In this second post in our Preparing your school’s Inclusion Strategy series, Abigail Hawkins of SENsible SENCO offers a SENCo’s perspective on how schools can approach the Inclusion Strategy honestly and usefully.

Drawing on experience across many mainstream settings, Abigail explores how needs analysis, evidence‑informed practice, and clarity around impact can turn the Inclusion Strategy from a compliance exercise into a meaningful planning tool.

Abigail Hawkins, founder of SENsible SENCO

The requirement to publish an Inclusion Strategy by 31 December 2026 is one of the most significant accountability shifts to come out of the Inclusive Mainstream Fund guidance. Schools will need to describe not just what they do for children with SEND, but how they are deploying their funding, what evidence underpins their provision choices, and whether their universal offer genuinely meets commonly occurring and predictable needs.

The good news is that most schools already have the raw material. The Inclusion Strategy is, in essence, a more structured and publicly accountable version of what your SEND Information Report should already be describing. The question is whether yours is honest enough to be useful.

If the Inclusion Strategy feels daunting, it may help to think of it as a close cousin of something schools have been producing for years. The Pupil Premium strategy statement, introduced around 2013 and refined significantly from 2021, requires schools to publish a needs analysis of their disadvantaged cohort, set out their planned provision with an evidence base, and report on the impact of previous spending. The accountability structure, public publication, Ofsted scrutiny, and annual review is almost identical.

The Inclusion Strategy will very likely follow the same logic, with a needs analysis of your SEND cohort replacing the disadvantaged pupil analysis, your Inclusive Mainstream Fund deployment replacing the PP spend plan, and your evidence of impact replacing the PP outcomes review. The main difference is an additional emphasis on the universal offer: what the school provides at the level of everyday teaching and environment, not just targeted interventions. If you have been writing a PP statement, you already understand the shape of what is being asked. This is not a new skill. It is an existing one, pointed in a slightly different direction.

Start with four diagnostic questions...

1. Does your current documentation describe your universal offer clearly, or does it list provisions without explaining what a child actually experiences day to day?
   
   
2. Does it explain how your SEN notional budget is deployed, not just that it exists?
   
   
3. Does it describe the evidence base for your provision choices, or are programmes in place largely because they always have been?
   
   
4. And could a parent reading it understand what their child would receive at each layer of support, without needing a glossary or a meeting to decode it?

If the answer to any of those is uncertain, that is where the planning work begins, and the summer term is the time to do it, before the DfE guidance lands and the clock starts ticking.

On the funding side, the Inclusive Mainstream Fund is not simply a spending pot to allocate at the end of the budget round. It is a strategic planning instrument. Schools should be asking which interventions are most needed for their specific SEND population, which evidence-based programmes will be funded and why, and how deployment decisions connect to what the graduated approach is telling them about children's needs. A school that deploys this funding reactively will struggle to write a coherent strategy. A school that plans from a clear picture of its cohort's needs will find the strategy largely writes itself.

One practical step that often gets overlooked: pull your TA deployment data before the summer. The Inclusion Strategy will need to account for how support staff time is used. The EEF evidence is clear that TAs who are well-trained and positioned for structured, targeted support have a significant positive impact, but that impact depends entirely on how they are deployed. Knowing what your TAs are actually doing, rather than what you think they are doing, is one of the most useful pieces of intelligence a SENCo can have at this stage.

Finally, a note on what not to do. The most common mistake right now will be creating new systems and paperwork before the DfE guidance is published. The template is coming. What schools need between now and then is the evidence and the practice to populate it honestly. The discipline of making provision transparent and evidenced is good practice regardless of the policy requirement and schools that approach the Inclusion Strategy as a genuine account of how they include children will find it becomes one of the most useful planning tools they have.

Next steps

• Take a look at Preparing for the Inclusion Strategy Requirement, Abigail’s incredibly useful planning guide for SENCos covering cohort data-gathering, auditing the universal offer, TA deployment review, and a timeline to the December deadline.
  
  
• Check out Abigail’s video review of Clicker – which she describes as"a powerful resource to raise outcomes and reduce gaps without rewriting your scheme of work”.
  
  
• This post forms part of our three‑part series on preparing for the Inclusion Strategy. You can also read HeadteacherChat® founder Lucy Coy’s advice for school leaders and hear from digital specialists about the role that Digital and Assistive Technology can play in removing barriers to learning.