Czech Gov't Agency for Social Inclusion director: Inclusion is a trend that cannot be stopped
"Inclusion is a trend that cannot be stopped. More and more parents are behind it and more and more directors are managing their schools to be open to all children," said Martin Šimáček, director of the Czech Government Agency for Social Inclusion in an interview for the second issue of the Škola All Inclusive newsletter, which news server Romea.cz brings you in translation below.
Q: Which nursery school or primary school do your children attend, and how did you and your wife choose the right facility? Was it a condition for you that the school be inclusive?
A: We’ve been looking for a nursery school and found ourselves in the situation that most parents here know – demand exceeds supply. The selection of nursery schools is a bit degraded by this competition for places. Nevertheless, when looking for a nursery school we took an interest in who our son would be spending half of his day with, which means the schoolmaster and the teachers. We were also interested in the environment, both in the nursery school itself and in its vicinity. We were interested in what kind of regular program the children have and how the adults work with the children. My son’s nursery school is very open, but despite that, its collective is rather homogenous. For example, there are no disabled children or children of a different ethnic background enrolled there. I would be glad if my children could meet such people in nursery school and primary school in the future, so that they can learn to naturally work with children who come from different starting conditions than we do. That experience is very important and instructive for their lives.
Q: When I looked at this year’s enrollments into the primary schools, I had the feeling that the lines were not forming at the inclusive schools, but at the selective ones. You won’t meet a child of another ethnicity – especially not a Romani one – in those schools. Why do you believe Czech parents are still so afraid of inclusive schools?
A: You are right that the greater interest is often in elite nursery schools and primary schools. However, that does not mean such schools are always the best. Parents are dependent on how much information they can manage to gather about a school – they never get answers to many of their questions, and very rarely do they understand precisely what they are getting into. That’s bad, nursery schools and primary schools must be open to the public, parents should have the opportunity to get involved in the life of the school even before deciding whether to send their child there or not. The problem is also often on the parents’ side – many of them do not take much interest in where their children go to school and rely on proxies to assure them of quality. They believe that if they pay a lot of money it will be a quality school. Impoverished children aren’t enrolled there, so their child won’t have to be subjected to the problems associated with them. The academic results of all the children there are above average, so that’s enough. However, those are not guarantees that the child will feel at home there, that the school will respond well to the child’s needs, that the child will develop not just academically, but also socially, in contact with others. Parents will not care about inclusive schools until they learn to want more from the schools than they themselves experienced firsthand 30 years ago.
Q: Is it within the power of the average parent to determine whether a school is good?
A: It is hard for parents to orient themselves as to what is available, to recognize what precisely a school is offering. I still want to ensure that nursery schools and primary schools should be required to publish more information that what you find in their Annual Reports, in the school curriculum, or even on their websites. For example, they should publish their teachers’ portfolios, the instruction methods they use, etc. In recent years the work of the schools has been completely transformed – it is no longer necessary to provide basic encyclopedic knowledge, but to teach children to work with the enormous amount of information that comes to them, to sort it out, and to recognize what is important, to think about it. It is also important for the school to help children orient themselves in basic human values, to help them seek out positive authority figures, and to lead them toward active citizenship and independent activity. A school like that must logically stop using frontal instruction methods and introduce modern methods, for example, cooperative teaching. It must respond to the composition of children in its catchment area and their needs, communicate with the public, collaborate with institutions in its area. A school is a center of social events, its role hasn’t changed in that respect, but the ways in which a school must achieve that aim today have changed.
Q: During your years of working for the Agency you must have visited many schools. Is there any place that is a shining example of inclusion, or one that has disappointed you?
A: Inclusion is a trend that can’t be stopped. More and more parents are behind it and more and more directors are managing their schools to be open to all children. Particularly in small towns with just one primary school, one can see very well whether they are succeeding. I am forced to omit a number of excellent schools here, but to represent all of them I can name, for example the Poběžovická School in Domažlice and the primary schools in Krásná Lipa or Jáchymov. Those are schools that govern themselves by the following motto: If a child is "failing", so-called, in school, then it is primarily the school itself that must change something. Of the schools I am talking about, the children who are living with disabilities, who are Romani, or who are socially vulnerable do not leave these schools for segregated schooling, and neither do the gifted or the so-called average children, because they too are satisfied, the schools respond to their needs as well.
I don’t like it when "practical primary schools" in particular label themselves as inclusive. By their very nature, those schools cannot be inclusive, because they only educate children with mild mental disabilities or (unfortunately) socially disadvantaged children. That’s not about educating everyone together. At the very most these schools might be applying some appropriate or modern methods to the education of children with special educational needs.
Q: The Council of Europe has long criticized the Czech Republic over how many Romani children attend the "practical schools" in our country. Despite all of the inclusive projects that do their best to return these children to the mainstream schools, the reality is such that Romani children continue to enroll in the "practical schools". What is going wrong?
A: Romani enrollments into such schools are declining, but they are doing so slowly. According to various investigations, around one-third of Romani children are educated outside of mainstream education, 10 times more than any other population group. The Czech education system is failing here. There are many reasons why. To start with, there has been a lack of courage on the part of most Education Ministers to choose to make inclusive education a priority. This is not just about inclusion, but about modernizing Czech schools per se, about the vision that the Czech education system will respond to the fact that we now live in an information society, in one that is becoming more and more heterogeneous.
Q: The Czech media recently published a report about a school in the central English town of Leicester which is attended by Romani children who have "emigrated" there from the Czech Republic. The Romani children’s attendance rate there is 93 % (while in northern Bohemia, for example, it is 65 % maximum) and the children look forward to going to school there. Why does it work there and not in our country?
A: Many people are deliberately challenging that information, but I must confirm that I personally spent a brief time as a teaching assistant in Britain years ago. It’s not necessary to inflame the situation by saying that the British education system is perfect and the Czech one is backward. That only angers Czech teachers, and justifiably so. There are bad, good and worse schools and teachers in both places. On the other hand, it is a great experience to see the British educators from Leicester in action. They are very far advanced when it comes to their approach to children and their instruction methods. That’s understandable – British education has not had to wake itself up from the coma of the socialist mass education of children, while the Czech system has had to do so. The British education system, just like the Finnish one, for example, has simply had a longer time in which to develop naturally. Good practices from abroad are a great opportunity for our schools and should never be dismissed out of hand.
Q: Are Czech teachers prepared at all for inclusion?
A: Yes and no. Many are not and do not care to be. I have met many teachers who look down on Romani children or who dislike people living with disabilities. Such people have no business working in the schools. On the other hand, a large proportion of teachers would probably be able to adjust their working methods, but they don’t get much support for that. Despite this, I continue to meet more and more teachers who are very advanced in their knowledge and their practice. They are no longer addressing the question of "Inclusion – yes or no?" but are addressing the details of "How?" They have extensive experience, both bad and good, and they can share it, they can evaluate the practices their schools introduced 10 or 15 years ago. This is also a question of preparing future educators, there are certain restraints in place there, and it is also a question of the quality of the lifelong education of the teachers currently working. Another general problem is the question of who even heads into education today, given that it offers such low pay and prestige.
Q: Is the Agency capable of providing some kind of service to schools that want to get started with inclusion?
A: Yes, that is our task. In most of the 26 communities where we are currently working, at least one school is doing its best to transform itself toward greater inclusivity. We are supporting them in finding resources, pointing them in the direction of the good practices available, helping them get involved in collaborations with social service providers and with parents. It’s even better when the establisher of the school also decides in favor of such change, then we can work with the entire education system in the community. That’s how we helped with comprehensive changes, for example, in Sokolov, where a segregated school closed and the other schools opened their doors to the socially disadvantaged children who had been attending it. Some of the experts from the defunct school, who had enormous experience in working with children with special educational needs, were then used in the other schools.
This interview was first published in the second issue of the Škola All Inclusive newsletter, which is published by the People in Need association in cooperation with Palacký University in Olomouc as part of its "Systemic support for inclusive education in the Czech Republic" project.
