Opening the inclusion Flood gates

Tara Flood is both a Paralympic champion and an award-winning, 24-7 campaigner. She tells Sunil Peck that her ambition is to lead the fight for a truly inclusive education system

Tara Flood is best known for campaigning for equality for disabled pupils in the education system.

But despite her reputation as a radical inclusionist, she scoffs at the suggestion that all special schools should be closed immediately.

“The truth is that if you shut every special school tomorrow, would inclusion happen for every single young disabled person?” she says. “It wouldn’t, because mainstream isn’t up to the job yet.”

In July, Flood was recognised for her campaigning with the Alliance for Inclusive Education (Allfie) with an award from the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, which specialises in helping campaigners hone their campaigning skills.

Flood had never heard of the foundation until a friend emailed her about it the day before the closing date for nominations. But she insists that the award means a lot to her. For one thing, it shows that “big-wigs in the third sector” recognise that the debate around inclusive education has moved on from being for or against special schools to ways in which disabled learners can be integrated into the mainstream system.

“I had what I thought was going to be a traumatic interview with Nick Partridge from the Terrence Higgins Trust and Adam Sampson from Shelter,” Flood says, recalling interviews with the chief executives during the award’s shortlisting process.

“But when I was talking to them about the Inclusion Works campaign, I really felt that they got it. I didn’t feel that I had to trudge through the same debate around inclusion versus segregation which is nearly always what I have to do when I talk about the work that the organisation does.”

Flood says the award could prove a significant boost for Allfie.

“What you also get through the Sheila McKechnie programme, which I think is extremely valuable, is that they start to work with you around building a programme of support to make your campaign more effective. We couldn’t pay for that at the organisation and I think raising our profile will be crucial for attracting more funders.”

Gordon Brown presented Flood with the award (on her birthday, as it happens) and she used her ten seconds with him to request a meeting with children, schools and families secretary Ed Balls.

The United Nations convention, which promotes rights and equality for disabled people, is at the top of her agenda at the moment, and she is desperate to persuade Balls of the need to ratify the convention without giving the government an option to educate disabled pupils in special schools.

Flood describes herself as a survivor of the special school system. She gained a degree in applied social sciences before going on to gain an MA in disability studies. She turned her back on a career in the City to concentrate on campaigning for disability rights. She has worked for RADAR, the Disabled Living Foundation, Scope and Disability Awareness in Action.

Flood’s campaigning button is “never switched off”. But although she talks about the importance of fundraising and schmoozing with politicians, she says that the grass-roots activists’ penchant for direct action campaigning is still an important tool in the struggle for equality. Indeed, she led a march to the offices of the Department for Education and Skills in 2006, which resulted in the government reaffirming its commitment to a fully inclusive education system.

“We wouldn’t have achieved as a movement the things that we have, had we not gone out and thrown red paint and demanded change,” she says. “But there is also another way to campaign and that is to recognise who it is at the top of the decision-making tree. So if we can get radical politics into the offices of those people and say, ‘You have a responsibility to deliver equality by 2025, you’re not going to do it until you listen to people like us,’ we should.”

The Labour government has, Flood says, served disabled people well in education, particularly with the introduction of legislation to place more disabled pupils in mainstream schools. But she also feels that Labour has undone its good work to some extent by being “too responsive” to media stories about parents and disabled children who have had a tough time in mainstream schools.

“When you unpick the stories saying that inclusion isn’t working and inclusion is a human rights abuse, there wouldn’t be a single inclusionist that would call that inclusion. At best it would be poorly-resourced integration where a disabled person has been thrown into a mainstream school without the support they need and the school hasn’t got the support that it needs to change its environment or its curriculum.”

Flood says that a victory for David Cameron at the next election would be a disaster for disabled people and could scupper any chance of achieving equality.

“At this point in time, a Conservative victory in two years could potentially set the UK on a path back to the bad old days for the majority of disabled children and young people and those with special educational needs labels.”

She stresses that disabled people must make it a priority to convince the Conservatives of the importance of a transition framework that builds the capacity of the mainstream system to a level where it can respond to the learning needs of everyone.

As well as being a committed campaigner, Flood is also a former Paralympian. Her world record for the 50-metre breaststroke, set in Barcelona in 1992, still stands. But surprisingly, she will be watching the TV coverage of this year’s Paralympics hoping that someone breaks it.

“If it goes, it means that people with my level of impairment continue to compete. But as the Paralympics has become more and more mainstream, athletes with a higher level of impairment have slowly been excluded from competing. So swimmers with my level of impairment have very little opportunity to compete now.”

Flood has no problem with elite athletes like Oscar Pistorius and Natalie Du Toit participating in the Olympics, but she is concerned that they may have lost sight of the importance of the Paralympics.

“I was desperate to compete. I didn’t care where it was, I was just desperate to achieve. With Oscar Pistorius and Natalie Du Toit, their desire to achieve at the Olympics takes precedence over their desire to achieve at the Paralympics. In my view, there is no difference between an Olympic and a Paralympic medal.”

When asked about her future plans as a campaigner, Flood replies: “I live campaigning 24-7 because I have to challenge disablism 24-7. But my ambition is that the Alliance for Inclusive Education becomes the true leader of the inclusion movement and supports organisations like Scope to transform its education services. It’s about working with other people to say what’s possible for disabled young people.”