But is it actually inclusive?

Something happened this week that really made me think about what we actually mean when we talk about inclusion.

I can’t tell you the specifics because it involves one of my children and other people who haven’t chosen to have their lives shared in my emails. But essentially, there was an expectation being placed on a group of children. For most of them, probably not a particularly big deal. For my child, it was. It required skills that haven’t fully developed yet, and the expectation itself was creating a huge amount of anxiety. To the point where something seemingly quite small was becoming a barrier to being able to attend.

Now, the people involved were trying to help. They listened, recognised the difficulty and made an adjustment. Which is great. Except the adjustment meant that my child would now very visibly be doing something different to everybody else.

So yes, technically there was an accommodation. But was it actually inclusive? Because that’s not quite the same thing.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot ever since. Sometimes I think we can be so focused on making an individual adjustment for a child that we don’t stop and ask whether the expectation itself needs to be there in the first place. Could we change the environment instead? Could we give everybody more flexibility? Could we offer a choice? Because if we can, suddenly the child who needs something different doesn’t have to announce that need to everyone around them in order to access it.

And I think that matters, particularly as our children get older and become increasingly aware of their peers and of the ways in which they might be different from them.

There’s another part to this too. The original expectation was intended to encourage independence, and I completely understand that. Of course we want our children to become more independent. We want them to learn skills, grow and eventually be able to manage more things for themselves.

But I think sometimes we confuse expecting independence with teaching independence. They aren’t the same thing.

If a child doesn’t yet have the skills to meet an expectation, adding more pressure doesn’t magically give them those skills. It just gives them the original difficulty, plus the pressure of knowing they aren’t managing something everyone seems to think they should be able to do.

And that’s where something that looks really quite small from the outside can start to become something much bigger. Because there’s a world of difference between thinking, I can’t do this yet, and thinking, Everyone else can do this. What’s wrong with me?

That’s where anxiety can start to become shame.

For many of our children, they are already working much harder than those around them simply to be there. Getting through the doors, feeling safe enough to stay and being able to access their education can already require an enormous amount from them. Then we add another expectation. And another. Each one, on its own, perhaps seeming completely reasonable.

But every time a child can’t meet one, we’re potentially adding another little piece of evidence to the story they are beginning to tell themselves. I can’t do what everyone else can. I’m getting it wrong. I’m different.

And if an environment repeatedly becomes somewhere a child experiences anxiety and shame, eventually that environment doesn’t feel safe. Then we wonder why they don’t want to go.

This is something I come back to again and again in my own parenting, and it’s one of the reasons the work of Dr Ross Greene has influenced me so much. His premise is that children do well when they can. If they’re not doing something, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want to do it or aren’t motivated enough. Sometimes they simply don’t yet have the skills required to meet the expectation.

Our first question is so often some variation of, How do we get them to do it? Maybe sometimes a better question is, What’s getting in the way?

Do they actually have the skills we’re expecting them to have? What support or scaffolding might they need? Do they need more time and space to develop those skills? And perhaps most importantly, does this expectation actually need to exist?

Because inclusion isn’t taking a child who can’t fit into the environment we’ve created and making an exception for them, particularly if that exception then publicly marks them out as different.

Sometimes inclusion means looking at the environment itself and asking whether we could do things differently. Whether there could be more flexibility or more choice. Whether changing something for everybody might mean the child who needs that change doesn’t have to stand out at all.

Of course, that’s not always possible. Our children will need individual reasonable adjustments, and sometimes those adjustments will inevitably mean doing something differently from their peers.

But where we can remove an unnecessary barrier altogether, I think we should at least be willing to ask the question.

Because sometimes the most inclusive thing we can do isn’t help a child cope with the barrier. It’s remove the barrier.