Reinforcing inclusion: Arts teachers’ micro-adaptations for pupils with SEND
Written by: Beccy Thompson
7 min read
BECCY THOMPSON, SENIOR LECTURER IN PROFESSIONAL STUDIES AND DRAMA PGCE LEAD, UNIVERSITY OF ROEHAMPTON, UK
Introduction
It is well established that students with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) face more disadvantages in school compared to their peers without such needs (Children’s Commissioner, 2022). A concurrent issue in English state schools has been the ‘downgrading’ of arts subjects, raising questions about the accessibility of the curriculum (Tambling and Bacon, 2023). In response to these two areas of concern, the qualitative research discussed in this article takes an aspect of a project that investigated six arts teachers’ decisions for students with SEND (Thompson, 2021) in a boys’ secondary school. One aim of the research was to determine whether and how arts teachers’ decisions reinforced the inclusion of students with SEND. Inclusion is a widely contested term but is conceived broadly here as a right to belong (Thompson, 2021). In this a
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