Inclusive practice for families

Abstract

Family experience of high quality inclusive practice at an early stage significantly influences the understanding and expectation of inclusion within learning environments. Parents/carers, children and young people possess personalised, unique expertise regarding their own service requirements. This has the potential to support educational institutions in their quest to successfully implement inclusive practice. It is particularly relevant for families who may be marginalised through poverty, cultural or social factors, where reluctance to engage in and secure support from professional services offers a challenge to organisations to reflect upon and review the effectiveness of their inclusive practice. The impact of parental involvement in their children’s education is well documented: it has a positive influence on future educational attainment and therefore an integrated approach to parental engagement is advocated to build solid lifelong foundations for learning. This chapter will discuss the importance of user voice and associated participation strategies which are genuine and realistic, and also consider current service provision for excluded families with reflection upon the qualities and competencies required to firmly embed inclusion throughout all strands of these services. We shall use examples from the context of education as a way of exploring issues of inclusion with regard to children, young people and their families. The chapter is in three sections: poverty and inclusion, ‘hard to reach’ families, acknowledging diversity and complexity, and a case study example of effective consultation with parents of young children who experience disability. It is a salient point that families from minority ethnic groups and families with adults and/or children with disabilities are both more likely to experience poverty and disadvantage (Gupta and Blewett, 2008; Lansley and Mack, 2015) and so it is to the issue of poverty that we focus on in the first instance.