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By the end of December 2026, every mainstream school in England must have published an inclusion strategy.

The accompanying government guidance is specific about what such a strategy must contain: the “commonly occurring, predictable needs” within a school’s cohort, the “barriers to learning pupils with additional needs face”, and the approaches a school intends to take in response.

Identifying a cohort’s predictable needs, and understanding the barriers those pupils experience, should fundamentally be a research question before it can become a planning one.

Over the past year, working with Challenge Partners, ImpactEd Group set out to answer the question of how schools can best support all learners directly, surveying 6,568 pupils across 13 schools, from Year 3 through to Year 13, alongside their teaching staff and families.

Building on the existing literature and guided by a steering group chaired by David Bartram, with support from leaders in education, special educational needs and disabilities and school improvement, we that are encountered day-to-day in school.

One of the most important lessons to emerge from the research was methodological, showing that if we look only at whole-school averages in the data, they can conceal almost everything. It is only when you dig down into subgroup analysis that the actionable patterns start to emerge.

Three findings really brought this to life.

1. Transition to secondary should be a key point of focus

The first concerns transition. Across every domain we measured, pupils’ experience of inclusion drops by around two points on a 10-point scale between Year 6 and Year 7, and it does not recover afterwards.

Belonging falls furthest of all, from 7.2 at primary school to 4.2 in early secondary, before reaching its lowest point yet in Year 10.

Thinking particularly about inclusion, we also found that pupils with SEND are significantly more likely to score lower than their non-SEND peers when asked if the start of the school year went well, and whether they know where to go if they have a problem.

If we only look at whole-school data, we would miss this important nuance.

2. The physical school environment really matters

The second concerns the physical environment, which is the lowest-scoring domain at every phase and for every pupil group we examined, with sensory conditions (noise, lighting and temperature) emerging as the weakest area within it.

This finding maps directly onto the seventh of the government’s principles of inclusion: inclusive environments. It is within this domain that pupils perceive the widest gaps in their daily experience.

3. Consider how pupils’ needs might overlap

The third area that we always need to look at carefully is the intersectionality of different characteristics. For example, pupils who are both eligible for pupil premium and have SEND report a distinct additional disadvantage in the physical environment, one that neither characteristic predicts when considered on its own.

Therefore, any strategy that treats pupil characteristics separately, one at a time, will fail to acknowledge the significance of overlapping characteristics and how this impacts on school experience.

None of these three patterns is visible in a headline figure, yet each becomes visible the moment the underlying data is broken down by year group and pupil characteristic.

What else?

There are two further findings from the pilot that deserve attention and should be of note for future study.

The first is that measuring the whole-school community, rather than pupils with SEND alone, is what makes the barriers visible in the first place; when every pupil responds, a school can establish whether a given problem is experienced more significantly by pupils with SEND or is felt by everyone. It is this distinction that can determine whether the right response should be targeted or universal.

The second is that the schools whose data particularly stood out had been those leading sustained and strategic inclusion work over time, distributing ownership of inclusion across all staff rather than leaving it with Sendcos, and building genuine engagement with the families of pupils with SEND.

For school leaders looking to begin work on their inclusion strategies, they would do well to bear these points in mind, to give themselves the most accurate picture of the specific inclusion challenges that exist within their schools.

Beth Williams is associate director for ImpactEd Evaluation. The findings from are available in full on the ImpactEd Group website and could help to guide your practice. If you would like to discuss how data could inform your own inclusion strategy, get in touch