My guest this week is Professor Mel Ainscow, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Manchester. He is internationally recognised as an authority on the promotion of inclusion and equity in education. Mel is a long-term consultant of UNESCO and has recently published a report which looks at the status, trends and challenges in inclusive education since the Salamanca Statement.
In our interview, Mel speaks about how he began to work in inclusive education, beginning his career as a head teacher and moving into inclusive education research after that. He describes how his research always involved working with schools and communities and he emphasises the importance of taking individual school or area contexts into account when introducing inclusive systems.
