Ruth Pickersgill B

Interviewer: Cat
Interviewee: Ruth Pickersgill

Introductions

Cat (00:00:00):
On this computer. Fab. Brilliant, hi. So hi Ruth. To start us off, could you please just introduce yourself for the recording, and just tell me a little bit about yourself and your current work? Just a brief overview.

Ruth:
Okay. I’m Ruth [inaudible 00:00:14]. And at the moment I’m a city counsellor, and my ward’s Easton Ward. So I was elected in 2016 and would have finished last May, but due to the COVID situation, we’ve had our year extended. So I’m being a counsellor for another year. And in my free time, I’m a trustee of WECIL, the West of England Centre for Inclusive Living, and of Ashley Community housing and Bristol Refugee Rights, which are refugee organizations. And I’m chair of governor of the local secondary school, which is the City Academy. So I tend to keep myself reasonably busy.

Disability provision in education

Cat (00:00:55):
Fab. Thank you. So today we’re going to be mainly talking about your work around Disability provision in education settings. So if you’d like to start at the beginning, where and when did your work with Disability provision in education start, who or which organizations were involved?

Ruth:
Okay. Well, it started way back in 1985, I think it would have been, when I was incredibly lucky to get a job as the director of something called Lambeth Accord. That was a project inBrixton. And it was a Disabled people’s project, run by Disabled people, funded through the European Social Fund. The aim was to try and get Disabled people into training or employment. So we ran two major projects.

Ruth:
One was a training project, mainly training people in either office skills, or in catering. And we ran another project, which was helping people with employments. We had people who would help get rid of the barriers to employment, so we had somebody work with them on housing, somebody work with them on getting the right education qualifications. We had a social worker who might support if they needed PA support, that sort of thing.

Ruth:
So I got involved there, and I went into it not actually knowing very much about inclusive education really at all, because I went to a mainstream school, and I became Disabled when I was about 21. So I’d only been Disabled a few years myself. But one of the people who worked for me was the most amazing guy called Rob Griffin. He didn’t have arms, and he had feet and no legs. He actually wrote with his feet, and he’d done a PhD in inclusive education. And he was my education officer. So he worked for me, and he really opened my eyes because he’d been through the special schooling system, and knew a lot of people who had. And talked about it a lot. So I started to get really interested in the whole concept of inclusive education at that time. But the work that we were doing then was more with adults, and young adults. So it wasn’t till I moved back to Bristol in 1988, and subsequently that I started working on inclusive education in schools really.

Cat:
So what was the motivating factors for you getting… Making that real focus switch to the education in schools? Or did you just find your way into it, or were there any specific factors that made you focus on that?

Ruth:
Well, I became, sorry, I’m fighting a cat here who wants to sit in my lap. I became really interested in schools because I was a teacher. So originally, I was a teacher. I always wanted to carry on being a teacher, but because I’d become so Disabled, I couldn’t really do much. Because in those days, you still had to write on blackboards. And you still had to do PE sessions, and everything else. There was no concept of reasonable adjustments, or anything. So I gave up teaching. I’d always wanted to be in teaching, and always been interested in education.

Inclusive education movement

Ruth (00:04:07):
So once I found out about the inclusive education movement and got… Joined things like the Alliance for Inclusive Education, it came together. My interest in Disability and my interest in education came together really. And at the time in the late 80s, early 90s, I was working as Disability Equality Officer for Avon council.

Ruth:
So I was able to get quite involved in education issues there. So working with quite a lot of schools, mainly around access improvements, and things like that. Nothing major. But then I moved to Bristol City Council, and I was able then to [inaudible 00:04:46] I had a job, it’s a couple of jobs on… Because I worked in the [inaudible 00:04:50] sector for a while, but then I got a job as Inclusion Coordinator for the city council. And that was a very specific role to try to move as many children from special schools into mainstream as possible. So that was where I started being really interested. But in the interim bit, I’d represented the West of England Centre for Inclusive Living because I was working there, on an inclusive education steering group for Bristol City Council.

Ruth:
So what we’ve managed to do, a lot of people have been on this steering group, a lot of Disabled people, particularly somebody called Ann Pugh, who was a Disabled activist and video maker, and did all sorts of work around education.

Ruth:
We pushed really hard for the council to adopt an inclusive education policy. So when they did that, it was really exciting and quite novel, because [inaudible 00:05:45] had done it, [inaudible 00:05:46] authority. And said, “Right. We’re going to close our special schools, we are going to have nobody in special schools, everyone in mainstream.” And they’ve gone quite a long way along that route. Bristol wasn’t willing to be that radical, but we did get a policy that said in principle we agree with inclusive education. We’re going to have a roadmap of how we gradually move children over. And the idea… There was a three-pronged approach really. So one was to make mainstream schools more inclusive in the first place. Another one was to take classes from special schools and move them into mainstream. So for example, Kingsweston special school had a class in Sea Mills Primary School, and they had another class in what was Portway Secondary School.

Ruth:
So their children would go along with their teacher and with their LSAs, but they’d start to be in a mainstream setting. So they’d get the advantages of play times and lunchtimes, all those things. But also they’d get opportunities to go into different lessons, and gradually experience the mainstream settings. So we call them inclusion classes. So we did quite a lot of those in a number of schools around Bristol. And I think we spoke last time about the situation with Claremont schools. So that was another of the kind of inclusion initiatives, which wasn’t the same, it wasn’t inclusion class, but it was about twinning together schools. So Henley’s infants and juniors linked with Claremont, and we looked for all sorts of opportunities to do joint work, and social opportunities and learning opportunities for the children. So there was that piece of work as well.

Ruth:
And then the third bit was around physical changes. So we decided we were going to close the secondary provision of Broward Special School and Elmfield Special School, and move it onto a mainstream site. So we created the… Well it’s now at Bristol Met. because the schools have all changes names. But Bristol Met. has a secondary provision for children with severe learning difficulties on-site. Oh and Bedminster Down ended up with a provision for physically impaired young people. And so did Brislington School and… Which was the other one I just mentioned? Oh, Elmfield. So that was an interesting one. Elmfield School for Deaf Children. We closed their secondary provision, and Fairfield school was then being rebuilt at the time. So we built a deaf provision within Fairfield school. So all of those, the idea was that it… Because parents were so keen on special education, we weren’t saying, “No, we’re just going to dump you in mainstream and that’s the end of it.”

Ruth:
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, and meet with their peers. And have a much wider academic opportunity as well.

Ruth:
So for example, there was a lot of children from Kingsweston School who are on the autistic spectrum. And they were in the special school, but they moved over to an inclusion class in Portway School, which meant they could then access mainstream GCSEs, but also have somewhere to go back to if they needed any specialist support, or a bit of a quiet time or whatever. So they had a base, but they could move out into more lessons. So it just widened the opportunities I think, for a lot of children.

Cat:
[inaudible 00:09:28] Yeah. It sounds really, really good. Really useful. Did you come up against any challenges during this work? Not necessarily opposition, but just anything that maybe you found difficult or had to work around, or challenges to attitudes?

Gaining trust from special schools

Ruth (00:09:46):
Yeah. We were very, very unpopular with the special schools, who thought we were just trying to close them down. And it took a lot of hard work to try and gain the trust. And I think what happens in most of them was there’d be one or two people within the school who would understand what we were doing, why we’re trying to do it. And were really good allies, and we worked with them. But there were others who were completely opposed to it, and just thought that we were completely loud and we just wanted to close special schools, and they didn’t really understand why. Because there were a lot of Disabled adults involved in this work, and they didn’t see why Disabled adults should be having their say in what Disabled young people wanted. Because they thought the parents should be deciding. And on the whole, a lot of the parents were preferring the special schools because they felt safer and they have good relationships with the staff and everything else. So there were tensions with parent groups, and there were tensions with the special schools, be fair to say.

Cat:
Yeah. I can imagine that would be quite difficult. But did it manage to rectify in the end? Did people get used to it after a while, and it settled down? Did you achieve the results you were hoping to longer-term after a while?

Ruth:
Well, we did, but it needs constant revisiting and revitalizing I think, because you can put people somewhere, but then it needs an awful lot of work to make it happen. And I think it only continued where there were people who had the commitment to make it work. And in other places I’m really disappointed, because my post was deleted because they felt that the work had started to happen and it would just carry on. So I got a different job as a qualities manager, and they just assumed it was going to happen, but I think it needed people to carry on being dedicated in doing that. So I’m really disappointed for example, in Bristol Met. I go there quite often because I lived nearby, and I don’t see any integration between the children with learning difficulties and the children in Bristol Met. And I don’t think there’s even a plan for that inclusion to happen really.

Lessons learned for the future

Cat (00:12:05):
So yeah. So leading on from that, what would you say, for your personal opinion, of lessons learned for the future, or next steps needed to continue that work? If you could wave a magic wand and fix anything to make it continue?

Ruth:
Well, I mean, I think we’d have to start again now, because I think everything has got forgotten. So people don’t even know we’ve got an inclusive education policy, and I keep pointing out it’s never been repealed. So in theory, we’ve still got it. But I think we’d have to start again, with a clear policy and a clear strategy, and that is starting to happen in Bristol a bit. There’s a bit of work going on at the moment of people trying to look at it again, but we’d need to do that, and we’d need to put resources into it. It just needs really clear, strategic thinking and commitment. But also I think it needs a steering group of people who are willing to put pressure on all the time, because I think the local authority was so fed up with everyone going on about it all the time, but in the end they started to make it happen. But there’s nobody really putting that pressure on now.

Cat:
Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. Thank you very much. That’s all really, really interesting to learn about. So thinking about your next project regarding Disability provision, I think you mentioned you were an Inclusion Officer just a moment ago. How did you move on to that, apart from your post being deleted? Was it linked to your first project? Or tell me a little bit about the next thing you moved on to?

Inclusion and equality

Ruth (00:13:34):
Well I was inclusion coordinator first, and then I moved into being equalities manager. [crosstalk 00:13:36] That way round. So I then managed a team that was wider than just looking at Disability. So my team looked at race issues and gender, and well any sort of equalities issues, and manage the supplementary schools provision, and the school transport, and various other things. So it was a much wider remit, but within that, I was still able to do some of the inclusion work. So I think the project that I’m most pleased with I think, was that we established something called the Bristol Inclusion Standard, which was to try and get schools to work towards a standard of inclusion, so that if a Disabled child did apply to their school, they’d know what to do. They’d be ready. They’d be inclusive. They’d be welcoming. So we worked with I think about 40 or 50 schools over several years, and they had to produce lots of evidence, come to training courses, and do all sorts of work towards becoming an inclusive school. And then they’d get an award, and get the standard.

Ruth:
But they had to prove that they’d linked with special schools, that they’d done inclusion work, they’d done access audits. They’d looked at the curriculum, see how they include Disabled people in the curriculum. They’ve done all sorts of work in order to get that reward. And I think it was a really good way of moving schools along. And it’s interesting now, because some of the people who were teachers then, working on that inclusion model, and now head teachers, because this was still in the early 2000s, so it’s quite a long time ago. And it’s interesting now when I go to their schools, they seem to have the schools at the most inclusive because they’ve obviously still remembered that learning. We also run a master’s degree jointly with Bristol University. Myself, an educational psychologist, and somebody from the university ran a master’s degree in inclusive education.

Ruth:
And again, some of the teachers who came on that went on to be real advocates for inclusion. Some of them were special schools’ teachers, some of them were mainstream, but they were able to take that learning back into their schools. So I think it’s really important to have the space for people to be able to look at the academic research and the background, because I wasn’t an academic researcher. I knew it was the right thing and I could see it working, but it was really important to let people explore the academic side of it as well I think.

Cat:
Yeah, definitely. I think that sounds really interesting. And did you come up any challenges in that work? What sorts of challenges, or not so much?

Ruth:
I think just the usual ones of working with schools really. It’s difficult for teachers to get the time to do what they need to do, and it’s on top of everything else. You try and organize event… Because we had quite a lot of events, so we’d have a lot of showcasing of good practice.

Ruth:
So for example, we were talking last time about the Drake Music Project, and they might come and do a performance, and then somebody else would do something around poetry, and somebody else would do something else. So we had some coming together and sharing a good practice, but it was always the case that it was so hard to get people committed, and then somebody’s coach would break down, or something would always go wrong like it does with schools. So actually the logistics of trying to bring everyone together to share the practice was difficult. So in the end we wrote a book, we wrote a resume of all the good practice that we developed during that time.

Cat:
What were the results of this second project? Again, did you feel that you managed to achieve the aims you’d set out initially?

Ruth:
Yeah, we did. I mean, we achieved in that they reached that initial standard, but the idea always was that that wouldn’t be the end point. You’d always carry on learning more, and improving more. But again, we ended up… Because equality’s where it went out to fashion in about 2005, or around that time. So I ended up moving to Leicester and when I moved, they deleted my post and then gradually deleted the whole of my team, because they’d stopped having that emphasis on equalities and inclusion, which is now starting to come back. They’ve only just started to relook at employing people in that field, but there’s been a whole lot of ground lost in the last 15 years I think.

Inclusion not Integration

Cat (00:18:03):
Yeah. So the next steps you would say are to get that going again, or would you say there are… What else would you think, if you wanted to get this off the ground again, what would the next steps be would you say?

Ruth:
I think the main thing is to start from the beginning, and actually look at what inclusion is, and what an inclusive school is, and how we can get our schools to move to that point. But I think it’s coming from a different place now, because it’s coming from a [inaudible 00:18:28] special educational needs and Disability perspective now, because I’m sure people probably know, but every single [inaudible 00:18:38] council in the country is hugely overspent on its [inaudible 00:18:41] budget. And as a result of that, the government is pushing people to do things. Well, you can keep getting more people… I can only say the acronyms. EHCPs, which are education, health care plans. I have to think, because I’m so used to the acronyms. And you can just get more and more people to have EHCPs and to be then put into schools, or you can make the schools more inclusive so people don’t need EHCPs. Their needs will be met.

Ruth:
But we’ve gone so far the other way with schools just saying, “Oh, I haven’t got any money. I can’t have that child because I haven’t got any money.” Half the time, the issue isn’t the money. The issue’s the attitudes and the inclusive ways of working. So I think we’ve gone so far the other way that we’ve got to really pull it back, and start saying to schools, “Actually, you do have a duty to make your provision more inclusive for most people.” And it should be a very rare when you need additional funding. But schools don’t even very often know where their money goes, because they get 6,000 pounds per pupil who’s got special educational needs, or a Disability. But they can’t ever tell you what they’re doing with that 6,000. It just goes into their pots. And then they’re saying, “No, we need extra money.” But you say, “Well, what have you done with the 6,000?” And they can’t tell you.

Cat:
I guess that links slightly…. It sounds like it links to the social model of Disability.

Ruth:
Totally.

Cat:
Yeah. Would you have any thoughts on that, and how that could play into this?

Ruth:
Well, I think it’s completely about that really. Because my take on the social model is about getting rid of the barriers so that people… Not focusing on the problem and the impairment, but getting rid of the barriers. And so rather than saying this person’s got this impairment and therefore they need this, this and this, it’s more about saying, “Well this school needs to be inclusive, so it needs to do this, this, and this to accommodate all pupils.” And that might be pupils who are left-handed, so need different scissors. To the spectrum of somebody who’s a wheelchair user who needs adaptations.

Ruth:
And for me it’s also about the difference between integration and inclusion. And we used to talk about that a lot, that integration. You put a Disabled child into a mainstream setting but you expect them to fit in with everything that everyone else does. Whereas inclusion is about changing the school, and the whole way the school operates, to meet the needs of the children and the Disabled adults. Because people forget that there are loads of parents who are Disabled, or teachers who are Disabled, and they don’t ever get a mention really. So if you made your school inclusive, then there’d be a whole lot of parents who’d be able to be far more involved in the life of the school than they can normally, or grandparents, or anybody else.

Cat:
Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Do you have any other projects in particular that you want to tell us about, that were really stood out to you as important or memorable? And don’t worry, if not.

Disabled students

Ruth (00:21:56):
I think those are probably the main ones. I mean the other one I’d probably mention is work I’ve done since I did all of that. I left and went to Leicester, and I worked in further education in a further education college. I was managing the SEN [inaudible 00:22:11] provision there and at St. Brendan’s, but in both of those places, I did work with the students who were identified as Disabled students. Around trying to get them to understand social model, and look at asserting their choices and their rights, getting ready to go on to higher education, or go into work. Because I found that a lot of them didn’t want to be identified as Disabled, because they felt it was a stigma, but didn’t know that if they went to university, they could get their Disabled students allowance. They didn’t feel confident asking for adaptations to exams.

Ruth:
They just wanted to not be noticed really. They didn’t want to assert their rights. And so in both places, we started Disabled students’ groups and work with them, and with their student unions as well, around trying to change the model from a medical to a social one to say, it’s actually not anyone’s problem, but it’s also not a favour to ask [inaudible 00:23:17] it’s actually a right. You should have a right to these things. And it was really nice to see some of the students just really blossom.

Ruth:
I think of one student at St. Brendan’s who had major issues with dyslexia and other things, and didn’t identify as Disabled at all. And he started talking to me and came to the group, and I kept giving examples of me. And I kept saying, when I went for this interview, I said, “No, I’m not going to do this interview because it’s completely inaccessible.”

Ruth:
And I kept putting it back to me all the time. He gradually got it. And I saw him a while ago, I just bumped into him in the street, and he’d gone to UWE and he’s just got his degree, and is really pleased with what happened. And he said to me, “I used my Disabled students grant and I got everything that I was entitled to.” It was really great. So made me feel that that’s… Just changing that mind shift, because it’s ever so easy to get put off when people don’t meet your needs.

When people don’t meet your needs

Ruth (00:24:23):
And still, even now as a councillor, I started as a councillor in 2016. And when I started, they said, “Right, everyone has an iPad.” So I said, “Well, I don’t want an iPad, because I can’t use it.” I need to bang with a pen on a keyboard, and I can’t swipe. So I said, “Well, [inaudible 00:24:34].” And they said, “Well, you haven’t got a choice. Everyone has iPads.” So I thought, here I am, 60 years old as a councillor, and I’m having to really fight. And I ended up nearly in tears, and ended up going to the chief executive, trying to get a laptop instead of an iPad. And I thought this is bonkers.

Ruth:
If I can’t get what I need as a local councillor, how on earth do Disabled children in schools get what they need? I feel passionately about that. That was what worked really.

Cat:
Definitely. So thinking overall, we’ve talked a little bit about the results of individual projects. Overall, your career in inclusion and integration, all of that. What do you think the impact was of your work in these areas, either your personal impact or the impact of focus groups and projects you worked with?

Ruth:
I think the main impact really was for educational professionals to be interacting regularly with Disabled people, and hearing their views and hearing their stories. And I’m beginning to understand them. I think that’s what’s missing in so much now, that that dialogue doesn’t go on. And if you go through your life never meeting any Disabled adults, then you’re not going to be thinking about how to make your provision, whether it’s a school or whether it’s adult care, or whatever it is. You’re just not going to think about how to make it inclusive. So I think that whole thing about dialogue, which is why we’re now focusing quite a lot on how can we bring the voice of Disabled people back again, into planning and particularly into education. Because it’s not there at all in education.

We need a Disability Commission

Cat (00:26:14):
No. So I’m guessing, is that what you would like to see in the future of Disability provision and inclusion, or is there something else that you would… If you could write a 10-year road plan for what you’d like to see happen in the next five to 10 years, what sorts of things would be on there?

Ruth:
Well in education, I’d certainly like to see a revised inclusive education policy with a really clear strategy, and an action plan with timescales. But wider than that, what I’m really keen to see is a Disability commission. Because I think for [inaudible 00:26:41], we need to have a Disability commission because there are a number of Disabled groups, but they’re all doing things separately. They don’t work together.

Ruth:
And I think if we could bring together everybody under a Disability commission, and have the right people there who’ve got power and influence, I think we could maybe start to have more of a citywide dialogue. I think Disabled people have got left out of the one city plan, and all the planning around going forward really.

Wrapping up

Cat (00:27:13):
Definitely. I would love to see that as well. And so is there anything else you would like to add about this topic area? Anything we haven’t covered that springs to mind, or? No worries if not, but just giving you the option.

Ruth:
No, I don’t think so. I think that probably covers it.

Cat:
Brilliant. Well, thank you very much. I will end the recording here, and then we’ll do our brief chat about consent and all of that [inaudible 00:00:27:34]. If you press [crosstalk 00:27:35]

Ruth:
So I press the pause or the stop. The stop.

Cat:
Press the stop video. No that’s me, no. Press the stop recording, up in the top.

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