How would you answer this question?

How would you promote equal opportunities in the classroom?

interview on tuesday and i'm not sure how i'd answer this !!!!!

analyse.....how do you yourself see equal opps....

treat everyone fairly..the same regardless of..........provide opportunities for all to participate.....and however you could/would do this

they may ask for a scenario when you put this into practise.....or how you would do this for someone who had differences in some way to make your setting inclusive

remember it applies to everyone in the school/community not just the children you work with//so teachers/parents....etc etc

Equal ops is about everyone having the same opportunities, which would involve some having more support, resources ect. than others.

Possibly differentiated planning for SEN.
Offering opportunities for equal opportunities eg: sewing.

Hate to do this, but I'm going to disagree with DQ

Equal opportunities is not treating everyone the same, if you did you would not provide equal opportunities to everyone.

It is recognising the barriers which prevent individuals from accessing the opportunities open to others, and finding ways of breaking those barriers down.

For instance most of us would include work from a range of abilities when setting up a display. However there are a few who will use only the 'best' examples. This allows for more able students to receive recognition for their work, while creating a barrier to less able students to get the same recognition, as well as the encouragement that goes with it.

On a more practical level, you may expect students to write down their homework in their book, and to make sure they do it. However there may be a child you need to check that they have written it down, and to make sure they take the book home at the end of the day.

One that I picked up as a SEN govenor was that the school was failing to set up their computer to maximise the benefit for a child who was visually impaired. There are a couple of solutions for this, one is to set up a simple macro which alters the display, the way the mouse works or other alterations needed to make access is easier. The other is to set up a style sheet and set the browser to accept your style sheet over the web designers.

If you have no experience in doing either of these then you may need to ask your it expert to do it, or there are some sites where you can get this done for free.

Whilst most schools seem to stick with Internet Explorer I'm not aware of any issues setting up a second browser for individual children to use with the style sheet permanantly.

As mentioned it is not just the children. A major issue for some schools is the number of languages spoken, with some parents not speaking English at all. This poses obvious barriers, both for the parents and the children. Considering putting in a system whereby parents can inform you they need to speak to you, along with their language so you can arrange an interpreter to be present would offer one solution to this which would allow equal opportunities for the family.

Hope this helps.

I think all of the above are examples of where children have been treated the same.

The art work goes on the wall regardless of ability.

The homework written for whoever needs it.

The computor adapted so all can equally access the work......

How I read DQ's post was that all children are given the means to do the same things regardless of ability or disability. How we arrive at that point of access is our job. We don't expect less of the visually impaired we make it so that they can see.

Think it might be a question of semantics.