ALLFIE: ALLFIE part one

Transcript

I think it’s been really important for disabled people to run the project because it has really made a difference in terms of people being able to talk to one another honestly, and nearly everyone that we’ve interviewed, has never actually had an opportunity, or nobody’s ever asked them about their experiences of education. So this is the first time, and some of our interviewees are over 80, it’s the first time in their whole lives that anybody’s asked them about their educational experiences and the impact that, that’s had on their lives.
For me and for interviewing those deaf people you had an instant rapport and they said themselves, it would have been completely different for them if they’d been interviewed by a hearing person who had different experiences and they didn’t think the involvement would have happened in the same way. So I think deaf people would rather have that rapport with another deaf person. And I think that’s essential, because it’s our history and we have to write our own history. We can’t allow other people to write it for us, it’s our story, and it belongs to us.
There’s some really good examples of really brilliant teachers that have really had an impact on pupils lives and, you can see from the interviews that inclusion is really possible but it’s often somebody else who, who makes it work and there are just glimmers of that possibility within the interviews and if some of that can be really captured and used by education providers then I think the education system could work really, much, much better than it does in the interests of inclusion.

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