Most school leaders are on annual leave this week. The Department for Education picked exactly that moment to publish three documents that will shape how every mainstream school in England spends its inclusion budget for the next three years.
On 7 August, the DfE updated its guidance on the inclusive mainstream fund (IMF), the £500 million-a-year commitment announced in the “Every Child Achieving and Thriving” white paper. Two documents landed: best practice guidance built around seven principles of inclusion, and a companion guide on developing an inclusion strategy. A third, a reporting template, sets out exactly what schools need to publish.
The headline is a deadline. Every mainstream school must publish an inclusion strategy on its website by 31 December 2026. Ofsted will assess how well that strategy is embedded in practice and whether staff are equipped to deliver it. For most schools, that means building a compliant strategy from scratch in a single autumn term.
Strip away the policy language and the DfE is asking schools to demonstrate seven things:
None of this is new territory for schools already doing inclusion well. What’s new is the requirement to write it down, cost it, and be held to it.
The guidance leans heavily on the Education Endowment Foundation as its recommended evidence source. That’s worth pausing on. The EEF has been vocal about the limits of evidence for neurocognitive and computerised cognitive training approaches, and we’ve said before that this stance sits oddly alongside the millions spent without producing much of an alternative evidence base of their own — though it’s fairer to say the EEF does have published work on cognitive learning theory more broadly.
That gap is exactly where organisations like Evolve have spent the last several years doing the work. We haven’t waited for a single UK gatekeeper to build the evidence base for us. We’ve built it with schools that had the funding, the space, and the scale to test at pace — international schools where year groups can run to 200 plus children, giving a sample size and a testing environment few UK state schools could replicate on their own. That work is what the mainstream sector is now being asked to catch up to.
Two of our programmes map directly onto the principles the DfE has set out, without needing you to bolt on something new.
ENHANCE, our neurocognitive development programme, sits at the universal offer level. It builds staff understanding of how children actually learn — attention, working memory, processing speed — the mechanics underneath “adaptive teaching” that the guidance asks for, but rarely explains how to deliver. It’s staff development and pupil development rolled into one seamless package.
For pupils whose needs sit beyond the universal offer, ENHANCE also provides a genuine Tier 2 option: targeted, evidence-informed support that doesn’t require a formal diagnosis or statutory process to begin, in line with what the guidance itself asks for under targeted provision.
Our mentoring programme complements this from the relational side of the seven principles: belonging, safe culture, and family partnership, delivered by people who specialise in exactly that.
Back in the summer term, before any DfE guidance existed on inclusion strategy statements, we put together a template to give schools a head start. We built it around the seven principles that had already been signalled in the “Every Child Achieving and Thriving” white paper, on the basis that schools shouldn’t have to wait for a formal template to start the work.
Now that the DfE has published its own best practice guidance and reporting template, it’s a useful moment to compare notes. The overlap is substantial. Both cover the same seven principles, the same emphasis on early intervention and adaptive teaching, the same expectation of governor-level accountability. Our original template is available here if you want to see it alongside the DfE’s version.
The structures differ slightly. The DfE template is organised as a linear reporting document: intent, barriers, this year’s activity, intended outcomes, review of last year. Ours is organised around the seven principles directly, with practical content already drafted under each one. If you’ve been using our template, or you’re starting from the DfE’s own document, we’ve put together some notes below to help you bring the two together and make sure nothing statutory gets missed.
If you’ve used our original template, here’s where that content sits within the DfE’s five-part structure, and what you’ll want to add.
1. Statement of intent (DfE requires ≤500 words)
Pull the opening framing from our template’s Introduction and Purpose section (your commitment to inclusive mainstream practice, governing body approval) plus a condensed line from each of the seven principles. Our template also includes a Funding Allocation section (your IMF amount and how it’s spent alongside existing SEND/pastoral budgets). The DfE expects this folded into the intent statement rather than kept separate.
2. Barriers to learning and participation
This is the one gap to fill. Our template doesn’t state barriers as a single upfront list. Instead, they are implied principle-by-principle. Pull together a short, explicit statement of your school’s key barriers (drawing on what you’ve already identified under Principles 2 and 5 around early identification and behaviour/attendance) as its own section.
3. Activity in this academic year
Most of this content already exists in our template’s bullet points under each principle e.g. named senior leader accountability, your early identification system, adaptive teaching CPD, enrichment audits, family communication offer, accessibility plan. Bring these together under one heading and tie each to what it’s actually costing or where it sits in your IMF allocation.
4. Intended outcomes
Our template states outcome measures (attendance, exclusions, participation, progress, pupil/parent voice) in the closing Monitoring section. DfE wants these stated upfront as intended outcomes, not just as review metrics. Take that same list and reframe it as what you’re aiming to achieve this year, before the retrospective review.
5. Review of previous academic year (required from Year 2 onward)
Not something our original template addressed directly. If this is your second year or later, you’ll need to add a short critical reflection: what worked, what didn’t, and what that’s changed in this year’s strategy. You should draw on national assessment data (with the standard Covid-disruption caveat), your own formative/summative data, and wider inclusion data like attendance and engagement.
If you’re working from our template and want a hand pulling it into the DfE’s five-part shape before the December deadline, we would be glad to help.
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