You Need
Last thing on Friday afternoon, when we eight-year-olds lifted our chairs on to the desks at primary school, it seemed like an age since the week had begun. The weekend stretched ahead deliciously. At twenty-eight, as a primary school teacher, I had the same feelings – but a week had become a whole term; the weekend a whole holiday. Now, thirty years after that, a whole year flies by in the space of a week.
It seems no time since Trish Hornsey, Roger Bates and I set up Inclusive Technology: it’s ten years and it has flown by. It has been the most rewarding and exciting ten years of my life. Better even than the preceding ten years taking SEMERC from government quango, through LEA consortium, to a £2.3 million business that astonished Oldham’s District Auditor (Local Authorities shouldn’t trade like that) and forced a sale to the private sector - eventually to Granada Learning (itself much in the news at present).
The only fly in the ointment, and it’s pretty recent, is the current absence of Government focus on using technology to help learners facing the greatest challenges - learners with more severe and complex special needs. These learners have disappeared from Government thinking and Government programmes. In my twenty years of experience in assistive technology, ten at SEMERC and now ten at Inclusive Technology, learners with severe and complex special needs have never been more off the agenda. From justifiably leading the field of ICT in education, they have now sunk out of sight at the DfES. We have pointed this out, most recently in a letter to the Education Minister, Bill Rammell MP.
Happily the networks of skilled teachers, speech therapists and LEA support teams still keep Britain ahead in supporting those learners who face the very greatest challenges : assistive technology sales are actually up. For those children with a cocktail of cognitive, severe sensory and physical disabilities , Britain leads the world in these resources and in the software publishing houses and small engineering companies which produce them. Where disabilities are principally sensory or principally physical North America generally has the lead and you will find teams of Brits at the three major US conferences winnowing out the best new resources and bringing them back here too. At Inclusive we have been lucky enough to play a part both in producing new software for learners with the most severe disabilities and in working in partnership with American and Canadian companies to make the widest range of resources available in Britain.
So on our tenth birthday I would like buy a birthday round for colleagues from our North West region and nationally. But also for local supporters and our international friends too.
Regionally, I guess Inclusive Technology kind of grew out of Northwest SEMERC (there still are five ex-SERMERCers on our team). Both organisations started in central Manchester in the heart of this region, birthplace of the industrial revolution (and the computer too). Our thank you, our birthday present,
is our bid to raise £50,000 to enhance facilities at the new Manchester Children’s Hospital. We are doing this by producing accessible special needs software based on Bob the Builder™ who was himself developed in Manchester by HIT Entertainment and generously loaned to us by HIT Entertainment and the BBC (who own the UK rights to Bob). The software is available now and Bob will star on the cover of our new catalogue from the 16th November. All proceeds go to the new Manchester Children’s Hospital.
Bob is our present to Britain too. Economics dictates that severely disabled children, requiring especially inclusive software which can be operated with a single switch, never get to play with expensive licensed characters like Bob the Builder™. Well this time they do. SwitchIt! Bob the Builder™ is accessible by mouse or mouse alternative, keyboard, IntelliKeys, touch monitor, interactive whiteboard, one or two switches, switch scanning – you name it. I’m afraid, due to licensing arrangements, it’s only on sale in the UK.
Internationally, we share a tenth birthday with EENET (Enabling Education Network), an educational charity which promotes inclusive education in the poorest parts of the developing world. We have worked with EENET from the outset: providing their website and assembling, publishing and distributing CDs of their materials, free-of-charge, to the poorest parts of the world. It seemed such a worthwhile thing to do. Our present to them is to provide and evening Birthday Reception, at the Special Needs Fringe, in January to celebrate their tenth birthday too.
Locally, Inclusive Technology is based in Saddleworth, a truly beautiful part of the world that fringes the Pennines and the Peak District. A great place to work. For two years we have had photographer John Todd capturing the character of the landscape and the Saddleworth villages: Denshaw, Delph, Dobcross, Diggle and Uppermill. You will have already previewed this work offered each month as desktop wallpaper on the Inclusive website.
In December, as a thank you to Saddleworth we mount an exhibition of sixty-six truly stunning photographs of the Saddleworth sights, villages and moors. The exhibition is free and will run from 2nd December to 28th January at the Saddleworth Museum in Uppermill. The sixty-six framed photographs and a calendar, based on twelve of the best, will be on sale benefiting the Saddleworth Museum and providing great Christmas present ideas too! Well worth a visit.
Well what of the next ten years? As I have said, Government support for the learners facing the biggest challenges has ebbed to a historic low. I’m sure the tide will turn. Mr Brown may have different priorities in helping the least advantaged. Mr Cameron has a strong personal interest in special needs. While Lady Walmsley, who leads on education for the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, was so wowed by the Bob the Builder™ project that she is already offering us lots of practical help. Let’s hope the CAP project, or something like it, can be reinstated, giving learners with communication difficulties the technology they need and supporting key parts of the assistive technology network like the ACE Centres, CENMAC and other vital organisations which have recently lost so much of their funding.
It is a fact that computers and educational technology offers most to learners facing the greatest challenges and that Britain still has a clear lead in applying assistive technology to learners with special needs. We are hoping that the events and initiatives we are planning for our birthday year will point this up and point a British Government, of whatever colour, to backing a British winner.
Martin Littler, November 2006.