Inclusive teaching: why every child matters in your classroom and strategies to deploy to ensure this happens within drama

Inclusion is a term which ensures that all students have equal access to the classroom in order to increase their life chances. This research aimed to explore how having an inclusive classroom could influence how students felt about their learning but also to find specific strategies to use to ensure that inclusion occurred. The literature found that inclusion was difficult to define as it had so many subcategories of Special Educational Needs which suggested different strategies. It also found that all students (both with and without Special Educational Needs) thrive in an inclusive environment. The research through surveys and focus groups to both students and inclusion staff was successful in finding out four key points: students felt working in groups was inclusive; students wanted to feel included by their teachers; instruction sheets aided inclusive learning and; students who enjoyed lessons felt more included. Overall this small study of 274 students was successful in finding out about inclusion in my own classroom. The findings could provide the basis for further studies by independent researchers in order to explore whether the four key findings are a key theme across more students and more schools.