Inclusive Pre-School at Challengers Farnham

Challengers has been working with disabled children and young people aged 0 -25 for many years now.  So,  as we expand our Young Adults scheme to include even more young people at the top of the age range, it’s only fair that we expand our services to children under 4 years too. 

The Play Group started at our Farnham Playcentre on the 19th April 2010. In line with Inverse Inclusion this project offers an equal number of spaces to non-disabled and disabled children.
Challengers Farnham Pre-School Play Group is a project for disabled and non-disabled children aged 2 - 4 in the local area. The project runs during term time from 9.30am to 12.30pm five days a week at Challengers Farnham Playcentre.

Farnham Pre-School Play Group currently offers 10 places per day but we intend to increase this to 15 places per day within a few months. Every disabled child will initially have 1:1 support to ensure a high quality experience for every child.

For further details on our Pre-School service, please contact Paul Wilson on 01483 230 571 or email paulwilson@disability-challengers.org 

Inverse Inclusion at Challengers

Disability Challengers vision is to make all our projects Inclusive through Inverse Inclusion. Our inclusive projects currently include our weekly Family Fundays at our Guildford and Farnham Playcentres, as well as our Dorking holiday Playscheme. Dorking Play was our first project to offer inclusive play during the summer and Easter holidays and our plan is to make our Farnham, Oxted and Leatherhead Playschemes also fully inclusive. When the demand for spaces from disabled children and their families has been met, we hope that all our projects will be fully inclusive. But why….?

Inclusion - the answer for all of us?

We believe that inclusion will help society move forward. Unfortunately, for historical reasons of segregation, many of us have grown up without contact with disabled people - for this reason we may feel uncomfortable meeting disabled people because we don’t know ‘what to do’ or ‘how to be’.

We are convinced that the play environment provides a perfect place for children to do what they do best. If disabled and non-disabled children grow up with the chance to play together then they will understand each other from first hand knowledge, In our experience, young people are naturally accepting of differences in their friends and will be equally accepting when they grow up.

In the future, this natural process will mean that no-one will be surprised to be interviewed by a disabled person when they go for a job or be served by a disabled person when shopping.

Inverse Inclusion - putting disabled children first

Some mainstream leisure projects offer one or two places to disabled children which, even with the best will in the world, only mirrors exactly what disabled children can expect from society when they are older - the feeling of being in the minority. Although these schemes are arguably better than having no play provision, it also demonstrates the poor state of inclusive play and the lack of choice disabled children experience (this is in contrast to the huge range of choices that non-disabled children have every day and can take for granted).

Most of us will choose to be exclusive on occasions - we can choose to have a lads night out or a girls night in but we can also choose to be out with everyone. But the important point is that we have choice ~ non-disabled children have choices that disabled children just don’t have.

So we do things round the other way. We practise an innovative and demonstrably successful method of play and leisure provision for ALL children which has come to be called Inverse Inclusion. We begin all our projects exclusively for disabled young people. Then, as space allows and the scheme is established as ‘secure, strong and familiar places’ for disabled children, we open up places to non-disabled young people. In this way we create a large number of inclusive places ‘at a stroke’, where everyone feels at home!

In an ideal world we would have space for all children to play together. Unfortunately, the huge lack of play opportunities means that we can not always offer spaces to non-disabled children in our schemes because, at the moment, to do so would be to turn down a disabled child.

The most valuable aspect to Inverse Inclusion is that it enables ALL children to FEEL included.

Inclusion - what it doesn’t mean!

Inclusion is not merely making a building accessible, using the right language, going on a course and ticking boxes. You can change the doorways, put in ramps, tick the ‘Inclusion’ box and disabled people still may not FEEL included - we need to be inclusive in our thoughts and actions. Inclusion really comes down to replacing our preconceptions with an open mind and willingness to see past the impairment and recognise that people are people - we are all different but have the same basic needs - to eat, sleep, play and have shelter over our head. Basically, only when we FEEL included, are we truly included,

We have to start developing society for everyone, not just for the majority of people. In the long term, we believe including disabled people, and changing our thoughts and attitudes towards disabled people will improve society for all of us. To make this change complete we believe that we have to start with our children and let them play together so they can show us what inclusion really means.

We are really interested to hear any thoughts on Inverse Inclusion, please email us with any comments or suggestions.