Inclusive practice

Colin: We were travelling the UK, parts of Eastern Europe and even trips to Canada and North America. We travelled a lot with the inclusion message. We really developed the Circle of Inclusion approach, really strengthening the idea of the Circle of Adults as a problem-solving process. We really embedded that with training and writing.

Derek: It’s probably important to say something about our training methodology in this context because we always trained together. We almost always used a large scale graphic visual representation of what topics we were training on and, in line with the inclusion message, we were keen to try and get the ideas across in as many ways as we could, so we were never people that lectured with a series of bullet points. I guess with hindsight I’d often say that good teaching is good teaching and using a range of methods.

Colin: So, we were very interactive in our training work. We’ve done individual work around training with families and young people, always with the mission of all children being included in mainstream schools with the right support, the right provision, and the right flexibilities. So, the ideas and strategies that we used, like, for example, restorative justice, were always in the interest of maximising every child’s right to inclusion. We really tried to get our training up to a gold standard so people would remember us and remember those ideas and take that feeling away, that spirit away to want to include all children.

2. Maresa: What di

fferences have Inclusive Solutions made?

Colin: One thing I would say is the educational psychology world has fully embraced a number of the approaches we promoted, particularly person-centred planning; the use of parts and maps. They are really highly valued by psychology services up and down the UK around working with children and families. To this day they are still hankering to learn more about them, so that’s been really important. I would say the Circle of Friends approach was embedded and put in the pills Toolkits, as was the Circle of Adults process which was the in depth problem-solving. It was quite something really. It was embedded in psychology approaches but then it filtered down into schools as well in terms of practice that gets close to young people. That’s definitely one change we brought.

Derek: Again, with hindsight, inclusion has become one of those words that nobody says they’re not. It’s almost an insult to be told you’re not very inclusive. That wasn’t the case 20 plus years ago. So that word has found itself into the mainstream of what people expect settings to be and the individuals to be. But that’s not the same thing as saying it’s properly understood. Nowadays I would introduce, especially our Keys to Inclusion session, with words along the lines of: “We want to be able to think together a bit more deeply about what that word means, because we all think it’s a good thing but what are we talking about and not talking about.” So, thinking about what difference we’ve made, we couldn’t take full credit for mainstreaming the word inclusion, that’s come from a whole range of sources, but right now it’s an accepted good thing.

What that means in practice is a different issue. That’s always been the struggle for us. The actual mindset of what underpins inclusive practice is quite tricky and takes a bit of unlearning about what we were all taught as ways of understanding people with differences. I suppose I’m getting at the medical model here; we do things like ask what’s ‘wrong’ with somebody as a first question, and to try and move beyond that and ask more inclusive questions is a big ask.