Last reviewed: 21 August 2026. The DfE guidance this page is based on was last updated on 7 August 2026.
Every state-funded mainstream school in England receiving the Inclusive Mainstream Fund must publish an inclusion strategy on its website by 31 December 2026. That is a condition of the grant, set out in the Department for Education's guidance on developing an inclusion strategy, and it comes with a defined shape: the commonly occurring barriers to learning and participation in your cohort, the activity you are funding to alleviate them with budgeted costs, intended outcomes, and a review of the previous academic year, all aligned to the DfE's 7 principles of inclusion.
This guide is for the SENCOs and school leaders who have to write one. It covers exactly what the DfE requires and by when, the 5-step process the guidance recommends, the 7 principles your funded activity must map to, what good looks like in each required section, and the part most guides skip: how to build the evidence trail that turns your strategy from a published document into something you can defend at review and at inspection.
The must-knows:
- Deadline: publish on your school website by 31 December 2026.
- Applies to: schools and 16 to 19 academies in England receiving the Inclusive Mainstream Fund.
- Must cover: the commonly occurring barriers identified across your cohort; the funded activities that alleviate them, with budgeted costs; intended outcomes; and a review of the previous academic year.
- Template: the DfE provides one with its Inclusive Mainstream Fund support publication; your own format is fine if it covers the required areas.
- Multi-year strategies must be reviewed annually, with the annual review noted on the cover page.
One disambiguation up front: this is the school inclusion strategy required by the Inclusive Mainstream Fund, about pupils, barriers to learning and SEND. It is not a workplace diversity and inclusion policy, which is a different document entirely.
What is a school inclusion strategy?
A school inclusion strategy is the published plan for how your school removes barriers to learning and participation, particularly for pupils with SEND, and how it spends its Inclusive Mainstream Fund allocation doing so. The DfE describes the approach as similar to the pupil premium strategy statement schools already write: identify the barriers in your cohort, choose evidence-informed approaches, cost them, deliver them, and review what changed.
The strategy is a whole-school document, and it marks a real shift in how inclusion in schools is accounted for: what was a values statement is now a published, costed, reviewed plan. It sits above individual plans and interventions, bringing your work on SEND, behaviour, attendance, wellbeing and belonging into one public statement of intent and spend. Done well, it is not extra paperwork: it is the document that makes every other inclusion conversation (with parents, governors, the local authority and inspectors) shorter.
Who must publish one, and by when?
The requirement comes from the Inclusive Mainstream Fund conditions of grant, which apply to schools and 16 to 19 academies in England receiving the fund from 2026 to 2027. The guidance itself is non-statutory, but the publishing requirement is a condition of taking the money, so in practice treat it as firm. The DfE has also proposed placing a legal duty on schools to produce an inclusion strategy in future, described as more comprehensive than the current requirement, so the direction of travel is towards more, not less.
- Publish an inclusion strategy on your school website by 31 December 2026.
- It must include the activity you are investing in to alleviate barriers to learning and participation, with budgeted costs.
- Any activity funded in part or in full from your IMF allocation must fall under one of the 7 principles of inclusion.
- If you write a multi-year strategy, it must be reviewed annually, and the annual review noted on the cover page.
- The DfE provides a template, but you can use your own format provided it covers the required areas (below).
If you are not sure whether or how much IMF your school receives, your school business manager or trust finance lead will have the allocation; the conditions of grant sit with the DfE's IMF support publication, and the consequences of not meeting them sit there too. Schools working in clusters can pool IMF funding where governance allows, but the guidance is explicit that each school must still publish its own strategy. If you lead 16 to 19 provision, the DfE publishes separate guidance for FE and sixth form settings; this page follows the schools' guidance.
For how the fund itself works (where the money comes from, who gets it and what it can buy), see our guide to the Inclusive Mainstream Fund. This page covers the strategy the fund requires you to publish.
What your inclusion strategy must include
If you do not use the DfE template, the guidance says your strategy must still cover four areas:
- the commonly occurring barriers to learning and participation identified across your cohort
- the activities invested in to alleviate these barriers
- intended outcomes
- a review of the previous academic year
On costs: the guidance requires budgeted costs for the funded activity, and it frames the IMF as supplementary, sitting alongside your core budget and notional SEN budget rather than replacing them, so it is reasonable to show IMF-funded activity in that context. The guidance does not specify how granular the costing must be, or whether your allocation figure itself must appear; where it is silent, that is a judgement for the school, and the DfE template shows the level of detail the department expects.
Notice what the four areas actually demand: evidence at both ends. You cannot state your cohort's barriers without something that surfaces them, and you cannot review last year without a measure you took at the start of it. That is the single most useful thing to understand before you start writing, and it is where most strategies will be weakest in year one (there is a section below on exactly that).
The 7 principles of inclusion
The DfE's guidance requires every IMF-funded activity to fall under one of the 7 principles of inclusion. Verbatim from the guidance, they are:
- ambitious leadership and governance that embeds inclusion
- evidence-based support prioritising early intervention
- high quality adaptive teaching with curriculum designed for all learners
- enriching provision beyond the classroom that all children can access
- a safe and respectful culture fostering belonging, attendance, and participation in learning
- strong partnerships with families and wider services
- inclusive environments with continuous improvements to accessibility
The DfE's companion publication, Inclusive mainstream fund: best practice for schools, sets out the types of activity that can sit under each principle, across both the universal offer and targeted support.
Two practical notes. First, the guidance is emphatic about doing fewer things well. In the first year most schools should concentrate investment on a small number of impactful activities in the universal offer, rather than spreading the fund thinly. Second, the principles will look familiar to any school grounded in nurturing practice: a safe and respectful culture that fosters belonging is a safe base by another name, early intervention is the entire logic of identifying need before it escalates, and strong partnerships with families have been part of nurture practice from the beginning. If your school already runs a nurturing approach, your strategy is largely a matter of writing down and costing what you believe.
The 5 steps to writing your inclusion strategy
The DfE guidance sets out a 5-step process, and recommends treating it as an ongoing cycle rather than a one-off writing task.
Step 1: Identify the commonly occurring barriers to learning and participation
Everything else hangs off this step, and the guidance is specific about how to do it. You should draw on classroom observation and what your teachers are telling you; internal assessment data; what families and pupils themselves say; discussions with the external professionals who work with your school; your SEND, attendance, behaviour and attainment data; and local and national trends in need. Critically, the guidance says this step should not be led solely by specific identified needs, or limited to the pupils already on your SEN register or holding an EHC plan. You are looking for the commonly occurring barriers across the whole cohort, which is a different and larger question.
The hardest slice of that list to see is social, emotional and mental health, because SEMH barriers rarely show up in attainment data until late. For that slice, a structured whole-school measure of social and emotional development shows you which pupils, classes and year groups face barriers you cannot otherwise see, and gives you the baseline your year-end review will need. That is what the Boxall Profile® Online exists to measure.
Step 2: Use evidence to choose your approaches
The guidance requires funded approaches to be evidence-informed and names where to look: the EEF's guide to inclusive teaching, the EEF's SEND guidance and Promising Programmes list, and the DfE's own RISE resources and best-practice publication. For SEMH barriers, nurture practice has its own published evidence base. As far as we know it is not named in the DfE's listed sources, so you will need to cite it yourself, and it is there to cite. RSM's independent research into nurture provision in Northern Ireland primary schools, for the Department of Education there (dated July 2025), is one strand, and nurtureuk's evidence pack reports two externally evaluated programmes in England: across 34 schools, average attendance for pupils with identified SEND rose from 84.8% to 88.7% over ten months, and the North Somerset nurture group pilot recorded a 15% reduction in behaviours hindering access to education.
Small-group nurture provision is among the best-evidenced targeted interventions available to a mainstream school. Be honest about what it requires, though: trained staff, a suitable space and leadership commitment, which is exactly the kind of costed, principle-mapped line an inclusion strategy is for. And note the guidance's steer that most year-one investment should strengthen the universal offer first; whatever you choose, be able to say in one sentence why you expect each approach to work for the barrier you identified.
Step 3: Develop the strategy
Structure it around the 4 required areas, map every funded activity to one of the 7 principles, and attach a budgeted cost to each line. Split your plan the way the guidance does: the universal offer first (high quality adaptive teaching and whole-school practice that benefits every pupil, which is where the DfE expects most year-one investment), then targeted support for pupils whose needs the universal offer cannot meet, delivered without waiting for a formal assessment or statutory process.
This is not a solo SENCO job, and the guidance says so. it names headteachers, deputies and assistant heads, the school business manager and the SENCO in developing the strategy, with governors, trustees and academy trust leaders sharing responsibility for it, middle leaders and pastoral staff contributing, and consultation with families and pupils expected. It also suggests peer review with other schools before you publish. Practically, the SENCO usually drafts, the business manager costs it, the head owns it, and governors should see it before it goes on the website. Set intended outcomes you can actually measure, and fewer of them than you think.
Step 4: Deliver and monitor
A strategy fails in implementation, not in the writing. The guidance points schools to the EEF's implementation guidance, and the practical discipline is the one SENCOs already know from the SEND support cycle: record what is actually delivered, check progress against the plan at agreed points, and adjust. For the full method at pupil level, the Boxall Profile® guide to the graduated approach explains how the assess and review cycle works; the same rhythm, run termly, keeps a whole strategy honest.
Step 5: Evaluate and sustain
Your year-end review is a required section of next year's strategy, so build it in from the start. Re-measure what you baselined in step 1, compare like for like, and report what changed, what did not, and what you are changing as a result. Schools that evidence their strategy with the Boxall Profile Online get this almost for free. The same measure taken at baseline and review shows the movement, pupil by pupil and cohort by cohort.
What good looks like: the four sections in miniature
Worked examples beat descriptions, so here is the shape of a defensible entry in each required section.
Barriers: "Across Years 7 and 8, our data shows a cluster of pupils (around one in six) whose attendance, behaviour records, and social and emotional assessment scores indicate difficulty regulating in unstructured time, most visibly at transitions and social times. This barrier is wider than our SEN register: half of these pupils receive no formal SEN support." (Named cohort, evidence sources, and honest about the register.)
Funded activity with costs: "Nurture group provision for Year 7 (two trained staff, four mornings weekly): £X staffing plus £X training. Falls under principle 2, evidence-based support prioritising early intervention. Whole-staff relational practice training: £X. Falls under principle 5, a safe and respectful culture." (Every line costed and mapped to a principle.)
Intended outcomes: "By July, pupils in the nurture group expect to show measurable movement towards age-expected social and emotional development on reassessment, and their attendance gap against the year group is expected to half." (Measurable, dated, few.)
Year-one review, when you have not baselined anything: be honest. Set out what the school spent last year from core and notional SEN budget and what you know about its effect. State plainly what you could not measure, and name the baseline you are taking now so that next year's review has a like-for-like comparison. A review that says "we did not have the data, here is how we fixed that" is a stronger opening entry than one that claims impact it cannot show.
Starting this in September?
This is a realistic sequence for an autumn write, with the deadline about one term away:
- September: confirm your IMF allocation with your business manager; gather what you already hold (SEND, attendance and behaviour data, pupil premium statement, last year's spend); take your baseline measure so it exists before you write.
- By half-term: barriers analysis done and the shortlist of funded activities agreed with the head and business manager.
- November: draft against the four required areas (or the DfE template); consult staff, families and pupils; peer-review with another school if you can.
- Early December: leadership and governors see it; publish on the website before the break.
Most of the material already exists in your school; the new work is the barriers analysis and the costing.
The evidence trail your strategy needs
The strategy's credibility rests on its evidence, and it is worth being blunt about what that means in practice:
- A baseline, taken early. Whatever you intend to claim in next year's review must be measured now. For SEMH barriers that means a structured measure of social and emotional development, not impressions.
- A record of delivery. What was actually delivered, to whom, when. If an intervention slipped, the review should know.
- A like-for-like re-measure. The same instrument at review as at baseline, so the comparison stands up.
- An honest review. Reviews that report only successes read as marketing; reviews that show what was dropped and why read as leadership.
This is not just good practice, it is inspected: the guidance itself says Ofsted "will assess how leaders ensure the inclusion strategy is embedded in practice" and that staff are equipped to deliver it. The Boxall Profile Ofsted evidencing guide covers what that evidence trail looks like at whole-school level.
How nurture practice delivers the strategy
A strategy document does not change a school; practice does. This is where nurtureuk sits: the Six Principles of Nurture are a tested framework for the culture the 7 principles of inclusion describe. Nurtureuk is an engagement partner of Inclusion in Practice, whose case studies the DfE guidance also points schools to. The two routes below map onto the two halves the DfE asks you to plan, the universal offer and targeted support.
- Your universal offer: the Boxall Profile® Online, nurtureuk's whole-school assessment of social and emotional development, gives you the baseline in step 1, the evidence in step 5 and the like-for-like re-measure in between. Used whole-school, it assesses every pupil, not just the SEN register, which is exactly the cohort-wide view the barriers section asks for. A free 30-day trial is available.
- Your targeted support: The Theory and Practice of Nurture Groups, our three-day live online course, trains staff to run the classic evidence-based small-group intervention, with the Boxall Profile® evidencing each pupil's entry, progress and exit.
In a strategy, a school would usually record both under principle 2, evidence-based support prioritising early intervention. Whole-school assessment can also support the adaptive teaching aims of principle 3 because it tells teachers which pupils need what. The mapping is yours to make, and the DfE's best-practice publication lists the activity types it expects under each principle. Each gives you a concrete, costed line for your strategy.
Ready to start? Begin with the universal offer: try the Boxall Profile® Online free for 30 days. Building targeted support? Book The Theory and Practice of Nurture Groups.