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At King Ecgbert School (KES) in Sheffield, part of Mercia Learning Trust, our focus on the inclusion and integration of children with special educational needs and disabilities is not just a label we apply - it’s a practice we commit to daily.

As such, our 30-place inclusion base for autistic children, known as the KES Integrated Resource, is fully embedded in the life of the school. It is the school, not a bolt-on to it - and that distinction matters.

Between 80 and 100 per cent of our pupils’ timetables are spent learning in mainstream classrooms with the same lessons, same exams and same expectations as everyone else in our large comprehensive city school.

The base doesn’t deliver a separate curriculum. It delivers something more powerful: a carefully scaffolded route into the full life of the school.

Inclusion base integrated into school life

If you visited their lessons, you’d struggle to spot the students in the integrated resource among their peers, but that’s because of the support that enables them to be there. Most of their parents didn’t think their children could cope in a mainstream setting, but the reality is that they thrive.

That’s only possible because of the team around each child. Base staff and mainstream teachers work in genuine partnership, sharing knowledge, pre-empting challenges, ensuring that the groundwork is laid before a pupil ever walks through a classroom door.

It rarely makes headlines. It makes all the difference.

We also plan for the moments that don’t appear on a timetable. Lunch. Break time. The corridor between lessons.

These unstructured moments can be the hardest for autistic young people, so we don’t leave them to chance. Staff accompany pupils to clubs and social spaces with strategies already in place.

The base becomes a genuine home, a cross-year family where pupils look out for each other and build the kind of friendships secondary school doesn’t always naturally create.

The parent connection

And we’re well aware of the risks that transitions present. That’s transitions at all scales: from lesson to lesson in our busy corridors, transition into the school in the morning and to the family home in the evening, into the weekend, into the holiday, into the year above and, most of all, into life after school.

Each transition can present a challenge to autistic students. But by knowing the students well as individuals, we can see the steps coming and prepare the ground so that they can tackle each step with confidence.

Parents aren’t an afterthought. Every child has a named adult providing regular updates to their parents at home; weekly as standard, daily when it’s needed.

We ask families to reinforce key messages at home, and they tell us what’s happened at home that will wash up in school the next day.

We’re honest about the challenges of transition into a busy secondary school for children who’ve often been in small and nurturing primary settings. But by taking it in stages, they can all do it.

We use our experience to give parents something they often struggle to find elsewhere: well-founded reassurance.

Parents say that because we know their children so well, they feel confident that we’ll find the adaptations that will enable their children to grow in confidence and experience success - something many of them feared their child would never have in a mainstream school.

Strong outcomes

Through this work, we are proud of the outcomes we achieve for pupils, too.

Above-average academic progress for many. Destinations spanning A levels, university, vocational training and employment. And zero young people leaving not in education, employment or training (Neet). Not by chance but by design, through personalised transition planning that begins years before Year 11.

The benefits reach beyond the base, too. Mainstream staff build genuine expertise and the knowledge of the children’s needs that is passed on to them by the expert staff in the base. Inclusion becomes a lived reality rather than a policy aspiration.

Friendships cross what might otherwise be a permanent divide, and the children are happy - their attendance and behaviour shows it.

Today’s government guidance gives schools across the country a framework to build something like this for themselves.

What we’ve learned is straightforward: when you get the model right, and hold firm to high expectations and genuine belonging, everybody gains.

Paul Haigh is headteacher of King Ecgbert School, in Sheffield, and a Department for Education Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) adviser

King Ecgbert School has 1,650 students, including 100 children with education, health and care plans