Georgina Durrant, SEND specialist and author; Strategic Lead for Inclusion, Twinkl, UK
This edition arrives at a pivotal moment for education and inclusion in England. A new Secretary of State for Education, an updated Ofsted inspection framework with an increased emphasis on inclusion, and the government’s proposals for reforming the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system together signal significant change for schools, practitioners and families.
The SEND reform proposals include national training for all staff, new tiers of support, digital individual support plans, narrower criteria for education, health and care plans (EHCPs) and a major expansion of inclusion bases in mainstream schools. They also introduce national SEND standards and Experts at Hand teams, bringing specialists to more children. Collectively, the reforms aim to strengthen early intervention and improve the consistency of SEND support across the country. However, they also raise questions around implementation, capacity, funding and workload. I explored many of these issues with Georgia Gould MP, the minister leading the government’s SEND reforms, in a special episode of the SEND in the Experts podcast (2026). Speaking during the week in which the proposals were announced, Gould provided valuable insights into both the ambitions of the reforms and the practical realities that schools will face in translating policy into meaningful practice.
Thousands of practitioners, parents, young people and organisations have contributed through the national consultation on these proposals and accompanying National Conversation events. We await the government’s formal response, which will determine not only how the reforms are implemented but also, more importantly, what they will mean for young people with SEND across England.
Schools have already been strengthening their inclusive practice, despite increasing pressures. The latest Department for Education statistics show the scale and complexity of this work. In January 2025, more than 1.7 million pupils in England were identified as having SEND – around one in five school-aged children – while 5.3 per cent of pupils held an EHCP (DfE, 2025). Demand for specialist provision outstrips capacity, resulting in mainstream schools supporting more diverse and complex profiles of need. These figures reflect not just rising prevalence, but the growing expectations for schools to deliver high-quality, inclusive education in increasingly constrained systems.
But we know that inclusion in schools is more practical and immediate than policy documents. Every day, teachers adapt lessons, adjust environments and respond to need. Inclusion is not a separate initiative; it is the ongoing work of noticing, understanding and responding. To me, the word ‘inclusion’ brings with it a certain irony. The more that we formalise it through inclusion bases, departments, strategies and teams, the more it may appear to sit outside of the classroom, as though inclusion is delivered by a particular group of staff, on a separate strategy, in a separate room. In reality, it is woven – dare I say included – in everything that educators do.
For me, inclusion is a collection of moments that a young person gathers over time, helping to build a genuine sense of belonging. It is when a child is happy at school because a visual timetable makes the day feel predictable and safe. It’s a young person sitting their GCSEs with access arrangements that enable them to display their understanding. It is a teacher adapting a classroom so that a child doesn’t feel overwhelmed. It’s everyone being part of sports day, school trips and performances. And it’s a teenager feeling safe enough to be themselves at school, not mask – enabling them to go home regulated and calm.
This edition is shaped around the interconnected elements that make inclusion meaningful in practice. It brings together practitioner voice and experts to share research, insight and best practice in ways that inspire and explain. Above all, it reminds us that while national conversations often focus on policy and strategy, at the centre of every discussion are young people with SEND.
We have been inspired by the wonderful contributions and struck by the shared purpose in every article: a deep commitment to strengthening inclusion and improving the experiences of young people with SEND. It has been a privilege to bring these voices together and we hope that readers gain as much from these insights as we have in curating them.
Margaret Mulholland, SEND and Inclusion Specialist, Association of School and College Leaders, UK
If I could ask teachers to strengthen one habit, it would be to adopt a ‘SEND lens’. This is not a new or separate intervention, but a disciplined way of adjusting our gaze – zooming in on one or two pupils who are not making progress, noticing what they experience, and learning from them what might make teaching more effective.
This makes teaching evidence-informed in two senses. One is drawing on research, both qualitative and quantitative, alongside EEF (2026) guidance and other syntheses about techniques to support learners, including scaffolding, explicit instruction, and cognitive and metacognitive strategies. The other is gathering evidence from the classroom itself: what a pupil can access, where they hesitate, what reduces cognitive load, what increases participation and which small changes alter the quality of their learning.
We cannot investigate every learner in this level of detail all the time, but when we zoom in on pupils who find learning hard, we often discover something that improves wider practice: which instructions need clarifying, which routines create avoidable friction, where scaffolds need adjusting, and how adaptive teaching can support the whole class.
It’s also important to address changing medical and social models of disability. The medical model has tended to position disability as a deficit in the person – a problem to be fixed – and can lead to thinking first about what a child can’t do. Attitudes have changed.
The government’s white paper (DfE, 2026) focuses on removing barriers to learning, aligning more closely with a social model where the onus is on society to adjust. Through the SEND lens, the medical and social models are not binary. The biopsychosocial model (Cappon and Kennette, 2022) is a holistic approach that considers biological, psychological and social conditions to build a whole picture of a child’s experience. We benefit from deeper knowledge of conditions while also seeing the person in the context of family and the various constraints and freedoms that affect their lives. This enables us to consider how and why learners experience barriers in a particular classroom, curriculum or interaction, and how we can help them to navigate those barriers.
The case studies in this publication show how this can be achieved in practice. For example, Howard discusses barriers that can affect the school day, such as arrivals, transitions and endings, and presents these as opportunities for deepening relational practice, not logistical necessities to be overcome.
Barrass et al. and Cooper-Smith both help us to consider the opportunities and risks of opening inclusion bases, which, for Barrass and colleagues, exist to ‘remove barriers to learning and increase access, not to create an alternative pathway’. Cooper-Smith highlights the risk of othering posed by inclusion bases, and recommends that schools ask systematically: what more can be done to keep this child learning with their peers?
Wise’s case study also explores this, highlighting the often-hidden nature of learning demands placed on pupils and how this can be addressed by building executive function profiles. Sometimes the barrier is not within the learner but created by a routine classroom demand. Chowdhury and Russell recognise that because practitioners often lack a framework that is both ambitious and developmentally appropriate for children who cannot access conventional phonics, it can be reconceptualised as multi-sensory and experiential.
The compact guides on condition-specific approaches, interspersed throughout this publication, are clear that not every child with a condition has the same needs. They examine the unique ramifications of specific diagnoses, drawing on specialist knowledge to inform universal practice. Reading the guides, you may focus on conditions encountered more often, such as ADHD or autism. Yet the guides on areas less well known, including multi-sensory impairment, also offer principles that can be generalised across inclusive teaching. I urge you to widen your SEND lens to include them all.
Incidental learning means picking up new knowledge or skills without being taught them directly, often while engaged in another activity. For many learners with SEND, this cannot be assumed. Sensory, communication or cognitive differences can prevent such learners from automatically absorbing casual cues from the environment, peers or the teacher. Autistic learners, for example, may need a strategic combination of direct intentional teaching and carefully planned incidental learning opportunities so that new knowledge can be introduced, practised and generalised in real contexts.
The multi-sensory impairment guide explains this clearly: for example, deaf children may not pick up vocabulary through overheard conversation in the same way as their hearing peers, so direct teaching is essential. This raises a question that matters across student needs: where do our learners require more intentional teaching, and what do we risk by assuming they will simply ‘pick things up?’
The guides and case studies show how rapidly the profiles of young people are changing and presenting differently. These changes, particularly co-occurrence of need, can feel burdensome unless we see them as a mechanism for professional learning and deeper understanding.
The authors also acknowledge that the evidence base for SEND is still fledgling and should not be treated as definitive. We offer this publication as a guide to what appears most effective right now, while building our own knowledge of difference and barriers to learning every day. This is why close knowledge of the learner matters: it turns evidence into better questions, sharper formative assessment and more precise teaching decisions.
Using the SEND lens means collecting and interpreting information about the learner so that barriers become visible. As Wheeler reminds us in his take on invisible disability, a student who attends regularly and appears calm and compliant may still be encountering significant barriers to participation, learning or wellbeing.
The next step is to maximise the learning opportunity by reducing the barrier. Here, the intervention is the teacher. This is captured well by Vella, who describes a change in lens: recognising executive function as a powerful enabler of learning, helping pupils to process, synthesise and access deeper knowledge. Routine classroom tasks such as copying from the board or working silently can create hidden barriers to executive function. When teachers identify these barriers, they can plan more effectively and support access to richer learning.
The case studies also show that zooming in on learners who face greater barriers develops teacher curiosity and inquiry, helping to reveal what is and is not working, with the goal of improving adaptive whole-class teaching.
Together, the guides and case studies show that inclusive teaching depends on what teachers notice, interpret and learn from pupils. Diagnosis offers helpful knowledge, but professional judgement turns that knowledge into better classroom decisions for all.
Read more from In Praxis: SEND and Inclusion
