Disability Equality in Welsh Schools Richard Rieser and Kat Watkins

Developing Disability Equality in Welsh Schools

Observations from the Pilot Project to bring Disability into the Curriculum for Wales

By Richard Rieser, World of Inclusion, and Kat Watkins, Disability Wales.

Human Rights is one of the new Curriculum for Wales’ cross-cutting themes, this includes the UNCRPD. There is a duty on headteachers in the Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2022 “In designing, adopting or implementing a curriculum, section 64 of the Act also places a duty on schools, settings, and providers of EOTAS including PRUs to promote knowledge and understanding of Part 1 of the UNCRC, and of the UNCRPD, among those who provide teaching and learning. Promoting knowledge and understanding Disability Rights and the UNCRPD is a mandatory requirement.”

Disability Wales secured funding from the Welsh Government and chose to offer a tender to develop materials and try them out with some Welsh schools to promote Disability Rights and the UNCRPD. World of Inclusion was awarded this contract. From March to June 2021, they developed and delivered the project. Welsh schools were just coming out of Covid restrictions.

Originally, we wanted to work with three Local Authorities, but they were unwilling at this time. We wrote to over 200 schools in English and Welsh explaining the project and asking for their participation. In the end, the logistics of visiting during 3 weeks of fieldwork in the summer term 2022 limited the number of schools that could be involved to 2 special schools, 8 primary schools and 6 secondary schools (16 schools across 12 Local Authorities). We developed and trialed a suite of materials, many bilingual, and initiated work on disability equality in many areas of the Curriculum. The team involved were Richard Rieser, Katie Cohen, Arabella Turner and Jon Ralphs (Graphic Facilitator) and Kat Watkins from Disability Wales. We:

⊲ Recruited a Steering Group of interested officials, Disabled people, teachers, parents, teacher unions and NGOs and an Implementation Group of participating schools; ⊲ Wrote a guide for school staff and teachers and amended in light of feedback; ⊲ Tried out methods of raising the issues in the classroom with children from KS1,2,3 and in the special schools KS4 and 5; ⊲ Developed many new tools and Graphic facilitation in a number of schools to develop understanding and ownership of the process ⊲ Identified and encouraged participating schools to incorporate disability equality into schemes of study and lesson plans; ⊲ Provided numerous workshops, assemblies and staff discussion sessions many of which we filmed.

The core of what we did was to develop different methods and tools to work with selected groups of children in the participating schools. The sessions varied in length from 45 minutes to 2 hours. We asked for there to be a mixture of Disabled and non-Disabled students in mainstream schools and for those who usually had learning support to have it with them in the workshop. The aims of the workshops were for participants to: