Children's Voices Centre
Children's Voices Centre
Children’s inclusion is grounded in a powerful commitment: every child belongs.
At the Children's Voices Centre, we learn with and from children about what enables inclusion within community and educational systems, settings and services. Our interdisciplinary research addresses barriers to inclusion and advances transformative approaches that promote equity, dignity and belonging for all children.
We understand inclusion involves organising systems so there is no "them" and "us", only "us" to which we all belong. Inclusion requires structural change. It asks how environments, policies, relationships and assumptions can shift so that all children can participate fully – just as they are.
Across our research, inclusion is understood as:
Children are welcomed as full members of their communities. Inclusion is part of everyday life, not a conditional privilege.
nclusion goes beyond physical presence. It involves meaningful access to learning, support and community life, opportunities to participate in decision-making, and genuine influence over matters that affect children’s lives.
Every child contributes to their communities. All the many diversities in communication, movement, sensory engagement, thinking, culture, language, gender, health and identity are recognised as part of ordinary human diversity and as resources for collective learning.
Our work on children’s inclusion brings together three interconnected strands: inclusive education, disability studies and transformative equity. Together, these strands provide a cohesive and rights-based framework for addressing marginalisation, exclusion and injustice in children’s everyday lives.
Our research on inclusive education brings together work across early childhood, schooling, and community education settings.
We begin from the understanding that exclusion is produced by systems, structures and practices, not by children. Rather than focusing on changing children to fit unchanged environments, we work to transform pedagogy, relationships and learning spaces so all children can participate as they are.
This includes co-creating inclusive learning environments, creating accessible learning opportunities for all, listening to children in all their languages and forms of communication, addressing discrimination in education, and supporting educators and systems to enact sustainable change.
Within disability studies, disability is understood as social, relational and political.
Disability is shaped by social, cultural, institutional and policy contexts. In our research, we centre the lived experiences and knowledges of children and young people who experience disability, recognising children as knowledge holders, changemakers, and leaders in shaping more just futures.
Our interdisciplinary research examines ableism, including both overt discrimination and subtle ableism, taken-for-granted assumptions about capacity and worth, and explores how disability intersects with race, gender, culture, language, poverty and geography.
We challenge deficit framings and instead foreground dignity, agency, creativity and interdependence.
Transformative equity extends beyond addressing ableism to consider other systems of marginalisation and oppression, including racism, audism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ageism.
This interdisciplinary work engages anti-bias and anti-oppressive approaches that facilitate transformation toward equity and inclusion for children in all their diversities. We examine how injustice is produced across education, health, community and policy systems and collaborate with children, families and professionals to reimagine fairer alternatives.
Our work is grounded in international human rights frameworks that affirm children as rights holders and active participants in shaping their worlds.
These include the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which recognise inclusion not as an act of kindness but as a responsibility and structural obligation.
Children’s inclusion provides a connective frame for our research on children’s perspectives, multilingualism, communication, early childhood education, health, wellbeing and workforce development.
It helps articulate not only what we research, but why we research it, and how our collective work contributes to children’s rights, equity and social justice nationally and internationally.
The Oxford handbook of speech development in languages of the world (forthcoming)
KathyCologon, Zinnia Mevawalla
(2023)
Oxford University Press.
9780190337230
Inclusive education through the creative arts in the early years
Amanda Niland, Kathy Cologon, Laura Huhtinen-Hildén
(2025)
SAGE Publications Sage UK
9781529786835