Dear Parents and Carers,

Tomorrow we celebrate the International Day of People with Disability.

What image pops into your mind when we say ‘disability’? It’s probably a mental image of someone you’ve seen that has an obvious appearance of disability. When you hold the image of that person in mind, what is it you focus on? What is it about that person that brings to mind ‘disability’?

Many people don’t feel comfortable to talk about disability…and that’s okay. It’s often simply because they don’t know how to talk about something, they feel unfamiliar with. I don’t know how to talk about soccer because I don’t know anything about it!

There are many families in our community who know someone, often a loved one, with a disability. Though they have a lived experience of disability, even they feel challenged in their thinking at times. They also don’t mind when other people don’t know how to talk about disability. They’re always happy to help a person who genuinely wants to understand.

So how do we understand about disability today?

Society is always learning and growing and the way we understand and think about disability today is very different to many years ago.

Traditionally, society has taken a medical model approach to disability, which focuses on a person’s physical, mental, psycho-social or intellectual impairment or ‘deficit’, always with comparison to ‘normal’ people. Under this model, these impairments or ‘deficits’ need to be ‘fixed’ or changed by medical treatment, surgery or other intervention, even when the impairment or difference does not cause pain or illness. This model creates low expectations and leads to people losing independence, choice and control.

While the medical model focuses on what is ‘wrong’ with the person, the social model of disability says that disability is caused by the way society is organised, specifically because of the assumption that all people’s needs are the same. It says that disability occurs because society has focused exclusively on one group’s needs — those who do not have impairment. The social model shows that impairment need not lead to disability, and focuses on how to remove the disabling features of contemporary society. This is a wonderful step forward and I think we can go even further.

I am inspired by the work of Professor John Swinton who approaches the idea of disability from a theological perspective:

‘There is no such thing as a normal human being….difference is the norm…it is our common humanity.’

It is so refreshing to think that there is no normal. Look around and you’ll notice that there is only difference. It begins with eye, skin and hair colour. It extends to hidden differences such as preferred learning styles, emotional responses to events, personality traits, life-long health issues such as eczema, diabetes or epilepsy. Then there are the more noticeable differences such as missing or inactive parts of the body or speech and understanding differences.

When we think that there is a ‘normal’ person then we automatically see everything else as ‘not normal’ and any more extreme versions of this as a disability. But if we change the way we think…that there really is no normal…that it is our normal human experience to just be different to each other, then we see every person for who they are, a human being, wonderfully made.

At St Benedict’s, as in society, the challenge then becomes not one of ‘integrating’ people with disabilities into the ‘normal’ classroom. It becomes one where we recognise how our school is structured and operates for a ‘normal’ majority and change it so every person, no matter what the difference, can access and participate in the full life of faith and learning that we all enjoy.

Tomorrow as we celebrate the International Day of People with Disability let us understand, embrace and celebrate our common humanity.

Thank you for your ongoing care and partnership in your child’s learning.

God bless.

Rachel Smith
Principal