Your inclusion strategy is due by 31st December 2026. Here's how to get it right.

If your school receives the inclusive mainstream fund (IMF), you're required to publish an inclusion strategy on your school website before the end of the calendar year 2026. This isn't a box-ticking exercise. It's a condition of your grant, and it needs to show real thinking about the barriers your pupils face and what you're doing about them.

The guidance behind this comes from the DfE, and while there's a template available, you don't have to use it. What matters is that your strategy covers the right ground. Here's what that looks like in practice.

Start with what's actually holding pupils back

Before you can write a credible strategy, you need an honest picture of the barriers your pupils are facing. That means pulling together evidence from several places rather than relying on a single source. Classroom observations, internal assessment data, conversations with families and pupils, input from external professionals, and your own SEND data on attendance, behaviour and attainment will all tell you something different.

It's worth looking for patterns over time here rather than treating this as a one-off snapshot. A trend that's been building for two or three years tells you far more about where to focus than a single term's data.

An honest audit of your current provision matters too. It's easy to assume your offer is stronger than it is until you look closely at how well it's actually identifying and meeting need across your cohort.

Choose approaches with evidence behind them, not just familiarity

The DfE sets out seven principles it wants schools to build their inclusive offer around:

• ambitious leadership and governance,
• early intervention,
• high-quality teaching and curriculum design,
• accessible enrichment,
• a safe and respectful culture,
• strong partnerships with families and services,
• inclusive, accessible environments.

These aren't meant to be treated as a checklist you work through once. They're a framework for asking where your energy and funding should go. Once you've identified likely areas of focus, look at the evidence for what actually works, drawing on external research such as EEF guidance and DfE toolkits alongside your own school data and staff expertise. The strongest strategies blend national evidence with local knowledge of what has and hasn't worked for your pupils.

Build a strategy that shows how your funding streams fit together

For your first published strategy, the DfE is looking for a realistic baseline rather than a long wish list. Focus on what you'll continue doing, what you'll strengthen, and where you'll add genuinely new activity, prioritised by likely impact. If your universal offer isn't yet strong, that's where the emphasis should sit, rather than jumping straight to targeted interventions.

Your strategy also needs to be explicit about how your IMF allocation works alongside your core budget and your notional SEN budget, since anything funded wholly or partly through the IMF has to connect to at least one of the seven principles. It's sensible to think about pupil premium spending here too, even though that still needs its own separate reporting.

This isn't a document to write alone. Bringing in your SENDCO, inclusion lead, school business manager, pupil premium lead, and behaviour and attendance lead, along with your governing or trust board, will make the strategy more joined up and easier to deliver. The same applies to consulting families and pupils before you finalise it, so the strategy reflects your actual context rather than a generic template.

Set outcomes at two levels: what you expect to see within the first year, and what you're aiming for over three to five years. If you're planning a multi-year strategy, you'll still need to revisit it annually as your cohort's needs shift.

Delivery is where strategies succeed or fail

From September 2026, Ofsted's revised framework will be looking at how well your inclusion strategy is actually embedded in day-to-day practice, not just how well it reads on paper.

That means giving staff time and support to put it into practice, not just sharing the document with them. Protected time for professional development, space to reflect on pupil data, and clear expectations about what their role is in delivering the strategy will all make a difference.

Keep a close eye on the pupils the strategy is meant to help. Track whether your universal approaches are shifting attainment, attendance, wellbeing and belonging, and whether targeted interventions are reducing the specific barriers you identified at the start.

Review, adjust, and don't assume last year's approach still works

What worked for your cohort last year may not work for the cohort you have now. Build in regular points to measure outcomes against your original success criteria, report honestly on what's worked and what hasn't, and adjust your approach accordingly.

Consider pooling funding with other local schools

Schools can pool a proportion of their IMF funding with others nearby to tackle shared challenges, whether that's joint staff training, shared access to specialists such as speech and language therapists, or a shared base offering short-term targeted support across several schools. If you go down this route, it needs to be clearly reflected in your published strategy, and each school still has to publish its own strategy individually.

Where to start

If you're not sure whether your current provision gives you a strong enough baseline to build from, the inclusion audit is the place to begin. Everything else in the strategy, from your priorities to your budget alignment to your outcomes, depends on having an accurate picture of where you're starting from.