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NEW!! "An Inclusive Education Guide for "The Professional Partnerships for Inclusive Education project was set up to Download a copy of the document here.
___________________________________________________________________ Is there any statistical backing for ‘the bias to inclusion’ SEN policy of the Coalition Government, towards disabled children and those with special educational needs in the English education system? Read this document by Richard Rieser for some interesting answers. __________________________________________________________
DISS Project The DISS project provides an accurate, systematic and representative description of the types of support staff and their characteristics. and deployment in schools, and how these changed over time.
It is the first longitudinal study to analyse the impact of support staff - in particular, Teaching Assistants - on teachers, teaching and pupil learning, behaviour and academic progress in everyday school settings.
The publication of "Keys To Inclusion" by Colin Newton and Derek Wilson.
Available NOW from our store You can download the first chapter FREE here. 'The Keys to Inclusion book is revolutionary and indeed a Bible for the inclusion movement, I hope people professing to be inclusive read it carefully and then put that into practice, The world will be such a more simpler and better place if that happens! '(Quote from a Parent - Feb 2011)
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Still the questions get asked...does inclusion work? What makes effective inclusion? Will children get a better education? The research is clear to us.The human rights issue is even clearer. All children should be in mainstream schools and no more children should be placed in special schools.Yes there will be problems to solve if this dream comes true, but there are now anyway! Lets move on. Work on figuring it out. Its time to change! There is plenty of research if you need it.... New approach to Research that we are offering... Narrative Approach to Collecting Young People’s or Parent’s Views on for example DCATCH, Child Care or other Services received. Sessions to do this would be best delivered as short days 10 – 2pm, twilights or evening sessions.
We would run these as a jargon-free interactive session and collect young people and family views on a large colourful wall graphic with their key words and images creating a rich picture of their experiences of inclusion (and exclusion) before and since the advent of DCATCH. Our aim would be to collect stories from at least 3 separate groups, share the stories across the groups, asking each group to be a kind of ‘outsider witness’ to the stories of the others, and inviting them to add their own stories. This model of engaging with groups in the community is built on this criss-cross exchange of stories and messages. Implicit in these stories will be the knowledge, skills, values and dreams that are developing locally. We would then extract the headline themes that emerge from these sessions and use these as the basis for writing this work up. _________________________________________________________________
A mother's battle to have her son's capacity to understand and communicate with support recognised. This film tells the story of Nihal Armstrong, a boy with Celebral Palsy whose misdiagnosed learning difficulties saw him spend some of his primary years within special needs education. Have a look at it here. _____________________________________________________________________Why do Finland's School's get the best results Internationally?Is it the three teachers in every class? One of whom works with anyone who is struggling. That they believe and practice 'mixed ability' teaching? That all teachers have MAs? That they encourage TRUST? Is it because pupils do less school hours? Is it that they recognise that diversity in the classroom leads to acceptance of difference?
Visiting Schools in Bologna, ItalyIn May 2010 a group of people from the Netherlands and Colin Newton and his son Louis from Inclusive Solutions the UK led by Trix Grooff travelled to Bologna, Italy and visited two middle schools, one 3-5 year old school (scuola maternal) and two primary schools, one of which was in Rimini, over the course of 3 days. Follow the link for impressions and comments based on the observations made and the interviews with staff across the schools. They are limited by the short period of time and by working through a second language but are still very interesting for anyone interested in approaches to inclusion across Europe.
InclusionCheck out this unequivocal quote in the TASH Journal Spring 2004 from Mary Falvey – Professor at California State University in LA: "Since (1977) hundreds of rigorous research studies have been undertaken to determine the effectiveness of integrating and including students with severe disabilities. As a result of a comprehensive review of the extant literature by myself and my colleagues, we were unable to identify even a singleresearch article that that found that segregated service delivery models are more effective than integrated models for students with severe disabilities." Click here to read this great paper about the values of inclusion.
Two ideal primers that will point you in the direction
of more in depth studies that have researched a wide range of
strands relating to educational inclusion. Gary Bunch and Angela Valeo 1997 Acceptance or rejection of inclusive education for all students is primarily a matter of attitude. There is no longer any argument that the inclusive approach cannot work, that teachers cannot undertake it without unfair stress, that the education of other students will be harmed, or that included ... Inclusive Schooling Practices: Pedagogical and Research FoundationsGail McGregor and R. Timm Vogelsberg 2000: A synthesis of the literature that informs best practices about inclusive schooling. This is really useful and will bring you speedily up to date with key research in the field Pub by Paul Brookes Co. Baltimore. Paul Brookes are the main US pubs on inclusion issues - worth getting their catalogue Also we really like anything that comes out of The Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire. Try; Restructuring High Schools for All Students - Taking Inclusion to the next leveled. by Cheryl Jorgensen 1998 also pub by Paul Brookes The Making of the Inclusive Schoolby Gary Thomas, David Walker, Julie Webb in 1997 This book provides what some would deem a 'balanced' UK perspective. This book can be located from the Amazon site. Resourcing Special Educational Needs and Reducing Reliance on StatementsThis issue causes school, LEAs and parents all kinds of headaches and if not done effectively can become a serious obstacle to inclusion. We are very interested in approaches to resourcing that do not rely on statements. We worked in Nottinghamshire and Nottingham and were involved in the development of the Mainstream Support Group system of resourcing that has reduced reliance on statements for resourcing in these two LEAs.This approach involved increasing the involvement and ownership of the process by school based staff. Such approaches support inclusion and increase trust.We offer training and development work based on these experiences. A recent research publication which shows the benefits of reducing reliance on statements can be downloaded here. Reducing reliance on Statements Centre for Studies in Inclusive Education:Segregation Trends and Statistics across Local Authorities Mark Vaughan OBE, Founder & Co-Director, CSIE said: 'All LEAs are working to the same laws and regulations, which call for inclusion of disabled pupils. It is time for the Government to take a firmer hand and get the higher segregating authorities to develop stronger inclusion policies. If Newham can do it with academic and social success, then so can every other authority.' Newham LEA, which has actively pursued a policy of inclusion in education for 21 years, placed 0.06% of its 0-19 year olds with statements in special schools and other segregated settings, while South Tyneside placed 1.46%. 'It is simply unfair and unjust for families that moves towards inclusion have been so slow, and that these variations still exist 22 years after the law to include disabled pupils in mainstream education first came into force' The Inclusion CharterTen Reasons for Inclusion Inclusive education is a human right, its good education and it makes good social sense Human Rights
Good Education
Social Sense
Effective Classrooms and Schools Did you know that based on research the top 6 most effective instructional strategies in the classroom are as follows?
This was based on meta analysis, combining the results of numerous studies. Download Effective Classroom Instruction Grouping by Ability? No way does it work!Key Research Findings Organizing students in heterogeneous cooperative learning groups at least once a week has a significant effect on learning (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Low-ability students perform worse when grouped in homogeneous ability groups (Kulik & Kulik, 1991, 1997; Lou et al, 1996) We hate the label 'low ability' and find it meaningless in the face of Multiple Intelligences work or when viewing pupils from a 'Gifts' perspective. Yet grouping by ability is still a dominant approach in primary and secondary education across UK. Where is the research to support the efficacy of such activity? 'Students of low ability actually perform worse when they are placed in homogenous groups' Marzano, 2005. This American research is supported by that carried out by NFER in 1998 concluded ' there are no significant differences between streaming, setting and mixed ability teaching on pupil achievement'. Also they conclude that: 'within homogenous groups teachers are predisposed to make negative judgemental of low ability pupils which, in turn, negatively affects these pupils' self perceptions, levels of achievement and experience of schooling'. (Streaming, Setting and grouping by ability, NFER,1998 For more information on grouping go to Focus on Effectiveness |
Inclusion Recent Research 
Inclusion: What Young People Tell Us 
Human Rights and School Change The Newham story by Linda Jordan and Chris Goodey |
'In a time when we attend very much to the mechanisms and techniques for delivering curriculum, we need to keep remembering that teaching is first and foremost a matter of the development of human beings as moral actors, as citizens, as people who are going to live in, and need to make a difference to, a very diverse and very complex world. And that requires far more than simply the delivery of instruction as marked by test results. It's a matter of the heart as marked by the kind of relationships and the sense of community that develops over time in a school.'
(John O'Brien).