This workshop explores inclusive education as a rights-based policy for achieving education for all. It presents practical strategies for addressing the complex challenges faced by families, teachers, advocates and education professionals working in schools, non-governmental organisations and national governments. These include:

• overcoming the stigma associated with human differences,
• dealing with disagreements about how to achieve inclusive education,
• resolving conflicts about the role of specialist knowledge, and specialist forms of provision, and,
• addressing concerns that the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream schools will hold back the progress of other children.

The workshop focuses on what has been learned about how these challenges are being addressed in different countries. Participants will have an opportunity to discuss this in light of the achievements and challenges of inclusive education in their own countries.

The second part of the workshop will involve participants in an activity that develops the idea that an inclusive approach to education for all requires not only learning new ways of working but un-learning practices that contribute to or reinforce the problems of discrimination faced by disabled people and other marginalised groups in society. Participants will learn how to identify local practices that can be replaced by new ways of working in support of inclusion.

Lani Florian, University of Aberdeen