ABSTRACT
Inclusive education is about all children and young people. It is about their families, teachers and the other professionals whose work impacts on education. It is about how all these people ‘respond . . . to diversity . . . listening to unfamiliar voices’ (Allen, 1999: 14) so as to bring about ‘the participation of learners in and reducing their exclusion from the curricula, cultures, and communities of neighbourhood mainstream centres of learning’ (Booth, 2003: 253). Inclusive education cannot happen without participation. Participation, real partnership, involves children, young people and parents taking an active and central role in the development of schools and services, and an active and central role in decision-making in schools. It involves professionals working together to place children and parents in a position so that they understand the role of the person they are seeing and are able to take a full part in decision-making in services. Throughout, it is suggested that problems cannot be understood as individual in nature or in manner of solution, and that individualisation needs to be challenged. What follows from all these considerations is that schools and services can evolve in ways that responds to the perspectives and needs of the people who belong to these communities – resulting in inclusive education supported by inclusive services. In essence this is community psychology – the development of ways of working collaboratively, between practitioners and community members (Kagan et al., 2006). The challenge for this chapter is to explain with respect to theory how this can happen so that the ‘agent of change is communal’ (Morgan, 2000: 31) and all knowledges are given voice.
