Understanding and Promoting Access for People with Learning Difficulties : Seeing the Opportunities and Challenges of Risk

The issue of access is at the forefront of the practical challenges facing people with learning difficulties and people working with or supporting them. This engaging text brings together evidence, narratives and discussions that question and advance our understanding of the concept of access for people with learning difficulties. Seale and Nind draw on their expertise to analyse a wide range of situations, including access to public spaces, citizenship education, community participation, and employment.

Through a series of related chapters, key researchers in the field of inclusion and learning difficulties enrich the access debate by:

• considering what kind of access people with learning difficulties want;
• identifying effective practice in relation to facilitating and promoting access;
• revealing the capability of people with learning difficulties to seek and achieve access to potentially exclusionary communities;
• providing a space for a wide range of people to share access stories.

With contributions from a variety of stakeholders including people with learning difficulties, Understanding and Promoting Access for People with Learning Difficulties clarifies the concept of access without over-simplifying what is involved. Through rigorous critique, this book provides a unique rationale for a new multi-dimensional model of access and ways of promoting it.

Proposing a reconceptualisation of the risk associated with promoting access for people with learning difficulties, this book will be of immense interest to students, researchers and professionals involved in inclusion and disability issues.

Jane Seale and Melanie Nind both work in the School of Education at the University of Southampton. Both Jane and Melanie have a strong track record of publishing in the area of inclusion and learning disabilities and of publishing edited works with Routledge and other publishers.