Routledge Enabling Access: Effective Teaching and Learning for Pupils with Learning Difficulties (Routledge Education Classic Edition)

This Routledge Classic Edition brings together widely experienced editors and contributors to show how access to a whole school curriculum can be provided for learners with moderate to profound and multiple learning difficulties. Along with a new appraisal of the contents from the editors, the contributors raise debates, illustrate effective teaching ideas and discuss strategies for providing a high-quality education for these pupils and a celebration of their achievements. The book also discusses the active involvement of family members and the learners themselves in these processes and considers issues surrounding empowerment of learners, professional development of the workforce and curriculum principles such as differentiation, personalisation, and engagement. Winner of the prestigious nasen/TES Academic Book Award in 1996, Enabling Access is an essential read for students and lecturers in higher education, and for teachers, support staff, and other professionals in all educational settings in the UK and abroad catering for these learners. Review ‘Enabling Access was published at a time when the professional community was engaged in an evolving discourse on what constitutes an holistic curriculum for students with significant disabilities. This book was instrumental in contributing to the pedagogical landscape for this group of learners by reminding the professional community that breadth and balance need to be at the heart of any pedagogical decision-making: something as pertinent today as when the book was published. It definitely warrants a place alongside other classic contributions to our understandings and practice of teaching and learning. A well-deserved accolade!’ – Professor Phyllis Jones, University of South Florida, USA ‘I warmly welcome the publication of the new edition of Enabling Access. In many respects, its first edition marked the start of a quiet revolution in how we view the education of a new, distinct and all too often disenfranchised group of learners who need new and personalised responses to their profile of learning needs. The growing number of children and young people with complex learning and other disabilities have always challenged the system – in schools, families and in their multiple interactions with health and social care. Enabling Access introduces new concepts, of holistic learning pathways and engagement, and importantly it takes forward the potential of pro-active personalisation in education. Personalised education can transform the responses of schools but it necessitates new and more collaborative relationships across schools, between families, with a range of other professionals and sometimes using the insights offered by neuroscience as to how children learn – and how they see their worlds. Enabling Access provides that transformative guidance and offers a rich range of essential advice, case studies and shared learning vital to the new 2lst century pedagogy which will ensure that our pupil population with the most complex needs can indeed achieve their full potential.’ – Dame Philippa Russell, DBE About the Author Barry Carpenter, CBE, is Honorary Professor at the Universities in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Australia. He has undertaken research with families of children with disabilities, motivated professionally and personally as the father of a young woman with Down’s syndrome. He is currently writing on such topics as mental health, complex needs and girls with Autism. Rob Ashdown has been Headteacher of special schools in England. He is currently an editor for the PMLD LINK journal. Keith Bovair has been Headteacher at special schools in England, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK and has worked extensively in the field of special education in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America.