Inclusion Charter for Brighton & Hove – what does inclusion in schools look like for you and your child?

For the last year, Brighton & Hove City Council have been working on the creation of a Brighton & Hove Inclusion Charter for schools. This includes a focus on children and young people who have special educational needs and/or a disability. PaCC wants to make sure that your voice, as a parent carer, is included and taken into account in shaping what the Inclusion Charter will look like.

On Thursday 18 May, we organised a PaCConnect, a forum, about the Inclusion Charter so that parent carers could share their views, thoughts, experiences and ideas on what helps children and young people with SEND to feel included within their school community or what would have helped them.

The PaCConnect forum looked at issues, suggestions and ideas around what inclusion looks like to parent carers, what are the barriers to inclusion, how can parent carers be included within the school community and also intersectionality- what inclusion means when you are, for example, a parent carer and/or a child from a minoritised community and also an LGBTQ+ person.

The session was led by Jonathan Ralphs, specialist graphic facilitator, who used a ‘graphic wall’ to capture what parent carers attending the forum said – click to see a graphic wall drawing here and another graphic wall drawing here.

Among the many suggestions parent carers made during the session, a parent underlined that ‘to have an automatic inclusion, all teachers should be SENCO trained and that providing reasonable adjustments should be the norm, not a fight to get them. Sometimes adjustments are small and cost free’.

Another parent suggested that ‘one-to-one support needs to be provided when the child needs it, as for example during playtime, and not wait to provide it when the child gets excluded’.

PaCC involvement and co-production around the Inclusion Charter is an ongoing piece of work and there will be other ways parent carers can feedback to PaCC around this area of work. Click here to submit your three words and have your say!