Inclusion bases in schools: what the new guidance gets right and what schools need to think about now
Last week, the DfE published its long-awaited guidance on inclusion bases in schools. For anyone working in or alongside the SEND sector, this felt like a significant moment, not because inclusion bases are new, but because clear, nationally consistent guidance on what good looks like has, until now, been largely absent.
And the thing is, schools haven’t been waiting. They’ve been getting on with it.
This isn’t new: schools haven’t waited for the inclusion bases guidance
Long before inclusion bases became policy language, schools were creating their own responses to the same fundamental challenge: how do you genuinely include children whose needs aren’t well met by the standard mainstream classroom offer?
I experienced this first-hand. As a SENCO working in a setting well over a decade ago, we set up a Nurture Group. We did what felt right. We visited other schools running similar provision, talked to the people leading it, tried to understand what worked. What struck me then, and has stayed with me since, is that beyond the broad descriptor of “something offered alongside or instead of the mainstream class”, there was very little that was actually similar between them. Different staffing models, different referral criteria, different views on what the provision was fundamentally for. Everyone was doing their best. But without shared frameworks or expectations, “best” looked very different depending on where you were.
That’s not a criticism of any of those schools, it’s an honest reflection on what happens when a genuine need exists but the national guidance doesn’t. Schools fill the gap, with good intent, and the results are inevitably varied.
Good intent isn’t always enough
Most schools that have set up this kind of provision have done so for genuinely good reasons: to support children who experience real dysregulation in a busy mainstream classroom, or for whom the cognitive demands of the expected curriculum for their age group feel out of reach. The motivation is care: a genuine desire to make things better for that child.
But care and education are not the same thing, and the gap is where the risk sits.
What can happen, I’ve seen it, and I suspect many reading this have too, is that a child moves into a quieter, calmer, more tailored environment, and things get easier. They’re more settled. Staff feel they’re helping. And in many ways, they are. But without sustained, deliberate reflection, the ambition for that child can quietly shift. The demands reduce. The curriculum narrows. The question of what the child is working towards, and, importantly, how the rest of the school is adapting to better include them, gets pushed to the margins.
This isn’t about blame. It’s about a structural risk that exists whenever we create a separate space, however well-intentioned: the risk that the provision offers care above education, and that the harder work of adapting the mainstream offer gets overlooked in the process.
The DfE guidance makes an important point here: a strong, inclusive universal offer across the whole school is a pre-requisite for an effective inclusion base, not an afterthought. If we want to move towards a genuinely more inclusive education system, we need to be continually asking what we can do to remove barriers in the mainstream classroom, not just how we can create better provision for the children those barriers affect. Without that ongoing reflection, we risk drifting towards segregation while believing we’re doing inclusion.
For me, that reflection didn’t happen until we had been running the Nurture Group for a few years, prompted, in the end, by increasing demand for a small number of places. Standing back and looking at what we’d built, I thought ‘we’ve done this the wrong way round’. The focus on inclusive practice in the mainstream classroom should have come first, or at least in parallel with the development of the provision.
But that’s how professional learning works. It’s not about deciding we got it wrong and leaving it there, it’s about using what we’ve learned to keep moving forward. The journey towards genuinely inclusive practice is exactly that: a journey. None of us are at the destination yet.
What the inclusion bases guidance gets right
The guidance is non-statutory. It sets expectations and describes good practice, but it doesn’t mandate a particular model. Within that, there are some things it names explicitly that it’s worth paying close attention to.
Provision should operate on a continuum, ranging from children accessing the majority of mainstream classes with targeted support, through to more intensive specialist spaces. Schools should consider where their provision sits on this continuum and be actively working to increase the time learners spend in the school’s mainstream offer.
Inclusion bases must be led by a qualified teacher. They must never be used as a sanction. And the knowledge and practice developed within a base should actively flow outward into the wider school.
The guidance talks about practical steps like making sure timetables work for children moving between the base and mainstream classes, and about the specialist approaches used in the base being shared across the wider school. These aren’t radical ideas. They’re the things schools with genuinely effective provision are already doing. The guidance gives the sector a framework to support consistency across the country.
The schools already doing inclusion bases brilliantly
In reality, there’s some extraordinary practice out there, in schools that have been running this kind of provision for years and have genuinely cracked it.
The schools that do it well tend to share a few things in common. The inclusion base isn’t a separate world, it’s a visible, celebrated part of the school. Staff across the building know what happens there. The specialist knowledge developed in the base reaches mainstream classrooms, and the insights flow both ways. Children who use the base feel like they belong to the whole school. They’re on trips, they’re in assemblies, they’re known. And school leaders talk about the provision not as a support for “those children” but as part of what makes their school genuinely inclusive for everyone.
And there’s something else the spotlight schools in the guidance have in common. They’ve all identified where they’re going next. None of them are sitting still thinking “we’ve cracked it”. That’s probably the most telling sign of genuinely great, inclusive practice.
What this means in practice
If you’re leading a school, or leading SEND within one, the guidance gives you a useful moment to pause and reflect, not as a compliance exercise, but as a genuine professional conversation.
Where does your provision sit on the continuum? Is the specialist knowledge in your base actively reaching the mainstream? Is movement between settings planned and purposeful, or is it ad hoc? And what are you doing to improve the mainstream offer for the children who currently need the base, so that over time, fewer children need it in the same way?
These aren’t easy questions. They’re also not questions any school needs to answer on its own. Some of the most valuable professional development happening in our regional networks right now is schools working together, being honest about what’s working and what isn’t, and building shared understanding of what genuinely inclusive practice looks like in their own community context.
That peer reflection, the kind of visit I did years ago when we set up our Nurture Group, but with a clearer shared framework to compare against, is exactly what the sector needs more of right now. Not to find a single model to copy, but to build the collective knowledge of what good looks like and hold each other to it.
A final thought about inclusion bases
The sector has needed a shared framework for this for years. It gives schools a shared language and a set of principles to work from. But guidance doesn’t change practice, people do. The schools that will use this well are the ones that see it as a starting point for an honest conversation, not a checklist to work through.
At Whole School SEND, our Regional SEND Teams are already having these conversations with schools. We have webinars coming in the autumn term, plus previous webinar recordings to support you to set up and run an inclusion base. Our online CPD units are there to help classroom staff develop their inclusive practice.
Great practice exists. It’s finding it, sharing it and learning from it that makes the difference.
Whole School SEND delivers the DfE-funded Universal SEND Services professional development programme as part of nasen. To connect with your Regional SEND Lead or find out more about our support, visit wholeschoolsend.org.uk
