A Reminder of your Legal Responsibilities

We have already seen that it is very simple to make practical changes to the way you work to ensure that all children and young people, are included in your setting.

As well as the moral responsibilities of including everyone, as we mentioned earlier all providers should also be aware of the implications of the Equality Act, 2010.

This act makes it unlawful for schools, educational institutions, and other service providers to discriminate against a person based on disability. It mandates ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure access to services and education.

Reasonable adjustments…

The type of practical and useful solutions that have already been identified in this sub course are helpful ‘reasonable adjustments’. The activity that you have just done (where you had to choose between two options for how to support a child with disabilities) gives you examples of reasonable adjustments and adjustments that would be less reasonable. To sum up, we can’t rebuild a building we rent but can use a portable wheelchair ramp. The second one of these is a reasonable adjustment.

It is important to remember that inclusion goes beyond reasonable adjustments. Refer back to Module 1 – we are looking at a whole setting approach to inclusion: