Trust leaders have no shortage of priorities competing for their attention. SEND and inclusion is one of them, and the reforms in this area over the months ahead will prompt further thinking and questions about how support is organised and experienced.
One useful place to start is with the relationships around pupils: between teachers and pupils, schools and families, SENCOs and colleagues, and schools and specialists. Those relationships shape how well support joins up around a child, and whether the adults involved are working towards the same goals. Strengthening those connections within and across schools is an important part of making inclusion work better in practice.
Belonging is built in the everyday
For pupils, inclusion is experienced in the everyday life of school: whether they can take part in lessons, access the support they need, and feel understood by the adults around them. Those experiences can also shape whether pupils feel they belong and are able to engage in learning.
Belonging and engagement are not the same as inclusion, but they are closely connected. Schools cannot control every factor shaping pupils’ attendance, motivation or behaviour, but they can influence how pupils experience school. Strong relationships, consistent support, and teaching that responds to need can help pupils feel that they belong and are able to engage in learning.
A shared language for understanding need
One practical part of making schools more inclusive is helping the adults around a pupil work from a shared understanding of need. Looking beyond a ‘label’ or the immediate difficulty can help teachers, SENCOs, support staff, specialists and families make sense of what they are seeing, and talk about it in a more consistent way.
At Ambition Institute, we’ve been working with specialists and organisations across the sector to help build that shared understanding, and to start with need rather than a label. This work led to the Inclusive Teaching Framework, which brings together evidence and specialist expertise across five areas of pupil need: speech and language, sensory, motor, executive function, and social and emotional development. It also connects that knowledge to principles of high quality teaching that will already be familiar to many teachers.
We’ve heard from some of the trusts we work with that the framework is already helping colleagues across different schools and settings to work from a shared starting point, while still responding to the pupils and communities they know best.
Connecting shared knowledge to everyday practice
A shared understanding of need only takes us so far. The next question is how that knowledge shapes what pupils experience every day. Inclusive teaching sits alongside specialist support, adaptations and wider provision, with each playing a different role So how do trusts bring those different elements together in day-to-day practice?
The EEF’s Guide to Inclusive Teaching brings together evidence on universal approaches, adaptations and additional support. Professional development is one way trusts can help staff turn shared knowledge and understanding into practice, while still ensuring space for schools to respond to their own pupils, staff and communities.
Working with the Department for Education, we have developed a new set of free, in-house professional development materials for schools and post-16 settings. The first package is being released now, with further materials to follow across the year.
The materials draw on the available evidence and have been shaped with input from educators, specialists and organisations across the sector. They are also designed to be used flexibly: leaders can edit and adapt them for their own context, while still using them to bring colleagues across different schools and settings together around a shared goal.
Used across a trust, the materials can give leaders, teachers and support staff a common basis for discussing what they are seeing in classrooms, sharing what they are learning across schools, and focussing on particular elements where professional development would help the most.
Creating the conditions for connection across the system
Creating that shared basis across schools is just one example of what trusts can make possible at scale. Trusts are particularly well placed to connect learning across schools, and to link that work to the wider system and communities they serve.
As SEND reform develops, stronger relationships and greater coherence will help translate reform into support that feels more joined up, adults who understand pupils’ needs better, and schools that can respond more effectively – ultimately helping every child to thrive.
- Hilary Spencer is Chief Executive of Ambition Institute. Ambition Institute is a sponsor of 2026 CST's Annual Conference.
We welcome perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
