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Young children can only be truly included if their educators understand their needs, and how to meet such needs through practices which aspire to excellence. For inclusion is about much more than location it is more than simply being in a setting it is about making sure that young children and their families are offered opportunity fully to participate in events and developments. And this is, alas, easier said than done. Despite the increasingly shared political agenda for social inclusion, there remain barriers to inclusion which have yet to be overcome. Four key themes which cross geographical and cultural borders seem to us to dominate the literature:
In two recent studies of educators' attitudes to inclusion, we found that although many practitioners espoused a pro-inclusive policy rhetoric, in reality they maintained reservations based on: the needs of the children they were seeking to include; the responses of parents; their own level of professional knowledge, and the level and quality of support they were offered to make inclusion of children with particular needs a reality (Clough & Nutbrown, 2004; Nutbrown & Clough, 2004). Participants from a range of settings and policy contexts generally supported inclusion but with important reservations; the Yes-but factor that we identified highlights the mismatch between policy and practical realities between the willingness to include all children, in principle, and the ability to cater appropriately for the diverse and sometimes demanding needs of young children. For example, two of the early years practitioners we interviewed commented: (It) depends on the degree of the condition the children have. A child who has mobility problems could not pose any insurmountable problems, but a child with severe autism would be too disruptive and would affect the learning process for the rest of the children. Children should be included, provided that there is adequate teaching support available to enable all class members to receive equal attention during lessons. It (inclusion) should promote tolerance in children without disability and enhance learning in those with a disability. However important are the views of practitioners, Kilpatrick and
Hunter (2005) remind us in their review of
inclusive education principles and practices in Northern Ireland that various
layers of inclusion must be peeled back to truly understand inclusion from a
child's viewpoint. They argue that only when children's perspectives are
understood, can an education system be truly inclusive. Little children are so at risk aren't they? It's such a responsibility to try to protect them from all sorts of horrors, we have to try to do that for all of them in the early years Special needs or not. (Clough & Nutbrown, 2004, p. 203) |
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