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Towards a whole school approach to inclusion

Inclusion is having a moment in education policy. But inclusion is about more than meeting new expectations. What does inclusion mean for governing boards in practice, and how can boards move beyond individual interventions towards a whole-school approach?

Blog
17/09/2026

‘Inclusion’ is having something of a moment in education policy. It features prominently in the government’s schools white paper, sits at the heart of emerging special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) reform and, since last year, has its own evaluation area in Ofsted’s renewed inspection framework. Yet, for a word being asked to do so much heavy lifting, there is surprisingly little agreement about exactly what we mean by it. Part of the difficulty is that inclusion means slightly different things in different conversations.

The white paper sets the lofty ambition of halving the disadvantage gap, while the DfE’s SEND reforms use the term primarily in the context of pupils with SEND – including a requirement for schools to publish an inclusion strategy from December. Ofsted takes a broader view, considering how schools support pupils experiencing socio-economic disadvantage, pupils with SEND and others facing specific barriers to learning. Elsewhere, it encompasses a much broader range of circumstances with a more colloquial understanding. I’ve been in rooms where people describe it as a ‘feeling’. There is something intangible, yet powerful, about knowing when a school feels inclusive, and perhaps more noticeably, when it doesn’t.


What is clear is why inclusion has come to the fore. Outcomes remain stubbornly unequal: pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) are 19months behind their peers by the end of secondary school. This figure rises to 22 months for pupils with SEND. But it would be doing a disservice to the thousands of school staff and governors to suggest that inclusion has suddenly become important because the word has become popular in Westminster.

 

  • "There is something intangible, yet powerful, about knowing when a school feels inclusive, and perhaps more noticeably, when it doesn’t."

    Schools and trusts have long understood that getting the best from young people often requires support beyond teaching and learning. In both 2024 and 2025, half of governors and trustees responding to NGA’s annual surveys reported an increase in additional services their schools were providing for families, from second-hand uniform to food and wraparound support.


    Therefore, the current agenda gives governors and trustees an opportunity to think more deliberately about what a whole-school approach to inclusion looks like, while building on the meaningful work we already know is taking place on the ground.

    A new way of thinking about inclusion


    A useful starting point is to flip a familiar idea on its head. We often treat the established way of doing things as the ‘correct’ way and consider what additional support a child needs when they cannot access it. Targeted and specialist provision will, of course, remain essential for some pupils. But true inclusion also asks whether the space itself needs to change. Instead of continually bringing children into systems designed without them in mind, how can we shape systems and practices around the unique make-up of the children they serve?

    With this in mind, ensuring inclusion requires us to mould our settings and practices around the unique make-up of the children within them. NGA’s new guidance offers three simple considerations for boards:
    • Who are our pupils?
    • What barriers might they experience?
    • How responsive are we?

    Three steps in action


    Understanding who your pupils are means going beyond headline data or broad categories. FSM eligibility, for example, remains an important proxy for disadvantage but does not capture every child experiencing financial hardship. Nor do pupils experience characteristics or circumstances in isolation. Geography interacts with socio-economic background and other characteristics too, in ways that mean disadvantage – and the barriers arising from it – will not look the same in every community across England. Therefore, knowing your pupils also means knowing their families and communities and, including, whose voices might be missing from the information that reaches the board.


    Considering the barriers pupils might experience requires boards to turn some of that attention towards the school itself. Established systems and practices will work for many pupils and, where they do not, our instinct can be to ask what additional support a child needs to access what is already there. Sometimes that will be exactly what is required. But it is also worth asking whether established routines and expectations might themselves be creating or reinforcing barriers. This might mean looking at how pupils experience the curriculum, behaviour and attendance approaches, communication with families or access to enrichment, without assuming the established way of doing things is necessarily the most accessible one.


    Being responsive is what turns that understanding into something meaningful. Pupils’ needs and circumstances do not remain static, and neither do the communities schools serve. Financial pressures can increase; local services can become harder to access and the profile of pupils joining a school can change. This means that boards need assurance not only that leaders are responding to the needs they know about now, but that the school has the capacity and ways of working to recognise and respond to emerging needs too. Importantly, this also means learning from what happens: where the same barriers appear repeatedly, something in wider practice may be worth reconsidering.

    • "But it would be doing a disservice to the thousands of school staff and governors to suggest that inclusion has suddenly become important because the word has become popular in Westminster."

      Working through a lens of inclusion


      For governors and trustees, the challenge is to bring this thinking into the conversations they are already having with leaders. Understanding who your pupils are, and the circumstances shaping their experiences of school, provides the starting point. From there, boards can consider where established systems and practices might be creating barriers – including unintentionally – and how well the school is able to respond when needs and circumstances change. None of this is necessarily straightforward. Pupils do not experience school in neat categories, and their circumstances are rarely fixed. Boards and leaders must resist assumptions about what pupils and families need and instead seek to understand their lived experiences of school.

      Perhaps this is where the current focus on inclusion can be most useful. It gives governors and trustees an opportunity to look across areas that can sometimes be considered separately – SEND, poverty, attendance, behaviour, enrichment, engagement with families – and consider what they collectively tell us about pupils’ experiences. The task for boards is not to arrive at a single definition of what an inclusive school looks like, but to stay curious about who their pupils are, be compassionate in understanding the circumstances that shape their experiences, and be willing to question whether established ways of working still serve them well.

       

      Fariha Choudhury

      Senior Policy and Impact Officer

      Fariha supports the development of NGA's policy and information outputs with a particular focus on multi academy trust governance. Alongside working at NGA, Fariha is undertaking a Masters in Education at the University of Birmingham.

      View Fariha's full profile

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