A rights-informed and respecting approach to more inclusive schools: Based on a Citizens' Panel pilot project

This paper is about how a rights perspective, both children's and others' rights, can be used to make sense of schooling which is more inclusive of children and young people with special educational needs/disabilities (SEN/D). It is based on a project that used deliberative democratic approaches, in the form of a Citizens' Panel, to address the question of how to make schools more inclusive for children with SEN/D. This paper aims to examine how the panellists' ideas about more inclusive schools are linked to rights-respecting school principles and to a balance of rights perspective. The project involved 28 panellists: young people (aged 12–16 years) with and without SEN/D, their parents and education professionals in an English local area. Thematic analyses showed links between the panel's ideas about more inclusive schools and rights-respecting school principles, with no panellists mentioning the term ‘rights-respecting’ schools. Analysis also showed that the panel's ideas about more inclusive schools recognised the distinctive and joint interests of learners with and without SEN/D and teachers. Through the best interests of the child principle, this was connected to the balance of rights perspective. This analysis has shown how a Citizens' Panel based on deliberative democratic methods has expressed such rights ideas relevant to more inclusive schools. The paper also discusses how these results might be due to the characteristics of the deliberative democratic process.