How to develop an inclusion strategy

September 18, 2026

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Every mainstream school in England must publish an inclusion strategy by the 31^st of December 2026.

It’s a new requirement tied to the inclusive mainstream fund (IMF), asking schools to set out exactly how they’ll use their funding to remove barriers to learning and participation for every pupil.

As part of its revised framework, Ofsted will now assess how well your inclusion strategy is embedded in daily practice, not just how it reads on paper.

In this blog, we walk through the DfE’s 5-step approach to building your inclusion strategy, the sections it needs to include, and the conditions of the grant you’ll need to meet along the way.

The conditions of the grant

The IMF comes with three conditions of the grant that you’ll need to build into your inclusion strategy planning from the outset:

• Ensuring your IMF grant aligns with the 7 principles of inclusion
• Publishing your inclusion strategy on your school website by the 31^st of December 2026
• Reviewing any multi-year strategy every year

The DfE have set out 7 principles of inclusion and additional guidance on how to use these principles in your inclusion strategy.

The 7 principles of inclusion

1. Ambitious leadership and governance that embeds inclusion
2. Evidence-based support prioritising early intervention
3. High-quality adaptive teaching with a curriculum designed for all learners
4. Enriching provision beyond the classroom that all children can access
5. A safe and respectful culture fostering belonging, attendance and participation in learning
6. Strong partnerships with families and wider services
7. Inclusive environments with continuous improvements to accessibility

Every activity you fund through your IMF allocation, whether in part or in full, must sit under at least one of these principles of inclusion.

 

The sections to have in your inclusion strategy

Your strategy needs to cover four areas:  

1. The barriers to learning and participation you’ve identified across your cohort
2. The activities you’re investing in to alleviate these barriers
3. Your intended outcomes
4. A review of the previous academic year (from the 2027/28 cycle onwards)

Clarity on what ‘activity’ means

In the DfE’s inclusion strategy template, ‘activity’ doesn’t only mean targeted, one-to-one style provision or intervention.

It covers any spend that builds your inclusive core offer, so a whole-school CPD or improvement programme, an accessibility improvement to a corridor or classroom, or a new small-group intervention can all be counted. Provided each is mapped to at least one barrier and one of the 7 principles of inclusion.

Setting outcomes

For outcomes, the DfE expects you to think across three tiers: short, medium and long-term.

In this first year, focus on setting realistic goals for what you can achieve straight away, then build on these over time as you work towards your wider strategy objectives.

Here’s how that might look in practice

Say your data shows a rising number of pupils arriving in Year 7 with unmet speech, language and communication needs (SLCN), and it’s impacting engagement and achievement across all subjects.

The activity could be training a group of teaching assistants to deliver a targeted small-group language intervention, alongside embedding visual supports and vocabulary pre-teaching into whole-class lessons.

• Your short-term outcome (year one) might be that 80% of identified pupils show measurable progress in receptive vocabulary by the end of the academic year, tracked through termly assessment.
• Your medium-term outcome might be that, as the approach becomes embedded, teaching assistants trained in year one are delivering the intervention independently by year two, with referral into the programme built into your standard Year 7 induction process rather than relying on individual staff noticing a need.
• Your longer-term outcome (three to five years) might be that SLCN are identified as a barrier for a smaller proportion of Year 8 pupils each year, as earlier identification and stronger universal teaching reduce how many pupils need targeted intervention by the time they transition from Year 7.

Reviewing your inclusion strategy

You’d then review this SLCN focus annually alongside the rest of your inclusion strategy, so you can see whether the approach is still the right one as your cohort changes.

Each outcome also needs its own measurable success criteria and a target date, not just a general aspiration or target.

 

 

5-step approach to planning your inclusion strategy

The DfE sets this out as a 5-step process, and it’ll feel familiar as it follows the same structure you already use for your pupil premium strategy statement.

Step 1: Identify barriers to learning and participation

The first step in creating your inclusion strategy is to work out what’s getting in the way of your pupils’ ability to achieve, thrive and belong in your school. This looks at the barriers every pupil may experience rather than relying on existing diagnoses or your current SEND register alone.

Draw on a range of sources to build up a picture of barriers to learning and wellbeing:

• Input from external professionals and agencies
• Classroom observations and professional discussions with teachers
• Internal formative and summative assessments
• Ongoing conversations with families and pupils
• Local and national trends in changing SEND needs
• Your school’s data on attendance, behaviour and attainment

Look for patterns over time too, so you can begin to predict where support will be needed as your cohort changes. A useful starting point is auditing your current provision to see how well it already identifies and supports pupils with SEND and other key inclusion and vulnerable groups.

Step 2: Use evidence to select your approaches

Any activity you fund through the IMF, in part or in full, has to sit under one of the 7 principles of inclusion and be backed by evidence.

There are lots of resources and guidance worth looking at for evidence-backed approaches; the DfE directs you to look at:

• The EEF’s guide to inclusive teaching and its teaching and learning toolkit
• The DfE’s own inclusion strategy best practice guidance
• The DfE’s RISE programmes for inclusive mainstream education
• The EEF’s Promising Programmes list for evidence-based targeted interventions
• The DfE’s guidance on developing inclusion bases, if that’s an area you’re considering investing in
• Specialist organisations for trusted advice, including Speech and Language UK, Mentally Healthy Schools, and The Difference

Weigh this external research against your own school data and what your staff already know works for your pupils. The aim is to pick a small number of approaches you can be confident will move the needle for your specific cohort in their specific development aim.

 

 

Step 3: Develop your strategy and align your budgets

Prioritise a small number of high-impact activities rather than spreading funding thinly.

The DfE recommends most schools use this first year to strengthen their universal inclusion offer before adding more targeted provision, unless you’re already confident that you have a strong universal offer in place.

To develop the strategy itself:

• Map out how your IMF grant sits alongside your core budget and notional SEN budget
• Work collaboratively with your SENCO, school business manager, pupil premium lead, and behaviour and attendance lead to create the strategy
• Involve your governors and middle leaders in the strategy and overall outcomes
• Gather opinions and feedback from families, pupils and your wider community, since your strategy needs to reflect your local context
• Be sure to include information about any special or alternative provision settings you already work with
• Draw on input from health and specialist education professionals in your area

Step 4: Deliver and monitor your strategy

Share the strategy with your school staff and make sure everyone understands how they’re expected to champion the inclusive ethos behind it.

Once you’re confident your school staff understand their shared ownership of inclusive practice, you can focus on ways to support and challenge progress on the inclusion strategy.

This might look like:

• Ongoing professional development
• Protected time for staff to look at pupil data, reflect on how delivery is going and spot where inclusion could be strengthened further
• Using the IMF grant to work alongside the core and SEND budget, highlighting to staff that this is a long-term impact improvement
• Using external trusted professionals to support and challenge you on your journey to inclusion

Step 5: Evaluate and sustain your strategy

Measure your outcomes against the success criteria you set, and be honest about what’s worked and what needs more focus.

To do this well:

• Treat evaluation as ongoing, rather than a review task you return to each year
• Use your assessment, attendance and behaviour data to spot trends and patterns of pupil need
• Collect and use pupil voice and feedback from families
• Feed all of this into your review of the previous academic year
• Stay alert to the fact that an approach with strong impact one year might not have the same effect the next, as your cohort shifts

 

 

Building towards whole-school inclusion for 2027

As the reformed SEND system takes shape, expect the DfE’s forthcoming national inclusion standards to ask schools for more detail on how deeply inclusion is embedded.

Getting a strong understanding of your strengths and development areas, grounded in your school’s context, puts you in a stronger position for whatever comes next.

Part of that longer-term picture is funding pooling. The DfE’s plan is for every school to eventually sit within a local group that shares resources, whether that’s joint staff training, rotating access to specialists like speech and language therapists, or shared inclusion bases for nearby schools.

Working with other local schools

You can start moving in that direction now by sharing your draft strategy with schools in your area and looking for where your priorities overlap, even though each school still has to publish its own strategy.

How IQM facilitates whole-school inclusion

The IQM Inclusive School Award gives school leaders an Evaluative Framework to audit their current provision and strategy plans against.

It’s designed to uncover how far inclusive practice runs in practice, beyond what’s written in a strategy document, so you can see where you’re strong and where the gaps still sit.

• Find out more about the Inclusive School Award.
• Contact IQM for a free school information pack.