We're Not Doing Anything About Inclusion. Here's Why.
Blog from Sallie Stanton, Chief Education Officer, Advantage Schools
Recently, I wrote about the curriculum wave breaking, and alluded to the next big wave building behind it. In truth, it’s already here. The detail of the 2026 Schools White Paper, the elevation of inclusion to its own discrete section of the new Ofsted framework, and the requirement for schools to produce an inclusion strategy by December all point the same way: inclusion is the next organising idea in English education.
There's a paradox at the heart of this. The more we talk about inclusion, the more we risk treating it as a separate thing - something that sits outside and alongside what schools already do. And the more we do that, the more we risk falling into the very trap we are trying to avoid.
Take, for example, the requirement for each of our schools to write an inclusion strategy by the end of the year. We're a bit stumped by this requirement - not because we don't care about inclusion, we care about it enormously - but because we're not sure there's anything to write. We think our education strategy is our inclusion strategy. They are not two separate things.
This post is our attempt to explain that, and to set out what we, at Advantage Schools, think genuine inclusion actually requires.
The Artefacts Trap
Let's start with an uncomfortable observation: the school that looks most inclusive may well be the school where the learning experience of vulnerable children is worst.
To illustrate this point, imagine two buildings. Building A has proudly declared itself inclusive, with disabled access at the side, a big silver button to open the door, and designated counters to serve different needs. Building B has not mentioned inclusion at all, but there is ramp as well as step access, one set of automatic doors, hearing loop throughout, and split-level counters.
The building with the most visible inclusion infrastructure is Building A. But Building B has no need for inclusion - it was designed to meet the needs of society from the start.
What does Building A look like at school level? Small-group and one-to-one intervention programmes are running at full stretch, requiring high levels of staffing and resource. Coloured overlays and fidget tools are ubiquitous, and many children need ear defenders and time out from the demands of the “hurly-burly” of the classroom (a phrase heard within an inclusion discussion on Radio 4 earlier this month). Some children are expected to leave lessons early because the corridors overwhelm them during transitions, and there's a room - maybe rooms - off the corridor for children who need a quieter space or delivery of a different curriculum. Everything is documented and meticulously maintained, and it's obvious to any observer how much the adults putting these provisions in place care about the children they are serving.
The building analogy comes from Nicole Dempsey, Director of SEND and Safeguarding at Dixons Academies Trust. She argues that, despite the best of intentions, such artefacts can substitute for inclusion rather than enable it - and what we often call inclusion is, in practice, a well-intentioned form of internal segregation: segregation of space, yes, but also segregation of quality and of expectation. The activity - the paperwork, the interventions, the separate provision - becomes the goal rather than the evidence of something working (her piece, There Aren't 'Children' and 'Special Needs Children'; Just Children, is linked at the foot of this post and is well worth reading in full).
Furthermore, evidence shows that many of the activities and provisions put in place in the name of inclusion may not be helpful at all – and in some cases may be actively harmful to the very pupils they are supposed to support. (For more on this see the paper 10 Common SEN (Mis)Interventions linked below).
If we really want to be inclusive, we need to build School B. But what would that look like, and how do we achieve it?
Aligning Around What We Stand For
Before we explain how we're trying to build it, it helps to be clear about what we believe.
As a trust, we believe that, given the right circumstances, all children are capable of extraordinary things. Our approach, therefore, is to provide all children with the highest quality teaching of an excellent academic curriculum, which enables them to become highly educated and to be full and active participants of society. We simply do not make exceptions in our high aspirations for children.
These cannot sit as mere lofty statements on our website. They will only mean something if they are the working assumptions that actively shape how every aspect of our provision is designed.
At a recent conference, Ben Keely (Director of Secondary Education at Future Academies) outlined some key principles of their trust which align very closely to our beliefs:
- Every child deserves a high bar - and all children can rise to it.
- Some children need more support to reach that bar. The bar doesn't move.
- Children are more similar than they are different. Two thirteen-year-old boys have an awful lot in common before we start talking about their differences.
- We articulate and exemplify what meeting the high bar looks like, so children have complete clarity on what we expect.
- We design school life so that it is genuinely easy to do the right thing - and correspondingly harder to get it wrong.
- The rightful place for a child with SEND is in the classroom, or in a targeted, measurable intervention with a clear return pathway.
- Teachers have a right to excellent training on the specific needs of their classroom - not generic awareness, but knowledge they can use tomorrow.
Accepting that children are more similar than they are different is not to dismiss the genuine challenges some children face. However, the evidence base on how human brains learn is remarkably consistent. At the cellular level, learning happens through synaptic plasticity: connections between neurons strengthen when they fire together repeatedly. This mechanism is conserved across all human populations. Conditions such as ADHD, dyslexia, and autism do not involve a categorically different memory system. They involve differences in the efficiency or domain-specificity of a shared architecture, not a different architecture altogether.
What follows from this is significant to any inclusion or education model. If cognitive load theory, the testing effect, spaced retrieval practice, explicit instruction, reducing extraneous complexity sit at the heart of an education strategy, it can be made to work for all. These are not mainstream strategies with a separate inclusion toolkit running alongside them. They are the toolkit, and are for everyone. The same underlying mechanisms of learning are at work in every child in every classroom. What varies is the capacity and profile with which those mechanisms operate, not the mechanisms themselves.
And attention is the gateway to all of it. You cannot encode what you have not attended to. That is not a controversial claim and it applies to every child.
This has practical implications that matter. If attention is the gateway to learning, and children are more similar than different, then we need to think carefully about what our adaptations are actually doing. At our recent SENCO development day, we had a live debate about fidget spinners. If we have collectively agreed that attention is the gateway to learning, why would we give children fidget tools that direct attention away from learning? It's a small example, but it points to a bigger pattern: reaching for an accommodation that signals care, without asking whether it actually supports the learning mechanism we're trying to activate. Reasonable adjustments should enable children to meet the same expectations as their peers. They shouldn't lower those expectations, or quietly replace them.
The Problem With Othering
When we treat inclusion as a separate domain - a specialism running alongside the curriculum with its own vocabulary and its own people - we risk doing something damaging to the children we're trying to help by othering them.
Othering happens when we design differently for a child rather than designing better for all children, with that child in mind. It happens when we create a parallel curriculum that lowers the bar, rather than adapting the delivery of the same one to make it accessible for everyone. It happens when our response to a child's struggle is to exempt them from the standard – be that uniform, showing good manners, sitting in SLANT, reading along or aloud in class or answering questions using full sentences - rather than to strengthen our teaching and support so that the standard becomes accessible, in time, for all.
As Dempsey puts it, a lower-quality input generates a lower-quality output, and if we accept that this is enough for some children, we are accepting second-class citizenship for some people. It is an approach that teaches the children and young people affected that they sit outside of the systems and the community, and it teaches the rest of the school community that same thing.
This is not a comfortable argument, and it does not mean that enactment isn't hard. But it is the right way to approach inclusion.
Designing the System Around the Most Vulnerable
W. Edwards Deming was a statistician and management theorist whose ideas transformed post-war manufacturing. His most quoted insight is deceptively simple:
"Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it does."
It's worth taking a moment to consider the statement carefully. The system is not designed to deliver the results we think we should get - it delivers the results it is actually designed to produce, whether that design was intentional or not.
If we use this as a diagnostic tool, it tells us clearly that we still have work to do at Advantage Schools. Across our trust, we see attendance gaps and high persistent absence concentrated among pupils eligible for free school meals and those with SEND. Whilst our outcomes sit broadly at national averages, there is significant variation between individual schools, and disadvantaged pupils achieve less well than their peers in every one of our schools and in every phase. These are the results the system is currently producing for our children.
But here is what makes this more than a narrative of despair: the variation within our trust is itself a Deming finding, and it is telling us something important, because we have genuine bright spots; schools where demographic does not equal destiny, and where the results are good enough to suggest that what looks like a context problem can be resolved through a system solution.
Take, as just one example, Queen’s Park Academy. This primary school has among the highest deprivation figures in the trust and seventy-two percent of children have English as and Additional Language. Thirty-seven percent of pupils qualify for free school meals, and pupil mobility is exceptionally high. And yet, this year children at Queen’s Park have achieved the second highest phonics outcomes across the trust, and last year seventy percent of disadvantaged pupils achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths - against a national disadvantaged average of forty-seven percent. This exceptional result shows us that aspects of the system are working there. What is crucial is to understand what those aspects are so that any pupil in any of our schools can benefit.
Right now, we have one trust, ten schools, and too many different systems, and that risks letting some of our most vulnerable children down. We want great results for our children, not different children. Therefore, we need one system that is optimally designed. This is where our work on an inclusion strategy must sit: understand what is working best for our pupils and to build from there.
An Inclusion System for Our Pupils
This reframes the inclusion question entirely. It is not: what do we do about these children? The deficit lies within the system, not the pupils. The question becomes: what does our system need to look like in order to produce better results?
At Advantage Schools, our cohort is not abstract. We know who is in our schools, and we know what they bring with them. High deprivation means predictable vocabulary and knowledge gaps that, if unaddressed, compound across the curriculum. High numbers of children new to English means many of our pupils experience additional cognitive load due to additional processing demand that our teaching needs to account for. High pupil mobility means children arrive without records, but not without needs. This mobility, alongside attendance gaps, create missing foundational knowledge that doesn't disappear just because the child is now in the room.
Each of these is a design brief: a specification for what our curriculum, our teaching, our behaviour systems, and our pastoral provision need to do. If those systems are not built with these children explicitly in mind, we are not building for our actual schools. We are building a school for a cohort that doesn't exist.
So what are the features of our potential system? We have identified and shared five levers for school improvement across Advantage Schools: attendance, conduct and participation, curriculum, teaching and learning, and developing pupils’ reading, writing and spoken communication competence. If these are our best bets for providing a great education, they cannot sit separately from inclusion. They are inclusion.
Attendance matters for vulnerable children because absence compounds gaps that were already there. Conduct and participation matter because a school designed so that it is easy to do the right thing - where expectations are clear, consistent, and kindly enforced - protects the children most likely to struggle when systems are unclear or inconsistent. Curriculum matters because an ambitious, well-sequenced curriculum that builds knowledge explicitly and cumulatively is the single greatest gift we can give a child who arrives without the background knowledge their peers may have absorbed elsewhere. Teaching and learning matter because explicit instruction, worked examples, careful attention to cognitive load, and frequent low-stakes retrieval benefit every child - but they are essential for children whose working memory is under additional strain. Reading and communication matter because language is the medium through which everything else is learned, and the children with the widest vocabulary gaps have the most to gain from a school that takes language and vocabulary instruction seriously across every subject.
There is no sixth lever labelled Inclusion. There is only the quality of the system, and the question of how well it serves those who find it hardest.
Two Models of Inclusion
If we fail to design a system around our most vulnerable pupils, inclusion will always be an act of remediation, treating some of our children as a problem to be managed outside the mainstream. SENCOs and Inclusion Leads are forced to work as case managers and document processors. Interventions happen in corridors with limited human connection, and in many instances education is delivered through a screen. The mainstream offer is designed for an imagined, notional typical child, and a parallel system accommodates everyone else. This does not describe what we want for our pupils at Advantage Schools.
Taking inclusion as system design starts from the opposite assumption. The offer is designed from the outset with the full range of learners in mind. All leaders play a role as system thinkers, identifying where the school's design produces the wrong result, and carrying that analysis into curriculum meetings, timetabling decisions, and CPD planning. Academic interventions are targeted, time-limited, and explicitly linked to the content children are missing in class, and are not a separate curriculum pathway.
So, are we really doing nothing about inclusion?
If we write a standalone inclusion strategy, we risk investing in Building A - creating a document that sits alongside the education strategy with its own set of actions and its own review cycle, and in doing so signalling that inclusion is something that happens separately from teaching, curriculum, and school design. It isn't. It can't be.
What we are doing instead is ensuring that our education strategy has inclusion designed into it from the ground up. That our curriculum thinking asks, from the start, what it makes possible for our most vulnerable learners, and what it makes difficult. That our approach to teaching is grounded in the cognitive science that serves all children, with careful calibration for those who need it most. That our SENCOs and pastoral leaders are system influencers, not corridor managers.
In simple terms, our inclusion strategy will be our school improvement strategy, looked at through the lens of our most vulnerable pupils. Across each of our five levers, that means asking: what does this need to look like for the children who find it hardest? The answers to that question, applied consistently and with precision, are our inclusion strategy. There is nothing else.
Nicole Dempsey's piece — There Aren't 'Children' and 'Special Needs Children'; Just Children — is published on Teachwire and is linked here.
The paper 10 Common SEN (Mis)Interventions is authored by Peps McCrea and Jen Barker and can be accessed here.