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Beyond Inclusion

Beyond Inclusion Picture

It's not just bricks and mortar

The debate about what support young people with special educational needs receive for their learning, needs to start with what young people themselves really value - not just where they go to school.
The debate around the future of provision for young people with special educational needs has been fierce in recent months. Should young disabled people be included in mainstream schools or not? From Baroness Warnock's 2005 report, revoking her famous support for 'inclusion' to David Cameron's personal response, this issue has never been far from the headlines.

But our research into education and learning and disability in other areas has suggested that the terms of the debate are unhelpful. What we should really be talking about are the successful ways in which young disabled people are supported to access the same educational entitlement as every other child, and how these could be built in to the system as an expectation, not an exception.

The first phase of this project will pull together existing research, undertaken with young people with a range of impairments and their parents, to get a strong picture of what successful support looks like in a variety of different areas. We will be working in partnership with the Royal National Institute for the Deaf who are funding  this work.

From this, we will draw out some of  the core criteria of successful provision wherever it occurs, measuring their outcomes against those promised to all young people in the Every Child Matters green paper.

We will produce a short think piece summarising our findings in October 2006, which will aim to reframe public debate around what service users value, and not just where they learn.

Please contact Sarah Gillinson or Hannah Green with any research or experiences that you would like to be included in scoping work for this project.