Now that many more children with Special Needs and Additional Educational Needs are being included in mainstream education, Children’s World has decided that in addition to its regular special schools work and integrational work, the Charity would like to undertake more work in mainstream schools to assist the smooth and happy inclusion of children with AEN and to assist schools in developing really good "Whole School Inclusion Policies".

Over the 3 terms of the 2000/01 Academic Year, we therefore devised and ran the "Children’s World Pilot Inclusion Project", an exploratory tour, working with groups of 40 children at 3 local primary schools. 25-40% of the children in each group had AEN or learning difficulties. Each of the 3 sets of children received a Consultancy Fun Morning, 2 full days of Workshops and 2 x half-day Follow-Up Visits - approximately 1,500 x 90-minute child-sessions in all. Children’s World commissioned Barnardos to undertake Individual Child Consultancies with 6 children (3 with AEN and 3 without) in each school, and much interesting and useful information was gathered.

The aims of the Inclusion Project’s Drama Workshops, Therapeutic Art Workshops & Child Consultancies were to listen to the points of view of children with special educational needs and without; to try to discover what school life was really like for them; to creatively assist the children in making their own suggestions & recommendations that would make school life better & more inclusive for them all; to work against bullying & exclusion; and, as with all Children’s World’s work, to provide "fun" interactive learning opportunities to increase confidence, self-awareness & raised esteem for self & others - and to try to create positive, happy & inclusive atmospheres where team work could flourish and aid all the children’s development.

The Pilot Inclusion Project ended with a special "Celebration Morning" at the Meyer Theatre of Millfield School when all 120 children came together with an invited audience to share what they had learned during the Project, to raise the beautiful "Inclusion Sunflower" that their artwork had created and to sing the Inclusion Song "All Together Now!" The Pilot Inclusion Project was deemed a great success.

A Report has been published and distributed to schools and statutory and voluntary bodies. We plan to offer shortened Inclusion Workshops, with the "cream" of our "Inclusion" material, to mainstream schools in the coming year.

THE CLASS TEACHER AT ELMHURST PRIMARY SCHOOL WROTE: "Children’s World’s Inclusion Project at Elmhurst has been an extremely worthwhile experience for both the children and staff involved...

The Project has offered children with a wide range of abilities the opportunity to work together as a team, using an awareness of everyone’s strengths & weaknesses, to actually help each other.

Both the art and drama workshops enabled all the children to participate - ideas and opinions being expressed freely. It has been noted that one particular child in Year 5 with AEN and behavioural problems has shown a significant improvement in his behaviour towards others and in his attitude to work since the Project.

Through the workshops, the children have become more aware of the feelings of others and are more responsive to issues of inclusion during circle time discussions and also in the playground.

The staff also feel that they have benefited greatly from the Project and feel able to adopt a more positive means of encouraging good behaviour as well as realising the importance of inclusion for all children throughout the school.

We would, therefore, welcome further Children’s World projects of this nature to be available to the whole school & other members of staff, as we see this as an invaluable opportunity which could benefit the whole community."

ANTI-BULLYING WORKSHOPS

Children's World's Anti-Bullying Workshop toured 8 secondary schools & 4 primary schools during the year. In each school 30 children received a full morning’s workshop creating characters of "bullies" and "victims", undertaking mask work, holding discussions and devising a movement piece for presentation in the afternoon session, which is attended by the whole Year Group.

The afternoon sessions took the form of a "Television Chat Show" on "Bullying", and was very successful, creating much lively debate. This unusual way of dealing with the subject seems to allow both pupils and staff to speak quite freely about how they feel - and to continue discussions and make progress after Children’s World’s departure.

All the schools that participated felt their children had benefited greatly from the day’s workshops.

THE HEAD TEACHER OF WEST PENNARD PRIMARY SCHOOL WROTE: "Thank you for providing such a useful day on Bullying for our Year 6 children...The content of the day was sensitively designed and the Class Teacher felt it was well pitched, allowing sufficient opportunity for the children to have their say and be listened to, whilst making clear what the best courses of action might be... From this platform we will now move on with the children...I am confident that the awareness raising will prove to be most helpful... The Children’s World team were entirely professional and clearly quite passionate about their mission, managing the children with exceptionally well crafted skills."

PEER PRESSURE WORKSHOPS & TEAM CHALLENGE GAMES

Our Anti-Bullying Workshops with secondary schools convinced us that many different workshops could be usefully run with primary and secondary age pupils and in the Summer Term we took part in St. Dunstan’s Community School’s "Healthy Lifestyle Choices" Week, providing Team Challenge Games for 90 Year 8 students and a new role-play Peer Pressure Workshop for 30 students. These were both enthusiastically received by pupils and staff alike. We believe that Role-Play can be a very useful tool for behaviour-based workshops, and we are currently devising new Problem-Solving Workshops that will be able to address any subject in this way.

THE HEAD OF YEAR 8 AT ST. DUNSTAN’S COMMUNITY SCHOOL WROTE: "Our pupils benefit enormously from all your workshops. The Team Challenge activities were super and the children really enjoyed them. The children who took part in the Peer Pressure Workshop fed back that it had been extremely beneficial, enjoyable and had given them strategies to use in the future. Your team leaders are superb - they have a really good insight into working with children."