Sitting in a Classroom and Belonging in It: What Inclusion Should Mean Under the SEND Reforms

Written By Amber Windsor

(Before anything else: nothing in the SEND reforms has changed the law yet. Your child's rights today are the same as they were before the proposed reforms were announced, and if your child needs support now, you can still ask for it, and challenge decisions, under the current law.)

There's a child sitting in a mainstream classroom who has learned to hold everything together until she gets home. She's quiet and polite, she follows instructions and her work is good, so her teachers have no particular concerns and her attendance looks fine on paper. Yet every school day is an exercise in endurance, and most evenings end with her falling apart in the safety of her own bedroom.

There's another child who spends most of his school day in a corridor or a small side room, because the noise and pace of the classroom overwhelm him within minutes of walking in. He's still on the school roll, there are adjustments in place, and the adults around him are working hard to help.

Then there's a third child who hasn't been inside a school for months, but who is learning again through a personalised package of education, with tutors she trusts, at a pace her nervous system can manage, and who is slowly starting to feel like herself again.

These three children are composites, drawn from patterns I see again and again in my work rather than from any one family. I'd like you to hold them in mind, though, and ask which of them is included. Going by the way inclusion is so often measured, the first two would count, because they're on the roll of a mainstream school, and the third wouldn't. I'm not sure that's the answer the children themselves would give you.

Inclusion is one of the defining ambitions of the government's SEND reforms, and I want to be clear from the start that it's an ambition I share. I want mainstream schools to become more inclusive. I want children to get help earlier, teachers to have the training, time and resources they need, and children with SEND to have the same chances of learning, friendship and belonging as anyone else. Many of the schools I work with want exactly the same, and are often doing everything they can with far too little.

My concern is that two quite different goals are being talked about as though they were the same thing: making mainstream education more inclusive, and getting more children educated in mainstream schools. Sometimes those lead to the same place, and with the right support a mainstream school will often be the best place for a child, but sometimes they lead in very different directions, and this piece is about what happens to children in the gap between them.

What the reforms are promising

The Schools White Paper, published in February 2026, and the consultation and further consultations that followed set out a large programme of work aimed at making mainstream schools more inclusive. The main proposals include:

  • Inclusion bases. Existing SEN units and resourced provision would be brought together under one name, inclusion bases, sitting inside mainstream schools, with many more of them planned. National guidance on inclusion bases has already been published, though it's non-statutory.

  • More specialist places. Capital funding for a further 50,000 specialist places, including in inclusion bases, by 2029 to 2030.

  • Money and expertise for mainstream schools. The £1.6 billion Inclusive Mainstream Fund over three years, the Experts at Hand offer to bring therapists and educational psychologists into schools, and a national staff training programme of over £200 million.

  • Specialist Provision Packages. Nationally defined packages that would sit at the heart of future EHCPs, and which could be delivered either in a special school or in an inclusion base within a mainstream school.

  • Two further consultations in July 2026, one on giving mainstream schools more SEND funding upfront through a "local SEND inclusion formula", and one on education otherwise than at school (EOTAS). Both closed on 18 September.

Some of this could make a real difference. Earlier specialist input, better-trained staff and well-designed inclusion bases could transform school for some children, and some existing resourced provisions already offer excellent, highly specialist support. What worries me is the assumption running underneath all of it: that where a child is educated tells us whether or not they've been included.

Placement or inclusion?

Increasing the number of children with SEND who are educated in mainstream schools is a placement goal. Increasing the number of children with SEND who can actually access their education, who feel safe, can take part, are learning and feel they belong, is an inclusion goal. The two overlap, often a great deal, but a policy can succeed at the first while completely failing at the second, and if success is measured by placement, nobody may notice until a child has stopped coping altogether.

The international definition of inclusion the government itself relies on draws exactly this line. In its response to the Education Committee's report on the SEND crisis, the Department for Education said its approach to inclusion is guided by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and specifically by General Comment No. 4 on the right to inclusive education.

That General Comment distinguishes between two things:

  • Integration, which means placing disabled pupils in mainstream settings on the understanding that they will adjust to the school's existing norms and practices.

  • Inclusion, which means systemic reform of content, teaching methods, approaches, structures and strategies, so that every pupil has a learning environment that suits their needs and preferences.

It goes further still, stating that placing disabled pupils in mainstream classes without changes to organisation, curriculum and teaching does not amount to inclusion.

By the government's own chosen standard, then, moving more children into mainstream schools without changing how mainstream schools work would be integration, and the question worth asking of every part of the reforms is which of those two things it is really building.

What the evidence actually shows

The reform proposals open with a confident claim: that the evidence is compelling, and that pupils with SEND educated in inclusive mainstream schools are twice as likely to find employment and live independent lives. Natspec, the membership body for specialist further education colleges, went looking for where that figure comes from, and traced it to a single study by Myklebust and Båtevik, published in 2006, which followed young people in Norway.

Natspec raised four concerns about relying on it, and the first deserves far more attention than it usually gets. The study comes from Norway, whose education system, funding model, approach to learning and wider ethos are very different from England's, so the inclusion its young people experienced sat within a completely different set of structures, expectations and resources. Using its results to justify policy here is a little like pointing to outcomes in Norway's prisons, which are built around rehabilitation, and expecting English prisons to achieve the same simply by housing people in the same way. Where someone is placed tells you very little when everything around that placement is so different.

The other three concerns are important too. The study is now twenty years old, and need, diagnosis, law and provision have all changed enormously since then. It isn't clear how far it accounted for differences in children's needs, and since young people with more complex needs are both more likely to be in specialist settings and more likely to face barriers to employment, the gap in outcomes may reflect their needs rather than where they were educated. Finally, it measured outcomes almost entirely through paid work and financial independence, leaving out the many other ways young people build independent, fulfilling lives.

The Department for Education's own analysis of GCSE results points the same way. It found that pupils with EHCPs in mainstream schools achieved around half a grade higher in English and maths than those in special schools, but the department acknowledged that it couldn't show mainstream placement caused that difference, which may simply reflect pupils with less complex needs being placed in mainstream in the first place.

None of this means specialist settings are always better, and that isn't my argument. What it shows is that the evidence doesn't support treating mainstream placement as the better outcome in itself, and that the things that matter most to children are the things least often measured.

When researchers do ask young people, a different picture starts to emerge. A 2022 systematic review of 33 studies on the experiences of autistic young people in mainstream secondary schools found that, for many of them, mainstream school was a complex and demanding social environment. Bullying, an inflexible curriculum, an unpredictable environment and not feeling supported meant that many didn't feel they belonged, which led the authors to ask whether a school can be considered inclusive at all if it doesn't foster a sense of belonging among all its pupils. Autistic girls in several of the studies described masking their differences in order to fit in.

That kind of fitting in comes at a cost. A study of more than 700 autistic children and young people found that masking predicted anxiety, depression and physical complaints, even after taking age, gender and IQ into account, and a 2026 review of the research found it consistently linked with anxiety, depression, stress and burnout. The review's authors went as far as cautioning against interventions that encourage autistic people to camouflage, which is worth remembering whenever a child's ability to look settled in class is held up as evidence that inclusion is working.

Natspec's own research, What is inclusion and who gets to decide?, spoke to 67 learners and 32 senior leaders across ten specialist colleges. It found that when young people with higher levels of need are involved in defining inclusion, its meaning moves away from where learning takes place and towards the quality of their experience: belonging, agency, and having the right specialist support.

Even the government's own research supports this. In October 2026 the Department for Education published research into how sixteen mainstream schools had built a strong sense of belonging. The schools saw belonging as a prerequisite for learning, built on psychological safety, positive relationships, real pupil agency and knowing each child as an individual, and the research encouraged schools to track a range of indicators including wellbeing, alongside attendance and attainment. If belonging is this central to learning, it's hard to see why inclusion should be judged mainly by placement.

When the environment is the barrier

In my work I see the same pattern over and over. A child is described as quiet, compliant, well behaved and making expected progress, and those descriptions are taken as evidence that their needs are being met. At home, though, the same child is exhausted, falling apart every evening, and gradually losing the capacity to keep going. Masking can keep a child looking settled long after the cost has become unsustainable, which often means the adults who see them at school are telling the truth when they say they don't see a problem.

Two autistic girls interviewed for a study by Craig Goodall and Alison MacKenzie described what this feels like from the inside. One of them went whole days without eating because the school cafeteria was too overwhelming, while staff assumed she was fine because she was quiet; she said she felt invisible. The other described being left standing alone each time a teacher asked the class to find a partner, and the humiliation that stayed with her long afterwards. Neither girl felt included in school, and neither felt accepted.

This is why I find it helpful to separate inclusion from assimilation. Assimilation asks the child to adapt to the environment, while inclusion asks the environment to adapt to the child. Every child learns, grows and stretches themselves at school, and helping a child build skills and confidence is part of good education. The difficulty comes when we expect a child to suppress their needs, hide their distress and tolerate an environment that overwhelms them, and then describe the result as inclusion. If a child can only take part by concealing their disability, the exclusion is still there; it has simply become harder to see.

An everyday comparison can help. Imagine a school handing every child exactly the same size of shoes. Most children would manage well enough, but for some the shoes would rub and pinch all day, every day. Nobody would respond by building up those children's tolerance for blisters, rewarding them for walking a little further each week, or deciding they simply weren't suited to walking; we would get them shoes that fit. When the barrier is sensory, social or emotional, though, we are far more likely to focus on changing the child, helping them tolerate the noise, cope with the transitions or manage their anxiety well enough to get through the door, while the environment causing the difficulty stays exactly as it was.

Having offers on the table doesn't make the table accessible if a child can't even get through the door to reach it. Inclusion can't be measured by what adults have offered, it has to be measured by what the child can actually access, and by what it costs them to do so.

Can inclusion bases bridge the gap?

For some children, an inclusion base could be excellent. A smaller, calmer, more predictable space with specialist staff, which lets a child stay connected to their school and their friends, could make all the difference, and some of the best provision I've come across in my work looks exactly like that.

A base still sits inside the same building, the same timetable and often the same expectations as the rest of the school, though. A child may still have to face the corridors, the crowds, the noise at lunchtime and the constant transitions that made school so hard in the first place. One of the girls in Goodall and MacKenzie's study put it well when she said that the attitude and atmosphere inside a building count for far more than the building itself.

Research on existing resource bases, the kind of provision the reforms would bring under the inclusion base name, shows how this can play out. Joanne Halsall and colleagues interviewed autistic girls who split their time between a resource base and mainstream classes, along with their parents and school staff. The girls masked most in the mainstream classroom, hiding both their autism and their learning needs, and found it exhausting and distressing, with knock-on effects on their learning, their relationships and their sense of belonging. Having a base to retreat to didn't remove the cost of the hours spent outside it.

Whether inclusion bases work will come down to the detail:

  • What will each base actually provide, and for whom? That means the staffing, expertise, group sizes, sensory environment and flexibility of the curriculum.

  • Will a place be offered because it meets a child's needs, or because it's the place that's available?

  • What happens when a base doesn't work for a child? Will that be recognised as evidence that the provision isn't suitable, or will it lead to another attendance plan and more pressure to persist?

  • Whose view counts when deciding whether a child is included? The school's records, or the child's and family's experience, including what happens after school?

  • What legal protection will children keep? An inclusion base can't replace the special educational provision in Section F of an EHCP, which the local authority must secure under Section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014. How that duty will work alongside Specialist Provision Packages under the reforms is a question that still needs a clear answer.

Choice is part of this too. Natspec has pointed out that the presumption of mainstream education gives young people a right to a mainstream place with no matching right to a specialist one, and that a specialist place could become harder to secure if some packages are mainstream-only and the Tribunal can no longer name an alternative setting. The learners they spoke to made a simple point: a genuine say requires genuine choices. Asking a child which mainstream option they'd prefer is very different from asking what kind of environment lets them learn, take part and feel they belong.

The law already allows for different routes

The current legal framework promotes mainstream education, but it has never treated mainstream as the only legitimate way of meeting a child's needs, and it doesn't treat other routes as a failure:

  • Section 19 of the Education Act 1996 requires local authorities to arrange suitable full-time education for any child of compulsory school age who, because of illness, exclusion or otherwise, would not receive suitable education without those arrangements, whether or not the child has an EHCP.

  • Section 61 of the Children and Families Act 2014 allows a local authority to arrange education otherwise than at school (EOTAS) where it would be inappropriate for the special educational provision a child needs to be made in a school.

  • Specialist settings, from special schools to specialist colleges, remain part of the system for children whose needs call for them.

Specialist provision, alternative provision and EOTAS can all be part of an inclusive system. For the third child at the start of this piece, learning again outside school may be the first time in years that she has experienced what inclusion actually feels like.

None of these duties has changed. If your child can't currently access school, or the support they need isn't in place, the law as it stands still applies, and you can still ask for that support and challenge decisions now.

What real inclusion would need

A system that took inclusion seriously would:

  • fund and staff mainstream schools properly, so that teachers have the time, training and flexibility to change how school works for a child, rather than only adding support around the edges;

  • get the right help in place early, at whatever age a need appears, before a child reaches crisis point;

  • treat specialist provision, alternative provision and EOTAS as valued parts of an inclusive system, available when a child needs them;

  • measure success by whether children feel safe, can take part, are learning and feel they belong, alongside attendance and results;

  • listen to children, including those who mask, and give their experiences real weight in the decisions made about them;

  • keep individual, enforceable rights, so that when provision doesn't work there is a clear way to put it right.

Many schools are already trying to work this way, often against the odds, and many of the teachers I work with would welcome a system that made it easier. The reforms could help us get there, if they're judged by what children experience rather than by where children are placed.

Inclusion is about more than a building, a placement or a statistic. A child educated in mainstream isn't automatically included, and a child educated somewhere else isn't automatically excluded. The real test is whether they can learn, take part and belong without having to sacrifice their wellbeing to do it.

A child should not have to endure an environment that excludes them in order for the system to call them included.

If you need support now

These free resources are based on the law as it stands today:

Sources

Amber Windsor
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