Inclusive practice

Maresa MacKeith interviews Derek Wilson and Colin Newton from Inclusive Solutions

As partners of Inclusion Now magazine for many years, we wanted to know more about their inclusive practice work. So, in April this year, Maresa interviewed Colin and Derek on behalf of the editorial board – here’s what she found out.

1. Maresa: We wondered if you could tell us about the history of Inclusive Solutions?

Colin: Inclusive Solutions goes back about 20 years, maybe 21 years this year. We were exposed to the Inclusion Movement through Marsha Forrest and Jack Pearpoint and also, in this country, through Richard Rieser. As educational psychologists we didn’t want to give up our day jobs, and Marsha Forrest just died and that was our trigger. We were doing a lot of work on inclusion and the approach of Circle of Friends. We made a lot of progress with that and person-centred planning.

Derek: We were getting more and more requests to come and do training with other people across the country. We didn’t leave local authority jobs because we were unhappy or frustrated. In many ways we had a lot of freedom to do what we thought was important as part of developing inclusion in Nottingham city. But the picture felt like a bigger one, I guess, looking back and we made the decision to strike out as freelance trainers and support Inclusion Now when we could. We were doing that at