aims of inclusionweek

* Inclusion Week home
* Aims of the week
* Register your event
* List of events
* Ideas for events
* About CSIE
* Index for Inclusion

Blue circle

The central aim of the Week is to highlight the importance of building inclusive schools

The range of exclusionary pressures experienced by many children, young people and adults include attitudes to poverty, cultural backgrounds, disability, learning difficulty, challenging behaviour, social class, race, gender and sexual orientation.

We hope that CSIE's Inclusion Week will reveal how these processes operate and present ways to reverse them. CSIE is inviting good practice to be promoted by pre-school settings, schools, colleges and universities, LEAs, organisations and other bodies in the UK and from overseas during the week.

Developing and celebrating inclusion

The Centre's work with inclusion was given a boost in 2000 with the publication of CSIE's Index for inclusion, written by Tony Booth and Mel Ainscow, which the Government has placed in every school and LEA in England.

Maybe your school is one of the many now involved in the Index process and could take this opportunity to present your work. One of CSIE's events in the Week will be a major conference on the working of the Index in schools.

Inclusion Week will encourage guarantees of support for the mainstream. Developing inclusive school cultures, policies and practices in schools is the concrete task that lies at the heart of the Index.

Another aim of the week is to raise the voices of children and young people, as well as those of heads, teachers, parents and governors who support inclusion.

Reducing segregation in education and elsewhere in our society is a steady goal for all those committed to ending discrimination.

Definitions of inclusion in education from the Index for Inclusion
  • Inclusion in education involves the processes of increasing the participation of students in, and reducing their exclusion from, the cultures, curricula and communities of local schools.
  • Inclusion involves restructuring the cultures, policies and practices in schools so that they respond to the diversity of students in their locality.
  • Inclusion is concerned with the learning and participation of all students vulnerable to exclusionary pressures, not only those with impairments or those who are categorised as `having special educational needs'.
  • Inclusion is concerned with improving schools for staff as well as for students.
  • A concern with overcoming barriers to the access and participation of particular students may reveal gaps in the attempts of a school to respond to diversity more generally.
  • All students have a right to an education in their locality.
  • Diversity is not viewed as a problem to be overcome, but as a rich resource to support the learning of all.
  • Inclusion is concerned with fostering mutually sustaining relationships between schools and communities.
  • Inclusion in education is one aspect of inclusion in society.

Reference: Index for inclusion. Developing learning and participation in schools, Booth, T. & Ainscow, M., 2000. Revised edition 2002. CSIE Bristol, UK price £24.50 incl. p+p.

breaking down barriers in learning and participation
  Sage blob

Do the aims, cultures, policies and practices of your organisation support this vision?

If so, is there something you and your colleagues can do to celebrate this progress?

Why not propose an event for Inclusion Week?
Blue circle

Back to top