Core areas

I-STEP organises its cooperation through four core areas: Inclusive Skills, Inclusive Training, Inclusive Employability and Inclusive Participation. Inclusion is the transversal framework applied across all four — not a separate fifth area.

Connected, not sequential

The four areas reinforce one another, but they do not form a fixed route and there is no order to follow. A single piece of work often sits in three of them at once. Members combine them according to the objectives, the people and the communities involved.

What the I means

In every area name, the I stands for Inclusive. It is not decoration: it commits each area to asking who can take part, whose experience shapes the work, what barriers remain, and whether the result is useful to the communities concerned.

Inclusion across every core area

Inclusion is the transversal framework of I-STEP. It is applied across Inclusive Skills, Inclusive Training, Inclusive Employability and Inclusive Participation, and it is not a fifth core area.

What transversal inclusion means

It means the same questions are asked of every activity, resource and partnership, in every area, at the point of design rather than at the point of reporting: who can take part, whose experience shapes the work, what barriers remain, and whether the outcome is useful to communities that are usually designed around rather than designed with.

How it applies across the four areas

In Inclusive Skills it decides whose learning counts as learning. In Inclusive Training it decides who can deliver, and who can attend. In Inclusive Employability it decides which routes are treated as real. In Inclusive Participation it decides who is in the room, and whether being there changes anything.

Why it is not an area of its own

Making inclusion a separate strand allows everything else to carry on unchanged. Keeping it transversal means there is nowhere for it to be someone else’s job.