Activism is about both support and conflict, and embracing each other’s points of view. This is certainly true in education. Here we look at different approaches to the same goal of equality for all.
Ruth Pickersgill, Will Bee and Hilary Sutherland share their views
“I strongly believe that the best model of education is for Disabled people to be in mainstream schools, but with specialist support.”
Ruth Pickersgill
Ruth Pickersgill went to a mainstream school and trained as a teacher. She became disabled at 21, which thwarted her early career objective, but opened up another. She explains that as a teacher, she “couldn’t really do much, because in those days, you still had to write on blackboards, you still had to do PE sessions. There was no concept of ‘reasonable adjustments’. So I gave up teaching.” But she went on to find out about the Inclusive Education movement, “joined things like the Alliance for Inclusive Education” and says her interests in education and disability ‘came together’ when she began working on inclusive education in schools with Bristol City Council in 1995. Her first role, as Inclusion Manager, involved “trying to move some of the special school provision onto mainstream sites”.
She says: “We pushed really hard for the council to adopt an Inclusive Education Policy: it was really exciting and quite novel. We said ‘Right, we’re going to close our special schools, we are going to have everyone in mainstream’. Bristol wasn’t willing to be that radical, but we did get a policy that said ‘in principle we agree with inclusive education’. There was a three-pronged approach. One was to make mainstream schools more inclusive. Another was to take classes from special schools and move them into mainstream. The children would go along with their teacher and their LSAs, so they’d get the advantages of playtimes and lunchtimes, and also get opportunities to go into different lessons, and gradually experience mainstream settings. We called them inclusion classes.”
Schools were also ‘twinned’ to give social and learning opportunities for the Disabled children, while the third ‘prong’ involved physical changes. “For example, we decided we were going to close the secondary provision of Briarwood Special School and Elmfield Special School, and move [them] onto a mainstream sites at what are now Bristol Met and Fairfield, which have a secondary provision for children with severe learning difficulties and Deaf pupils on site.
“Because parents were so keen on special education, we weren’t saying, ‘We’re just going to dump you in mainstream and that’s the end of it’. We were trying to say we’ll take the expertise and the learning and the good practice from special schools, but put them into mainstream settings, so the children have a lot more chances to be included and integrated, meet with their peers and have a much wider academic opportunity.
“We were very, very unpopular with the special schools. It took a lot of hard work to try and gain the trust. In most of them there’d be one or two people who would understand what we were doing, and were really good allies, and we worked with them. But there were others who were completely opposed to it, and just thought we just wanted to close special schools.
“There were a lot of Disabled adults involved in this work, and they didn’t see why they should be having their say in what Disabled young people wanted – they thought the parents should be deciding. A lot of the parents were preferring the special schools because they felt safer and they have good relationships with the staff. So there were tensions with parents’ groups, and there were tensions with the special schools.”
The project Ruth is most pleased about was establishing the Bristol Inclusion Standard, which encouraged schools to work towards a standard of inclusion, so that if a Disabled child applied to their school, they would be inclusive and welcoming. She says “We worked with about 40 or 50 schools over several years; they had to come to training courses, prove they’d linked with special schools, done inclusion work, done access audits, looked at the curriculum, seen how to include Disabled people and then they’d get the Standard award.
“It was a really good way of moving schools along. Some of the people who were teachers then, working on that inclusion model, are now head teachers. When I go to their schools, they seem to have the most inclusive schools because they’ve obviously remembered that learning. We also ran a Masters degree in Inclusive Education jointly with Bristol University. Some of the teachers who came on that – special school teachers or mainstream – went on to be real advocates for inclusion.
“I still strongly believe that the best model of education is for Disabled people to be in mainstream schools, but with specialist support.”
“What is really important is getting the message across that it’s about pushing people”
Will Bee
Having been through both residential special school and mainstream education, Will Bee believes that education should be about finding the best solution for each individual – mainstream or special school – and then about pushing them to achieve the best they can.
He says: “I’d gone to residential special school in North Wales, and I’d been top dog in the school, because I was one of only about three pupils in the school who could actually read, even at the age of nine. I was probably getting a bit too big for my boots, and the headteacher said to my parents, ‘Will really ought to be in mainstream school’. He pulled a few levers with the local education authority and I started going to a mainstream primary school, and then on to secondary. I never saw another Disabled person once I left that special school, and I felt I’d been allowed a free pass to move out of an excluded Disabled world where I would’ve gone to school and worked in sheltered workshops especially for Disabled people, and I’d probably have married another Disabled woman if I married at all and lived in especially adapted housing, and really been cut off from the world, because that’s what happened to so many young Disabled people at that time. I was sort of accepted into what I would call, at those times, the ‘able-bodied world’, but a lot of my behaviours were about fitting in and being really quite grateful.
“I was convinced mainstream school is the place to be, it’s where you learn the social skills and where you are pushed. There’s no excuses, the teachers will push you as hard as anyone, and that’s where Disabled people need to be. But I remember a good friend and colleague on the senior management team at the DRC [Disability Rights Commission] said exactly the opposite. He’d been to a really challenging residential special school in England, where they do push pupils to do A levels and go off to university. He said that his parents had fought to get him into his [mainstream] primary school, but he was struggling. He wasn’t being pushed, his parents weren’t able to give him the support, and if he’d not gone to special school and been pushed, he wouldn’t be where he was.
“I am left with the conclusion that there is no right answer – it’s finding the environment that best pushes a Disabled person to fulfil their potential, and in some instances, that is with other Disabled people, and in some instances, it’s being thrust out into the mainstream world. What is really important is getting the message across that it’s about pushing people.
“What happens to, I think, too many pupils in both settings, mainstream and specialist, is that their teachers don’t believe in them and don’t push them to maximize their potential, and that’s what’s absolutely fundamental. That would be the lesson that I would pass on: structural things are rarely the solution, it’s the personal. I hope that somehow with teacher education and others involved in working with Disabled young people and people who require disability knowledge, the message gets through that your role is to help that person find out what their potential is, and push them to fulfil it, not to make judgments of them, not to let them sit back, and certainly not to make assumptions about what they can’t do.”
“Sign language is our language, it’s our right to have access to that language”
Hilary Sutherland
Hilary Sutherland fought for her profoundly Deaf son to go to a mainstream school. Her experiences of growing up Deaf in a hearing family, and of later bringing up her own children (one Deaf son and one hearing daughter) have made her passionate about the importance of ‘sign bilingualism’ – that is, sign language and written English.
She says: “Right from the start, my family were told ‘Never, never, never use sign language with Hilary. If you use sign language, then she’ll never be able to speak’. My sister remembered the pressure really well. I could lip read my mum and she could understand me, but it took a long time for me and my dad to understand each other well. There were a number of times growing up that I felt left out, that I was missing out on important information. When I was in school, the approach used to educate Deaf children was oralism – sign language wasn’t encouraged” [or even allowed].
By the time she was thinking about her own son’s education, it was acknowledged that sign language was really important for Deaf children and adults, and Hilary’s son was already proficient. She wanted him to go to a Deaf school: “he was very dependent on sign language, as he didn’t really have any speech, and his lip reading wasn’t very good when he was young; he just wasn’t very confident with hearing people.” The most logical way forward was for her son to be educated through sign language.
The family had to wrestle with the local authority to get what they wanted – at one point this involved a headteacher and the head of service having an embarrassing ‘battle’ in front of them – but they eventually managed to get their son into the school of their choice. “That was really, I suppose, the starting point for me, when I developed my sense that something wasn’t right [within the educational sphere] for Deaf children. And also within the community. Sign language is our language, it’s our right to have access to that language.”
Hilary was also particularly keen that her hearing daughter did not experience the isolation that she had as a child. She says: “The way around that was just to use [two languages] in the home.” It was an approach she carried through to her first job, working on the three-year Deaf Child at Home Project, funded by Children in Need, which trained Deaf people to go into hearing families’ homes and teach them how to communicate with their Deaf child. Hilary says: “The education service could see the benefit of that so much, they employed [these] Deaf people to continue working in that role once the project had finished.”
She later undertook a PhD exploring further sign bilingualism – at the time, quite a new idea – through the eyes of a Deaf child. “I was interested to see what language choices children wanted to make, how they wanted to choose to express themselves, what Deaf children’s views about Deaf and hearing people were, where they would look to for support.”
Hilary says: “What I learnt from doing that research is how important self-esteem is for Deaf children. Deaf children have to be able to feel good about themselves. If they’re not understood when they speak, then that really [knocks] their self-esteem. I see sign bilingualism as giving tools to Deaf children, giving them lots of different ways that they’re able to express themselves, and giving them the confidence to be able to say, ‘Okay, if you don’t understand this way, what are the other options I’ve got to make you understand what I’m trying to say? Can I write something down, can I draw something, can I mime something?’ So rather than not having the resilience [and the resources] to keep going, helping them to feel like they can continue. I felt like that’s really important for their future.”