School inclusion strategy: what to publish by 31 December 2026

If you have already read the guidance, you will have noticed the gap in it. It tells you what the document must contain and gives you a template to put it in. It does not tell you how to work out what your cohort's commonly occurring barriers actually are, what counts as enough evidence to say so, or how to write it so that it holds up when a governor asks where the number came from.

That gap is what this page is about. The requirement first, briefly, because it is short. Then the part nobody hands you.

What is a school inclusion strategy?

It is a short published document setting out the barriers to learning and participation that are common across your cohort, the activity you are investing in to reduce those barriers, what you expect that activity to achieve, and what it costs. It is published on your school website and updated every year.

It is not a SEND policy, and it is not a list of everything you do for pupils with SEND. It is closer in shape to a pupil premium strategy statement, and the guidance says so directly: the five step process it sets out is described as similar to the one you already undertake for pupil premium. If you have written one of those, you have written most of this before.

Do schools need an inclusion strategy?

Yes, if your school receives the Inclusive Mainstream Fund. Publishing one is a condition of that grant rather than a duty in law, and the distinction matters: it is an obligation attached to funding you have accepted. The Department for Education has proposed making it a legal duty in future, but that is a proposal and has not happened.

You will see this called a statutory duty in a number of places. It is not one, and the guidance is explicit that it is non-statutory. The practical difference is small in the short term, because the money is conditional either way and almost every mainstream school receives it. The difference matters if you are deciding how much of your own capacity to put behind it, and it matters for how you describe it to your governors.

The obligation itself sits in the conditions of grant (opens in a new tab), and the guidance on developing a strategy (opens in a new tab) explains how to meet it. Academies in a multi-academy trust each publish their own, even where the trust pools the funding.

What are the 7 principles of inclusion?

They are ambitious leadership and governance that embeds inclusion; evidence-based support prioritising early intervention; high quality adaptive teaching with curriculum designed for all learners; enriching provision beyond the classroom that all children can access; a safe and respectful culture fostering belonging, attendance, and participation in learning; strong partnerships with families and wider services; and inclusive environments with continuous improvements to accessibility.

They matter more than they first appear, because any activity you fund from your allocation has to sit under one of them. That is stated in the conditions of grant. So the principles are not a values statement to quote in your introduction, they are the categories your spending has to fall into. If you cannot place an activity under one of the seven, that is a signal to look again at the activity rather than at the wording.

The guidance is also clear that fewer, done properly, beats more. Its words are to focus on implementing fewer approaches well, with impact, consistency and quality in mind. A strategy naming two principles and doing them thoroughly is a stronger document than one touching all seven lightly.

What must the strategy include?

If you use the DfE template it covers the required ground for you. If you write your own, it must cover the barriers to learning and participation identified across your cohort, the activities invested in to alleviate those barriers, the intended outcomes, and a review of the previous academic year. The conditions of grant separately require detail of the activities invested in and their budgeted costs.

There is a template, and it is worth saying plainly because some schools have been told there is not. The DfE published one alongside the guidance, in the support for school leaders collection (opens in a new tab). Using it is optional. Using it is also the fastest route to a compliant document, and there is no advantage in building your own structure from nothing.

One detail that catches schools out: the review of the previous academic year is a required section in the first year too. For 2026 to 2027 that is a review of what you were already doing, not of a strategy you have not written yet. Say what you were doing, what you know about how well it worked, and be straightforward where you do not know.

When does the inclusion strategy need to be published?

By 31 December 2026, on your school website, for the academic year 2026 to 2027. After that it is updated and republished every year. Academies in a multi-academy trust publish one each, even where the trust pools its funding.

If you write a multi-year strategy rather than a single-year one, the guidance asks you to review it annually and to note that on the cover page. The annual publication requirement does not go away because your strategy runs longer than a year.

The DfE has said it will review a sample of published strategies to check the funding has been spent in line with the conditions. That is a sampling exercise rather than a submission process. You are not sending it anywhere: you are publishing it, and it needs to be findable on your website by somebody who does not know your site.

Does the inclusion strategy replace the SEN information report?

No. They are different documents answering different questions, and nothing in the guidance or the conditions of grant removes or replaces the SEN information report. The inclusion strategy is about how you are spending money to reduce barriers across your whole cohort. The SEN information report is about how you identify and support pupils with SEN.

In practice they will overlap, and that is fine. What causes problems is writing them as though they were the same document. If your inclusion strategy reads like a SEN information report with costings bolted on, it is answering the wrong question, and that is the version most likely to come back from governors.

How do you work out your cohort’s commonly occurring barriers?

This is the step everything else rests on, and it is the one the template cannot do for you. The guidance lists the sources you should draw on: classroom observation and engagement with teachers, internal assessments, engagement with families and pupils, discussions with external professionals, data on SEND including attendance, behaviour and attainment, and evidence on local or national trends in changing need. That is a good list. It is not a method.

Here is what I would actually do, in the order I would do it.

Start with what your staff already know, before you open a spreadsheet. Ask teachers what stops pupils accessing the lesson. Ask separately, not in a staff meeting where the first answer sets the tone. You are looking for the thing three people say independently. In most schools it comes back as something like processing and retaining spoken instructions, or writing stamina, or arriving dysregulated after unstructured time. These are barriers. What you get from the SEND register is diagnoses, which is a different thing.

Then check whether the data agrees with them. If staff say the barrier is attendance after lunch, look at afternoon attendance. If they say it is writing, look at where pupils drop off in extended writing tasks. You are not trying to prove the staff right. You are looking for the places where the data and the staff view disagree, because that is where you learn something. A barrier your staff name and your data cannot see is worth understanding before you spend money on it.

Deliberately look past the SEND register. The guidance says this explicitly, and it is the instruction most likely to be skipped: identification should not be led solely by specific diagnoses, or limited to the needs of pupils already on SEN support or with an EHCP. If your barriers list could have been written from your SEND register alone, you have described your register rather than your cohort. The pupils who most often show up in a genuine barriers analysis are the ones just below the threshold for anything.

Count how many pupils each barrier actually affects. Not precisely. Approximately, and write the approximation down. A barrier affecting an estimated forty pupils justifies a different response from one affecting four, and the moment you have a number you can be asked whether the spend is proportionate. That question is easier to answer with a rough number you can explain than with no number at all.

What counts as adequate evidence?

Two different things are called evidence here and they are worth separating, because schools conflate them and then feel underprepared on both.

Evidence that the barrier exists in your school. This is yours: your data, your observations, what your staff and families told you. Nobody expects research quality. What they expect is that you can say where a statement came from. “We identified this from attendance data and from a pattern raised independently by three phase leaders” is adequate. “We felt this was an issue” is not, and it is the sentence a governor will stop at.

Evidence that the approach works. This is not yours and you are not expected to generate it. The guidance points to specific places to draw on, including the Education Endowment Foundation's guidance on special educational needs in mainstream schools and its list of promising programmes, and the DfE's own best practice material. The requirement is that your approaches are evidence-informed, which means you can say what you drew on. It does not mean every approach needs a randomised trial behind it.

The practical test I would apply to any line in the document: could somebody who does not work at your school ask “how do you know that?” and get an answer in one sentence? If yes, the evidence is adequate. If it takes a paragraph, it is not evidence yet, it is an opinion with detail attached.

How do you write it so it survives governor and Ofsted scrutiny?

Governors and trustees are expected to scrutinise these, and the conditions of grant say so in terms: they should look at your plans, your use of the allocation, and the outcomes achieved in the previous academic year. Ofsted inspectors can consider strategies when evaluating inclusion, and the guidance says inspection will look at how leaders ensure the strategy is embedded in practice and how staff are equipped to deliver it.

Read those two sentences together and the test becomes clear. Nobody is grading the document. They are asking whether it describes what the school is really doing. That points at four things.

Every number should have a source you can name. Budgeted costs are required, so they will be read. If a figure is an estimate, say it is an estimate. A document with one honest approximation in it is more credible than one where every figure looks exact and none can be traced.

Do not claim impact you have not measured. Intended outcomes are a required section, and they are intended outcomes. Write what you expect to change and how you will know. Resist writing what has already improved unless you can show it, because that is the claim most likely to be tested and the one that damages the rest of the document when it does not hold.

Make sure your staff would recognise it. This is the one that catches schools where the SENDCo wrote the strategy alone at half term. If inspection asks how staff are equipped to deliver it, and the strategy names an approach your teaching assistants have never heard of, the document is describing a different school. It is better to name three things everybody is actually doing than seven that exist only on paper.

Write the review section honestly. A review saying something was tried, did not work as expected, and has been changed reads as a school that pays attention. A review in which everything succeeded reads as a school that has not looked. Governors know the difference, and so do inspectors.

One last thing, and it is a formatting point rather than a content one. Keep it short. There is no minimum length, and a strategy somebody will actually read is worth more than a thorough one nobody opens. The pupil premium statements that work best tend to run to a handful of pages, and this document is built on the same pattern.

Where SEND Guidance can help

There is nothing here a school cannot do itself, and if you have the capacity in the autumn term you should. Where it helps to have somebody outside the school is usually one of two situations: you need an independent read of what your data is actually telling you, or you need the drafting done while your SENDCo does their day job.

Five levels of support, from a single call to a full implementation package. Prices are fixed and published, and the whole inclusion strategy support list is on the school price list.

Pricing note: Final pricing will depend on school size, the volume of documentation, the number of stakeholders involved and whether the service includes drafting, staff delivery or follow-up support.

Full details of every service and what it costs are on the school price list, and if you are not sure which level fits, the clarity call is the place to start. There is also a guide to managing EHCP requests over the holidays if the autumn term is already full.