As a former SENCo in a mainstream school, I have seen first-hand the challenges and opportunities that come with ensuring that every learner can meaningfully access the curriculum. The recently published SEND Reform white paper places a renewed emphasis on early intervention, curriculum adaptation, and building a strong, inclusive universal offer - principles that lie at the heart of effective SEND practice. Central to the white paper is the role of assistive technology in reducing barriers, increasing independence, and enabling pupils to thrive within their local mainstream setting.

Clicker is a powerful example of this vision in action. It provides the tools, scaffolds, and flexibility needed to support a wide range of learners. Crucially, it does so without creating separate pathways or additional workloads for teachers. Used as a whole-school approach, Clicker promotes consistency, inclusivity, and autonomy. It ensures that children access the support they need when they need it and that staff feel confident delivering high quality, evidence-based provision.

Increasing inclusion in mainstream

Ordinarily available provision or a universal offer is not a new concept for mainstream schools. However, what this looks like varies widely between schools and local authorities. Even within schools this can vary class to class.

Using Clicker as a whole-school tool ensures that children are guaranteed consistency. It removes the ‘September stumble’ where new teaching teams are figuring out what works. With Clicker, learners can record their ideas the same way across all lessons and subjects.

Curriculum adaptation is mentioned throughout the white paper in relation to assistive technology and how it unlocks learning for pupils. Clicker supports effective adaptive teaching. Its tools enable staff to respond to pupils’ emerging needs in real time - whether that means offering speech support, vocabulary scaffolds, predictive text, or structured writing frames. Teachers can instantly adjust the level of support, ensuring that every learner can access the same lesson content while receiving the personalised scaffolding they need. This makes Clicker a practical, inclusive way of delivering high quality teaching that adapts to learners' needs.

With the included bank of nearly 4000 LearningGrids resources, teaching staff can access ready-made activities and scaffolds. They are also easily editable to allow for further adaptation. This reduces the need for teachers to plan different activities towards the same learning objective. It also ensures that children get the support they need without onerous planning.

The white paper also states that there should be less emphasis on needing a diagnosis to access support.

Again, inclusive schools are already putting in place provision to support children regardless of a diagnosed need. When Clicker is accessible on all staff and pupil devices, those barriers to learning are removed instantly. Schools do not have to secure extra funding to support a child before using Clicker. Staff can also access on-demand training and choose the supportive tools that help.

Many schools use Clicker as an intervention tool to target specific needs such as spelling or sentence composition, but it’s also an invaluable class-wide tool. Teachers can use Clicker to model writing, then utilise the support tools and LearningGrids resources to ensure that all children feel included in the learning. It is not ‘different from’ or ‘additional to’ what their peers are doing. All pupils can access the same task in a way that meets their needs, and staff do not need to remove or separate them from the lesson.

This can be transformational in developing a child’s self-esteem. It removes the empty page barrier or fear of doing it wrong and enables them to engage confidently with writing.

Planning support to meet inclusion standards

As a SENCo, I would have welcomed the introduction of inclusion standards to ensure that every teacher was fulfilling the ‘every teacher a teacher of SEN’ statement in the SEND code of practice. The white paper lays out the need for legally guaranteed support without an EHCP through the proposed tier system. This means SENCos must produce an inclusion strategy where support is proactively planned.

Clicker’s Analytics tool enables staff to formatively assess children’s writing. This means they have the information needed to personalise scaffolds for future lessons or identify commonly misspelled words to target.

Staff can also use Clicker Analytics for summative assessment, providing a powerful way to capture and evidence pupil progress. When I was a SENCo, it became an invaluable tool for tracking small, incremental steps. This was particularly true for learners working below age-related expectations. The ability to analyse vocabulary use, sentence length, independence with support tools, and overall writing output meant I could reliably demonstrate progress that traditional assessment methods often failed to capture. I then used this data to directly inform short term targets and as evidence towards longer term goals.

Strengthening early intervention

Schools can use Clicker to support learners from EYFS to Key Stage 2 and beyond.

The support tools that children access can be child-led. This means that children have autonomy over what support they use. Over time, this autonomy reduces overreliance on adult support and gives them true ownership of their learning.

Clicker is not just for supporting writing. Clicker Talk supports oracy – a powerful tool for developing speaking skills, supporting pre-writing and language acquisition. During my time as SENCo, pre-teaching vocabulary was pivotal in children accessing their learning. Using Clicker Talk to deliver this not only meant this was integrated into a pupil’s daily provision, but also meant that staff did not have to prepare extensive resources.

Clicker Books enables pupils to access on-screen speech supported books, from decodable stories to information texts based on a range of topics. You can also use Clicker Books to support social, emotional, and mental health needs, with many schools using it to create social stories and explain difficult concepts.

Clicker is a tool that supports every learner. It adapts to individual needs and grows with the child, providing continuity, consistency, and inclusive access as they progress through their learning journey.

Are you looking ahead to what inclusive and accessible provision might look like in your setting? We'd love to show you how Clicker can help. You can book a free discovery call with our friendly team to learn more.