Joe Whittaker was an amazing teacher and campaigner for Inclusive Education

By Richard Rieser

When I first met Joe in the late 1980’s, he was a teacher of teachers, particularly in Further Education at Bolton Institute. Joe was a great catalyst of the burgeoning Inclusion Movement in the UK. He had gone to a couple of Inclusion Summer Schools at McGill University in Montreal, and formed vital links with a group of presenters who had developed an important range of tools and methods for de-segregating Disabled people and developing integration, as it was called in those days.

Purposive inclusion had started in the wake of desegregating metal health institutions in some parts of Canada in the 1960/1970s, and tools such as MAPS, PATHS and Circles of Friends had been developed to break down isolation of ex-inmates and were extended to integrating schools. Advocates included Marsha Forest, Jack Pierrepoint (Inclusion and Human Rights campaigners), Judith Snow (Disabled institutional survivor), John O’Brien, Herb Lovett (psychologists) and George Flynn (School Board Principle in Waterloo, Ontario).