What the experts say…
WAYS TO DELIVER AN EDUCATION THAT IS ‘INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN’
Comment by RAY BOXALL, Head of SEN Services Academy21
F
or some time now, there has been universal recognition that inclusion needs to be at the top of the policy-making agenda; the SEN crisis shows no sign of abating. MPs have given the DfE a deadline of six months to present a concrete plan for what inclusive education will look like.
As Head of SEN in an online school for students from Key Stages 2 to 5, I am in a good position to provide innovative solutions and offer our families a greater degree of flexibility than the typical education setting—I acknowledge that. What I outline here is not a simplistic solution but instead some thoughts on one way to effectively deliver an inclusive education by design.
In our school, we have developed an approach which we call quality first inclusive teaching or QFIT for brevity’s sake. We have an extensive professional learning programme that all colleagues, including leaders, must complete. It has clearly defined criteria as part of learning walks and observations and features on everybody’s performance cycle targets in some form. ‘All teachers are teachers of SEN’, explicitly in other words: this is fundamental.
So, what is QFIT? Let’s look at the principles that underpin it, the ‘big picture’ strategies, and finally, some examples of the practical approaches and their impact.
It is predicated on two important principles that all stakeholders in our school subscribe to: first, effective, inclusive teaching doesn’t lead to any deficit for learners without SEND, and second, we can codify inclusive teaching as a series of practical steps that all teachers can deliver. Regarding the ‘big picture framework’, we began by adapting five main SEND teaching strategies that summarise the research-proven delivery
of ‘what works’ in mainstream education settings from the Education Endowment Foundation report Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools’. Very briefly, our five categories are as follows: taking account of individual needs; the construction and delivery of instructions; models and scaffolding; the creation of an inclusive environment for all; and reducing the requirement for writing wherever possible. Of course, there must be a mechanism to translate these overarching strategies into practical steps. In our independent, online school setting, we have developed a system called the Inclusive Teaching Plan. Working in an online setting can be wonderfully collaborative: we can build our tech platform to share information efficiently, and the fact that all our fully live lessons are recorded and catalogued for students to be able to revisit makes sharing good practice across faculties very straightforward. This is how we collaborate. Firstly, we agreed on a series of practical teaching strategies stemming from one of the ‘big five’ strategies. Then, we summarised them as clear statements for our families; for example, ‘My child will need dyslexia-friendly formatting for their learning materials’. As part of onboarding new students with SEND, we work with our families to populate a plan comprising these practical strategies. Next, we leverage the power of our tech platform to ensure that the plan, once completed, is automatically surfaced to teachers’ registers. To build our teachers’ confidence and ensure the quality of our practice, they complete a bespoke professional learning course that breaks down each accommodation, adjustment or support on the ITP with explanations and examples. Here is the crucial bit: we have gathered plentiful examples of our colleagues delivering the strategies in their lessons using our lesson recordings so that we can all see each other doing it. Across our school, we have a network of teacher ‘SEND Champions’ in all faculties who work with the SEN team so that there is a constant process of dialogue, discourse and renewal. We also collaborate across our schools so that we don’t become too insular – building this into the renewal cycle is imperative. Of course, the Inclusive Teaching Plan is not the be-all and end-all of supporting our SEND students; some of them will need further bespoke strategies and intervention beyond QFIT. But building up this shared skillset, this commonly held lexicon, means that referral to support students across teams in our school can be done much more purposefully.
So, what is the impact of our QFIT approach? Fundamentally, providing an environment for our students which is inclusive by design is often about working purposefully to ensure that our SEND students don’t experience those feelings of sensory and cognitive overwhelm that can be anathema to learning and feeling that they belong at school. Through constructing an online environment that is easily navigable and accessible, with flexibility around how to interact and explore the curriculum, with consistently inclusive teaching, our SEND students can thrive. Often, SEND students join us because they have felt unable to continue in their previous setting and reached a ‘crisis’ point. I’m an English teacher by background, so forgive me for finishing with a metaphor. For the government, turning this particular tanker around will take time; it’s a giant one, and it’s stuck in the Suez Canal right now. But there are many educational settings like ours with a passion for this work who are already doing it: if we are committed, open-minded and forward-thinking, we can adopt practical and innovative approaches to be inclusive by design.
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www.education-today.co.uk July/August 2025
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