A Vision For True Inclusion In Plymouth Schools And Beyond

Whilst references to inclusion abound in government policy and school ethos statements, truly inclusive practice recognises that inclusion in our schools constitutes much more than rhetoric or technical practicalities. When inclusive teachers recognise inclusion as a deeply political and ethical issue and come together with a shared, united vision, they have the power to foster togetherness and belonging in their classrooms, boost self-esteem for their students and collaboratively create a brighter and fairer society for all.

Running for the last three years, the ‘Are We Included?’ project^[1] is a cross-university collaboration between academics from Plymouth Marjon University and the University of Plymouth. In partnership with Plymouth secondary schools, school leaders, teachers, parents and carers and students, our work seeks to better understand and support truly inclusive education and social mobility in the city of Plymouth and beyond.

An Inclusion Crisis In Our Schools

Convening in the spring of 2022 with the initial aim of quantifying the existing inclusion climate in Plymouth’s secondary schools, our joint-university team worked in collaboration with Professor Umesh Sharma and colleagues at Monash University in Australia to adapt and validate recently devised student^[2], teacher^[3][4][5] and parent/carer^[6] inclusion questionnaires for UK use. In partnership with secondary schools across Plymouth, our team received over 1,500 student, parent/carer and teacher responses over the course of four weeks.

Results pointed to a chasm in pupil experience; whilst those students who felt included painted a picture of enjoyable time spent in school, high engagement with schoolwork, strong relationships with school staff and effective teaching and inclusion provision in lessons, unfortunately, over 50% of the 907 students surveyed were not satisfied with how included they felt at school. Whilst teacher willingness to engage in inclusive practices was high, teachers surveyed reported a lack of confidence surrounding practical techniques and approaches citing the following barriers to more inclusive practice:

• lack of joined-up practice between SENDCo and teaching staff,
• lack of cross-school communication,
• teacher understanding of practical support strategies for pupils with SEND,
• laborious paperwork and processes e.g. delayed EHCP applications^[7],
• large class sizes,
• limited school resources and time,
• lack of curriculum flexibility,
• wider systemic issues.

Later in 2022, statistical analysis conducted as part of our DfE commissioned evaluation^[8][9] of Plymouth’s ‘Place-Based School Improvement’ (PBSI) strategy further reflected a story of two halves in the city’s schools. Whilst improvements in attainment data reflected rising standards for those students already included in Plymouth’s classrooms, marked increases in ‘Overall Absence’, ‘Persistent Absence’, ‘Suspensions’, ‘Permanent Exclusions’, pupil movement figures and elective home education registrations told the story of the increasingly large cohort of students who are currently being left behind.

Worryingly, Plymouth is not alone in this crisis, with 30% of national GCSE entries attaining a grade 3 or below in English or Maths during the 2022-23 exam season, compared with 24.7% during 2021-22^[10]. According to government data^[11] the proportion of persistent absentees (students with <90% annual attendance) in England has increased significantly, rising from 14.8% of students in the 2021-22 academic year to 27.7% in 2022-23. Perhaps most alarmingly, the UK government^[12] estimates that there were an average of 117,100 children entirely missing education (not registered at any education setting) at any one time during 2022-23, compared to an already unacceptable 94,900 in 2021-22.

A Vision For True Inclusion

Whilst all good teachers are passionate about providing an inclusive climate in their classrooms, making it their everyday business to provide the practical differentiation, parent or carer partnership, high aspirations for all and warm accessible support required to include every young person in their class, schools are ever-increasingly busy places. Standardised narrow curriculum requirements, broad-brush behaviour policies and routine processes and procedures often feel antithetical to inclusion, clamping down on difference and diversity, standardising the learning process and burning out teachers’ time and energy for adaptability and student-led learning.

With our day-to-day still dominated by the ‘terrors of performativity’ that Stephen Ball^[13][14] describes, it can be easy to dilute or oversimplify inclusion into a technical job; a bolt-on to daily practice, another standard to be satisfied, or a tokenistic box to be ticked.

Whilst we are, of course, required by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child^[15] and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities^[16] to provide an inclusive education to all our students, inclusion itself is much more than the practicalities of what we do and how we do it. Rather, inclusion is political and ideological; it is about values and ethics; it is about achieving social justice and equality of opportunity for all; and it is about working together to build a better society and a kinder, safer and more united world.

Recent years have seen a rise in appreciation for what have become known as the post-humanist and post-structuralist approaches to education. The work of quantum physicist Karan Barad^[17][18][19] and others helps us to reframe the classroom as an ‘entanglement’ of inter-related and inter-subjective actors in which students, adults, parents, chairs, pencils, Darwin, Martin Luther King, school buses and breakfast cereals collaborate to create fresh and evolving moments of learning.

For educators like Karen Murris^[20][21], Marg Sellers^[22][23], Hillevi Lenz Taguchi^[24] and others, everyone and everything in education, and our world more broadly, is interconnected and working in collaboration to create the reality that we unfold together. We may begin to imagine a boundless web of symbiotic collaborative relationships between people, things, happenings and ideas, and if we follow the threads of the web, we realise that absolutely everything is inseparably interconnected with everything else.

What does this have to do with inclusion? For Barad, Haraway^[25], Braidotti^[26][27] and others, such inextricable interconnectivity foregrounds a deep ethical sense of togetherness and common ground; we are all collaborating parts of a shared mutual project, with our actions and roles so enmeshed and intertwined that we all already belong. This is where we find true inclusion.

Creating a truly inclusive climate requires us to uncover and embrace interconnectivity and collaboration in our classrooms. Supporting our students to recognise their place within the bigger whole, we can embrace togetherness in the ways we motivate ourselves, the pedagogy we deliver, the way we interact with our students and how we model collaboration with our colleagues. For teachers, and for our students, recognising interconnectivity can reframe the purpose of our work; we each have a role to play in the unfolding of the future we want to see, and we are always already a part of that shared process.

True Inclusion In Practice

In Our Day-To-Day Teaching

Difference and diversity are fundamental ingredients for any good collaboration. We can come to view the classroom as a collaborative melting pot, where students’ diverse variety of existing knowledge, backgrounds, motivations and learning preferences overlap, interconnect and enmesh to forge new opportunities. Teachers in truly inclusive classrooms embrace more ethical collaborations in this daily classroom crucible, and strong collaboration starts with honesty, openness and a willingness to be adaptable. It is the role of the inclusive teacher to adapt to and champion the needs and contributions of every student, rather than expecting students to adapt to the needs of the teacher.

Practically, adaptability becomes a lot easier when we give children choice. Drawing on the principles of universal design that architects use to design accessible buildings, the Universal Design for Learning approach developed by CAST^[28] encourages us to teach in a way that empowers learners to direct the ‘why’, ‘what’, and ‘how’ of learning. In the UDL approach, inclusive teachers provide 1) multiple options for engagement in learning, 2) multiple options for representation of information, and 3) multiple options for actioning and expressing learning, empowering all of their students to direct their learning in a way that works for them.

When skilled, supportive and adaptable teachers adopt these principles, not just as a bolt-on for their SEND pupils but for every student in their class, they transform their classrooms into a thriving collaborative learning community. Inclusion becomes organic.

In The ‘Are We Included?’ Mutuality Coaching Programme

Called to action by the stark findings of our ‘Are We Included?’ questionnaire study and our evaluation of Plymouth’s ‘Place-based School Improvement’ work, our team have developed, piloted and now run the ‘Are We Included?’ coaching programme in secondary schools across our city. Delivered across eight Plymouth secondary schools so far, the programme aims to improve students’ engagement with learning, boost confidence, build aspirations and promote a sense of interconnectivity, belonging and inclusion. Students engage in a six-week programme of one-hour mentoring sessions, supported by trained multi-disciplinary undergraduate and postgraduate student mentors.

Holding space within the school week for every student to feel seen, heard and understood, the mentoring format allows for open, reciprocal and trusting relationships to be developed between student and mentor, enabling adaptive, organic and collaborative needs-led discussions. At the end of the programme, school cohorts come together for a celebration event at the university campus, offering students an opportunity to interconnect with a wider ‘AWI?’ community, acknowledge their achievements and spark aspirations for the future.

Each term, our team evaluate impact using the Monash-developed and now UK-validated^[29][30][31] student, parent/carer and teacher questionnaires and through comparison of student’s pre- and post-programme school report data. Findings from our Autumn 2022^[32], Spring 2023^[33] and Summer 2023^[34] evaluations point to significant outcomes for students, teachers, mentors and wider school communities. Analysis of pre- and post-programme questionnaires suggests that, following completion of the programme (ibid.):

• An increased proportion of students say they feel included within their peer group and wider school community.
• The majority of students feel they are trying harder to improve their schoolwork and thinking more seriously about their attendance, behaviour and aspirations for the future (this is corroborated by our analysis of students’ pre- and post-programme school reports, with improvements in behaviour, attainment and attitudes to learning);
• Parents and carers echo their children’s sentiments, reporting increased confidence, improved relationships with school staff, greater commitment to learning and an increased enjoyment of school.
• Significantly, a greater proportion of parent/carers were satisfied with their child’s level of inclusion within school following delivery of the ‘AWI?’ programme.

Drawing on the external resources and funding of our two universities to create and hold space for collaborative mentoring discussions during the otherwise busy school day, the ‘Are We Included?’ programme is improving the experiences and educational outcomes of one small, targeted group of students at a time. Forging positive listening relationships and nurturing a warm, safe and diverse space for students to develop a sense of belonging, the programme foregrounds a vision of true inclusion within each school community it visits, supporting students to recognise and reconnect with the warmth and togetherness that lies beneath the surface of every school community.

Conclusion

Beyond the practical tools and techniques that we all employ, and amidst the unrelenting pressures of practice, we must remember that our struggle for true inclusion is deeply ethical and political in nature. Embracing true inclusion is a whole-school, whole-city, whole-system issue that requires a recognition of interconnectivity and togetherness at every level; from the teachers and teaching assistants to MAT leaders, DfE officials, policymakers and government ministers.

Passionate teachers and empowered students have the opportunity to build community and collaboration from the ground up. Foregrounding interconnectivity and celebrating the warm, reassuring and reaffirming sense of togetherness it brings – one conversation, one lesson and one student at a time, truly inclusive teachers can boost self-confidence and self-esteem for their students, showcase the potential of more ethical collaboration in the classroom, fuel meaningful learning and achievement for every learner and help to unfold a future that is brighter, kinder and more inclusive for us all.

George Munn is a researcher for the Plymouth Institute of Education at the University of Plymouth. He is currently involved in a number of local, national, and international education projects, including the ‘Are We Included?’ collaboration. He also works as a home education teacher alongside students at a local nature-based student-directed learning setting.

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