organization. Big Store also allowed an organizational focus. Consequently, the types of data (qualitative or quantitative), inquiry frames (traditional and appreciative), interview foci (the individual or the organization), and industries allowed us to develop a robust model of how inclusion is experienced in the workplace from the organizational member s perspective (Table 3.2). 

The data analyzed in this book come from our work with Big School on developing a vision for diversity and inclusion. We collected data in two ways for this project. Like Big Bank, we facilitated focus groups in which we collected oral and written responses to our question. We took this approach because some employees were not computer literate or didn t have access to a computer and we wanted to include their voices. We interacted with hundreds of people in this manner. However, the bulk of our responses came from the thousands of stakeholders (mostly internal) who completed an online survey, which we launched. In addition to posing the same questions as the focus group, the online survey allowed us to collect demographic and institutional data from respondents. Like Big Bank and Big Store, this enabled us to analyze patterns by various identity group memberships. 

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