The schools White Paper made it clear that one of the main ways ministers want to reform special educational needs and disabilities provision is by every secondary school establishing an inclusion base.
The ambition is understandable. Schools are supporting rising numbers of pupils with increasingly complex needs. Many leaders will recognise the intention to strengthen support within mainstream education.
What’s more, as a member of the Department for Education’s advisory board during the development of this policy, I saw the seriousness with which officials believe in this approach.
But policy success will ultimately depend on how inclusion is understood across the landscape - and if it is not clearly understood, this poses a difficult question: are inclusion bases a step towards SEND inclusion or exclusion spaces by another name?
Inclusion bases: ‘safe’ spaces?
The language used to describe these bases is revealing. A “safe space away from busy classrooms” prompts an uncomfortable question: safe from what, and from whom?
If inclusion is defined primarily through the removal of children from mainstream environments, we must be honest about the group dynamics that follow.
says that children derive a sense of self from the groups to which they belong. Schools are powerful identity-forming environments.
Pupils naturally organise themselves into in-groups and out-groups. When we physically separate children and give those spaces distinct labels, we risk reinforcing those boundaries rather than dissolving them.
This is not a theoretical concern. Many schools already operate internal provision under different names: support rooms, SEN units or resourced provision. Some are purposeful and well led.
Others quietly become places where pupils spend large portions of the day removed from mainstream learning, with limited opportunities for reintegration. Containment without belonging. Proximity without participation.
Unintended consequences
This is a real concern. Education systems are full of unintended consequences.
When staff teams are trained in physical intervention, restraint rates almost always rise. Not because staff suddenly become more punitive, but because a capability has been introduced into the system and it becomes available to use.
The same dynamic may apply here.
When a school invests space, staffing and resources into creating an inclusion base, there will inevitably be pressure to fill it. Pupils may begin to be moved there more quickly, more routinely and for longer periods of time.
When the next national exclusion statistics are published, will we congratulate ourselves as the numbers fall? Will suspension rates decline and be presented as evidence that the system is becoming more inclusive?
Or will we quietly overlook the possibility that some pupils are simply no longer being formally excluded. They are just spending their school days in permanent isolation somewhere around the back of the building.
Who will look out for the children who end up segregated in the worst versions of these spaces?
Staff training
To guard against this, we must look to the evidence. Research from across different nations shows that inclusive systems succeed when specialist expertise strengthens mainstream practice rather than operating alongside it.
This requires more than capital investment. It requires leadership, workforce development and a shared understanding of inclusion as a whole-school responsibility.
This means staff who understand behaviour through a relational and therapeutic lens, teachers who are equipped to adapt learning before crisis points emerge, and identity and belonging being actively protected within classrooms.
In those environments, specialist spaces support inclusion. They do not replace it.
The role of special schools
This is where the expertise of special schools could - and should - be harnessed.
As a trustee of the National Association of Special Schools, I see the depth of expertise that exists within that sector around complex needs, therapeutic environments and relational practice.
If every mainstream school is expected to establish specialist provision, structured partnerships with special schools should form part of the design.
Without that connection, we risk asking mainstream leaders to build complex provision without access to those who have spent decades refining it.
Inspection questions
Finally, inspection and accountability will also matter.
How will regulators know whether inclusion bases are being used as a last resort rather than a first response?
Schools will have to be ready to answer questions about pupil experience, reintegration and sustained participation in mainstream school life to ensure that inclusion bases are not just being used as a subtle form of exclusion.
The real test
None of this is an argument against inclusion bases. It is an argument against assuming that space automatically creates inclusion.
The real test of the White Paper will not be how many bases are built. It will be whether the children who use them remain unquestionably part of the school community.
Because the danger is not that inclusion bases exist. The danger is that, in the wrong hands, they become the most efficient exclusion rooms the system has ever built.
Thomas Keaney is the founder of The Complete Education Solution (TCES), a provider of special schools, and a trustee at the National Association of Special Schools
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