Today’s post is a little bit different from usual. I had written a completely different one and scheduled it to come out this morning but unfortunately it just didn’t work. Instead of writing a totally new one, I’m going to share the persuasive essay I wrote for my English class as I think it’s actually pretty relevant to my blog and the type of content I enjoy creating. I will say this essay is much more formal and follows a bit of a different structure than usual but I hope you enjoy it none the less.
The government has failed us. Over 14 million people are being denied the same right to a full education as their peers, why? Because they are disabled. The Equality Act 2010 states that schools mustn’t discriminate against a pupil because of their disability yet in the UK, the law states that schools only need to make reasonable adjustments for disabled pupils. This means that if a school is a new building it will be accessible but there’s no law that all schools must be accessible. Only requiring new schools to be accessible and not bothering to make all schools accessible is the government’s way of pretending that they truly care about the disabled people of their country.
So what’s the issue if disabled students can just go to new build schools? The issue is that disabled students at mainstream schools are already destined to face some kind of social isolation throughout school and being told that they’re unable to stay with their friends and peers, that they’ve built up relationships with, in Secondary school is quite simply cruel. Having to say goodbye to lifelong friends because you’re unable to transition to the same secondary school as them is heartbreaking and the few families willing to fight for their child’s place at the Secondary school they’re supposed to go to, face nothing but hoops to jump through and questions that dehumanise and degrade the entire disabled community into simply another societal nuisance. It should never be questioned why a disabled pupil wants to go to their local school.
Every child has a right to an education, yet if a disabled child has to stay on the ground floor and miss out on all the specialist subject equipment, nobody bats an eyelid. Education should never be a compromise. The effects of being unable to access every department in your own school can be detrimental on mental health, not being able to go where your peers can go, can cause further social isolation and teaches disabled people from a young age that they don’t deserve the full education that everyone else gets. On average, 13 out of 61 schools can provide a reasonable accessibility strategy. This is not good enough, this is discriminatory and if people do not start actively fighting, protesting against and changing this, then we are simply standing still and watching the disabled people of our society struggle. We should also remember that disability is not always something that you start school with, what happens to pupils or teachers who become disabled and are then forced to move to another school.
So what can you do? Why is this your responsibility? We live in a society fuelled by the ideology that if we are successful in fixing our own issues, we are successful, however this concept is deeply flawed. If disabled people are not aided in their fight for equality by their able bodied allies then change will take ages. There needs to be legal pressure put on the government by everyone, protests, letters written to MPs, the longer you do nothing, the longer you are simply a bystander of discrimination.