Introduction

Every classroom and every playground holds children who learn, move and respond in different ways. A child with special needs (CWSN) is one whose physical, intellectual, sensory or emotional condition means that ordinary teaching, equipment or playing conditions have to be adapted before she or he can take part fully. This unit of the CBSE Class 12 Physical Education course is about making sport and physical activity genuinely open to such children, and about the organisations, systems and strategies that have grown up to do exactly that.

A useful starting point is the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, England, which marked a real turning point in the way athletes with a disability were treated. For the first time the medals won by disabled competitors were added to their countries' final medal tallies; the athletes marched in the same opening procession, lived in the same athletes' village, and competed in the same stadiums at peak times alongside the star names. The change was as much about attitude as about scoring — disabled athletes were no longer an add-on event staged for the sake of appearances, but competitors taking part in their own right. The swimmer Natalie du Toit, who continued to compete at the highest level after losing a leg in a road accident, became a symbol of what that shift made possible.

Running through the whole unit is one simple idea: every individual is different, with different capabilities and needs, and those differences deserve respect rather than pity. Building on that idea, the sections that follow look at the organisations that promote disability sport (the Paralympics, the Special Olympics and the Deaflympics), the concepts of classification and divisioning used to make competition fair, the concept of inclusion in sport along with its need and implementation, the advantages of physical activity for CWSN, and finally the strategies that make physical activity accessible to them. Together these topics form a regularly examined part of the CBSE Class 12 Physical Education syllabus.