There is no shortage of disturbing news flooding our social media channels on a daily basis. However, if we can turn our attention for a few minutes from the sensational and look more closely at some of the non-newsworthy events happening around us, we can find glimmers of hope. One of these events has been the subtle shifts in our understanding of inclusion in schools over the past decade and the impact that this is having on our understanding of school communities. The shift has been slow and steady, but like any glacial movement, hopefully unstoppable.
My perspective on our shifting understanding of inclusion comes from my work in International Baccalaureate (IB) schools over the past twenty years, however, the changes in the IB’s approach to inclusion reflects the broader shifts in understanding across a wider educational community. Historically, the term inclusion was used in relation to students with special educational needs (SEN) and focused on a school’s efforts to support the needs of these students in the classroom. We see this perspective in the IB as up until 2015, the core resource related to inclusion was a Special Education Needs document that identified a range of identifiable learning needs and potential strategies to support these needs in the classroom. Inclusion was almost synonymous with SEN.
There was an exciting development however when the IB replaced their SEN document with ‘Learning Diversity and Inclusion in IB Programmes’ in January 2016. Although the new document emerged with little fanfare, it represented a seismic shift in approaches to inclusion including a definition of the term in an IB context: Inclusion as the identification and removal of barriers to learning for all students. In simple terms, SEN was still recognized as an important aspect of school life, however, inclusion became a broader umbrella term within which SEN was considered just one potential barrier to learning. For example, domestic conflict impacting a student’s mental health could become just as much a barrier to learning as dyslexia. Conflict within friendship groups or self-esteem issues could affect learning just as much as ADHD, and these factors will all be interconnected.
I was facilitating workshops for the newly developed 'Learning Diversity and Inclusion' IB professional development workshops at this time and encountered very mixed reactions from teachers to the new focus in the early years of the shift. The first time I facilitated the workshop, a participant asked me, ‘What happened to SEN?’ A number of the participants had come to the workshop expecting an exclusive focus on SEN. We had to keep returning to our umbrella metaphor. Inclusion was no longer synonymous with SEN, although SEN remained, and always will remain, an important part of the puzzles we are trying to solve. SEN remains a component part of the complex and unique learning environment in which each child exists. We just needed a larger umbrella.
SEN as one potential barrier to learning interacting with a variety of others.
The most significant part of the shift in 2016 to a broader consideration of potential barriers to learning is that we were now specifically directed to examine the learning environment that we were creating, including our various rules, written and unwritten, that govern life in our school. It was an interaction between the unique needs of a child, and the nature of the learning environment we had created. An consideration of SEN in isolation places the focus on the child. A broader focus shifts our attention to the learning environment the child is forced to exist within. The garden metaphor comes to mind. What's the soil like? Is there enough sun, or too much? Lots of questions need to be addressed when we consider environment.
In a further development in the IB, the ‘Learning diversity and inclusion’ professional development workshop underwent a review and was released in 2024 as ‘Principles of an equitable and inclusive education’ incorporating the idea of equity firmly in the center of the process of identifying and removing barriers to learning. Inclusion now has been brought under the broader umbrella of equity and has opened up an even broader range of issues for us to consider when we are trying to create an inclusive learning environment in our schools. We needed both a larger umbrella, and more of them.
Inclusion under the broader umbrella of equity, introducing a range of social justice issues.
These changing understandings of inclusion over the past decade suggest a growing recognition of the amazing complexity of the school environments that our students experience when they walk through the school gates. Inclusion is still about identifying and removing barriers to learning, however we are now considering the interactions between these myriad factors that impact a child’s learning and overall wellbeing. We are now also forced to consider our roles in the creation of these barriers, prompting many difficult but healthy, reflective conversations in schools. The broadening of the recognition of the complexity of our school environments is a step in the right direction as we work to create inclusive school environments. I am looking forward to where we go from here and how we organize our equity umbrella.
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