Report: Promoting Positive Attitudes towards Disabled People

Why not read this report by Beckett and Buckner about the role of English state primary schools in promoting positive attitudes towards disabled people!

In 2006 the UK government introduced the Disability Equality Duty, requiring publicly funded bodies to take a proactive approach to promoting positive attitudes towards disabled people. But in reality, this isn’t happening in many cases. Many schools are not sufficiently promoting positive attitudes towards people with disabilities.

This article, written in 2011, describes the shortcomings, on-the-ground barriers, and unevennesses in primary schools’ education surrounding disability. 

The first step in this would be teaching children about disabled people. The next would be encouraging students to engage critically with the processes that generate and sustain the idea of a privileged group and ‘the Other’. After that would be an education that encourages children to deconstruct these binaries – understand the complexities of identities, and think about disability as a contestable social construct. 

Go on, give it a read!