8: Making Meaningful Impact in and with Schools

This chapter explores the ways in which The Living Life to the Fullest sought to expand its networks and experiences of co-producing research with disabled children and young people. While we are proud of the political and practical collaborative emphases across our work, we do note that our co-researchers in The Co-Researcher Collective are all young women aged 18+, White, middle class, living with life-limiting and life-threatening impairments, and over half have been educated to university level. Therefore, our co-production processes inevitably benefit from co-researchers’ own abilities, privileges, skills and knowledge (see Whitney et al., 2019). We wanted to explore the ways in which we might expand our co-production practices to other disabled young people in other contexts. In 2017, we began a collaboration with Greenacre School, Barnsley. Greenacre is a school educating children and young people aged 3–19 labelled with severe and complex needs. The school became an Academy in April 2015 and subsequently joined the Wellspring Academy Trust in April 2017. It was a chance meeting – we were fortunate enough to connect with Harry Gordon, a special educational need and disability (SEND) teacher from Greenacre, at an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Sciences event we were running with The Co-Researcher Collective on co-production and accessible research.