There's never going to be a perfect school that ticks every box: minority perspectives of inclusion and placement preferences

Abstract

This research examines how British‐Pakistani mothers of children with special education needs and/or disability (SEND) experience the placement decision‐making process and the relationship between their notions of inclusion and different placement settings. This paper reports on the author's Doctoral research and explores how professional ‘expertise interacts with maternal concerns and knowledge. Using Weber's (2001) Intersectional Framework, this qualitative study was conducted in Southwest England in three phases using semi‐structured interviews, unstructured interviews and vignettes. Eight first‐generation and second‐generation immigrant British‐Pakistani mothers participated in this research, whose children varied in age and range of SEND. Research participants were contacted through Anoka, a South Asian disabled families' support group and through ‘snowballing. Braun and Clarke's (2006) thematic analysis was used to develop five main themes. This research yielded rich and nuanced data regarding maternal understanding around placement preferences. Mothers generally preferred those special schools with plans for eventual mainstream integration, particularly those sharing geographical locations with a mainstream school. A uniquely telling finding in this study was that mothers preferred special schools which had the least disabling visual outlook and appeared least like a medicalised setting. In the case of mainstream schools, in addition to overall performance and educational attainment, mothers valued school policies towards accommodating pupils with SEND. Most notably, all mothers suggested that their child's SEND was their main criteria for placement preferences in order to secure better provisions. This research suggests that for parents from minority communities, the placement decision‐making process must become more inclusive and enabling before they are able to fully support their child with SEND.

The Factors Important in Inclusive Education of the Pupil with Traumatic Brain Injury Identified on the Basis of the Lived Experience of His Mother

“…Decision-making between the two individual educational systems (inclusive and special) is also described in the experiences of parents of children with different types of physical disabilities (PD) [33][34][35]. In this study, we could meet positive contributions as well as barriers in both types of educational facilities.…”

Intersectionality of disability and cultural/linguistic diversity in the UK: a literature review

“…The majority of studies included employed qualitative research methods, utilizing a range of methodological approaches such as; phenomenology (Hatton et al, 2010;Heer et al, 2012Heer et al, , 2014Heer et al, , 2015Munroe et al, 2016), collaborative approaches like action research (Fazil et al, 2002;Bywaters et al, 2003) and community-based participatory research (Fox et al, 2017;Selman et al, 2018;Aabe et al, 2019), intersectional frameworks (Rizvi, 2017;Rizvi, 2018), case-study approaches (Oliver and Singal, 2017), narrative approaches (Sandhu et al, 2016), and grounded theory (Hubert, 2006). While a few studies incorporated both quantitative and qualitative methods (Hatton et al, 2003;Hussein et al, 2019), four studies used quantitative survey designs through secondary data analysis (Devapriam et al, 2008), cross-sectional studies (Durà-Vilà and Hodes, 2009), and Delphi consultation (Bonell et al, 2012).…”

Společné vzdělávání a role rodičů

“…Obdobně to platí o kulturních, národnostních a náboženských odlišnostech (Pavan et al, 2010). Řada autorů se zabývala volbou rodičů mezi inkluzivní a speciální školou a porovnávala jejich zkušenosti z obou forem vzdělávání (Rizvi, 2018;Bridges, Mkandawire, 2020). Na základě výsledků této studie doporučujeme akcentovat roli rodičů při vzdělávání v inkluzivním prostředí.…”