Founded on 28 June 1982 as the Centre for Studies on Integration in Education, CSIE took on its current name in the 1990s. The Centre has continued to evolve, has expanded its remit to cover all aspects of equality in education, and has remained at the forefront of developments in inclusive education. Some of our most recent achievements are listed below.

Our 2016 resource continues to attract the interest of teachers and school leaders. “Equality: Making It Happen” is a succinct and user-friendly set of reference cards to help schools reduce bullying, address prejudice and promote equality holistically. It has been sponsored by teachers’ union NASUWT, has won an Innovative Practice Award 2016 from the Zero Project, for a world with zero barriers, is being translated into Spanish and Portuguese with more translations in the pipeline and has been complimented in an independent review in Educational Psychology in Practice, the professional journal of the Association for Educational Psychologists.

In September 2016 CSIE created a short film with the generous help of George Magner, a freelance film maker who his services free of charge. The 3-minute film presents “Equality: Making It Happen” and the impact the new guide has had on schools, as well as describing CSIE’s intention to take this project one step further and create on online equality hub to be freely available to all schools.

CSIE has recently embarked, in partnership with a researcher from the University of Bristol, on a collaborative research project on Widening Participation for disabled students. This research has been commissioned by the University of Bristol and focuses on disabled students’ perspectives on the support that the University provides, identifying what works well and what are some of the barriers in disabled students’ learning and participation in all aspects of University life.

During the course of the year CSIE delivered equality workshops for education practitioners throughout the country, generously supported by Barclays Bank and The Ben Cohen StandUp Foundation, to whom CSIE remains grateful. Workshops were delivered in Bristol, Cardiff, King’s Lynn, Norwich, Leicester, Reading, Chorley and York. The overwhelming majority of participants said that they found the content excellent, useful, very interesting or thought-provoking, and the presentation well-paced, clear, concise, friendly and informal, tailored to the needs of the group, and with a good balance of discussion and listening.

CSIE’s disability awareness workshops for pupils are becoming increasingly popular with primary and secondary schools; this year workshops have taken place in Leicester, Kent, Glasgow, Surrey, Barnet, Hounslow, Cheshire, Aberdeenshire and Solihull. These workshops have been developed in response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s recommendation that schools should do more to help pupils understand disabled people, the social model of disability and the prejudice disabled people face (“Out in the open”, EHRC, 2012). This year’s workshops have reached around 1,500 pupils, 95% of whom have said on anonymous feedback slips that they have found the workshop helpful. Some of the reasons pupils gave for finding the workshops helpful were:

“If people look different doesn’t mean their personality is different.”

“It has taught me that we shouldn’t ignore people who are different to us.”

“I know not to judge a book by its cover and it’s the person inside that matters.”

“It showed me to be a lot more open to disabled people.”

“It has made me realise that disabled people are just as friendly as we.”

“It changed my outlook on how I look at disability.”

Alongside all these exciting achievements, recognition from others continues to grow. This year CSIE has been invited to support a school to undertake a whole school equality audit and to contribute to three more European projects, in addition to ELICIT+ and IMAS projects where CSIE is currently a partner in. Invitations to speak at conferences and contribute to edited books and journals continue to arrive

Happy Birthday CSIE, we all wish that you keep going from strength to strength and continue to be valued for achievements at the cutting edge of educational change!