Today, a student from Southampton has been given the honour to knock on 10 Downing Street door to deliver an impressive 107,000 signature petition to the Prime Minister. The event was part of a Day of Action led by the Alliance for Inclusive Education, ALLFIE, which included the delivery of the petition and the launch of the ‘Accessibility Plans Effective Tools for Inclusion in Schools’ report, that took place at the amazing venue the Lawyers’ Suite at the Supreme Court. Martine Harding, a final year student at Richard Taunton Sixth Form College was one of the participants in the study that generated the report and I were invited by Dr Armineh Soorenian to take part in the launch. We both contributed to the research alongside teaching support assistants in my team.
It was an eventful cold Thursday in London for us, as we had the opportunity to meet Marsha de Cordova, Member of Parliament for Battersea and Shadow Minister for Disabled People, who joined the group delivering the petition. Marsha spoke to the group outside 10 Downing Street about her own experience as a visually impaired child and how she benefited from a mainstream education, reason why, as she reaffirmed on her Twitter feed, she “will fight for every disabled child’s right to be included”. ALLFIE’s supporters and friends hope that Boris Johnson will take into account the views of those 100,000 plus voters who signed the petition asking for improvements in the provision of education in mainstream settings for the disabled. I mentioned the dilemmas faced by mainstream settings, like mine, in meeting Ofsted criteria and being inclusive at the same time, which resonated with the views strongly voiced by the director of policy and campaigns for People First (Self-Advocacy), Andrew Lee, the first disable person the be the director of a self-advocacy organisation.
At the launch, Martine spoke openly about her schooling experiences to an attentively impressed and moved audience. Her personal struggles as a person with a disability as well as someone who identifies as gender-fluid and an outspoken member of the LGBTQ+ community, resonated with the experiences of many disabled people in the room. Dr Soorenian’s PA read aloud one anonymised account of one of the children who took part in one of her numerous focus groups, it brought to tears members of the audience, because the heart-breaking account filled the room with a shared sense of indignation and sadness for the little boy in the narrative. Therefore, it was not entirely surprising that the room broke into a huge heartfelt applause when Martine mentioned she has now received an offer from one University to do a degree in Politics. Martine was the embodiment of those stories in the report. The hope is that the system can be fixed instead of the disabled children, who actually do not need fixing. As Joe Whittaker said in his opening remarks to the project launch, the biggest problem we have is that “schools have learning difficulties”, not the students. Schools have serious difficulties in learning to provide a good education for all abilities. The effort must be in “working with schools, colleges and universities to overcome their learning/teaching difficulties”.
The final part of this remarkable Day of Action was a brief visit to the Department for Education to hand in the Manifesto for Inclusive Education. It would have been a glorious end in a high note, if Mr Gavin Williamson was there to receive the manifesto. The group wanted to see the Secretary to make sure that a meeting was secured, when disabled people would be heard and taken into account by the DfE. Disappointingly, the group was dismissed by an employee of the secretary’s office, with a verbal promise that the Alliance for Inclusive Education will be contacted in the next few days to arrange a formal visit to meet with the secretary. Simone Aspis, ALLFIES’s Campaigns and Policy Coordinator, did her utmost best to get the disabled people’s point across, that is they expect more from the DfE to make sure that schools educate, not segregate disabled children and young people. In her own words, Simone said “they say let’s get Brexit done, I say let’s get inclusion done!”.