The voices of young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) have historically been omitted from research concerning their sporting experiences and provisions (Coates & Vickerman, 2013;Wickman, 2015). Consequently, this paper, informed by innovative participatory methods for exploring the experiences of young people with SEND who engaged in UK School Games, offers insight on inclusive school sport from the perspectives of young people with SEND. Participants included young people aged 11-18 with a range of SEND (n=18) who attended three different types of school (mainstream college, mainstream secondary with designated SEND provision and a secondary special school). The research design encompassed young people with SEND vlogging their experiences across two inclusive School Games county finals, video editing workshops replacing traditional follow up methods before culminating in a series of young people led showcases. Data was analysed using a reflexive thematic analysis, whereby the vlog audio was detached and transcribed verbatim before the analysis was performed consisting of a hybrid use of Nvivo10 and traditional coding techniques. Findings and discussion document the experiences of young people with SEND at the inclusive School Games competitions across three themes; Opportunities for inclusive school sport, Challenging perceptions and Meaningful School Games. The implications of these findings will be valuable to teachers and other stakeholders seeking to provide inclusive school sport and the methodology is of interest to researchers wishing to engage young people in participatory research.
This paper responds to the calls for researchers to be more transparent about their processes of conducting participatory research with young people. Set within the context of a doctoral project that explores the inclusion of young people with SEND in the UK School Games framework, the paper highlights challenges and triumphs of researching alongside young people with SEND. Participants were aged between 11 and 18 and attended either a special school, a SEND unit within a mainstream secondary school or a mainstream college. The paper offers two contributions to the field, first is the novel methodology, which offers researchers and practitioners fresh approaches to engage young people in research. Second is three reflective vignettes that are positioned within the methodology and provide transparency and insight into the messy and confusing processes of informed consent, data co-construction and research dissemination within a participatory research framework.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.