Being inclusive vs doing inclusion

Matt Griffiths said at the Inclusive Excellence Conference at the Fast Forward Festival in July 2015 at Colston Hall:

“Inclusion should be something we don’t just do on a Tuesday afternoon.”

I have been thinking about this a lot and, of course, I agree but I was wondering about what this means in practice.

It seems to me that we need to move away from ‘doing inclusion’ i.e. the active practice of opening up mainstream activity to those unable to access it, and towards ‘being inclusive’ i.e. your way of doing, saying, and thinking about anything has to be done in a way that needs no inclusion applied to it.

This means we need to do the exact opposite of what I wrote in the BPM Fund C Strategy in October. I wrote:

“Every offer that currently exists for the mainstream must be accessible to every young person.”

I guess that was me trying to say that, rather than doing inclusion a bit, we needed to do inclusion a lot. But what I now believe we need to do is identify where ‘being inclusive’ is taking place and applying it to everything we do.

The trouble is that being inclusive is not necessarily written down in a way (or in a place) that is accessible to the majority of those involved in music education. When I say written down, I mean that there is no definition or blueprint that tells you how to be inclusive, through and through. There are lots of bits of writing, just not any one definitive thing.

This links to my previous blog about starting from inclusive practice and spreading it to all of our work. We do need to nail down a definition so that those starting out can start out well armed. That goes both for practitioner practice and for organisational practice (an area that has never got anywhere near as much attention).

Needless to say, I shall be updating the sustainability chapter of our Fund C Strategy document...