Inclusive Environments for Students with Additional Needs

At its core, inclusion is the unwavering belief that every child deserves to belong, participate, and thrive in a learning community that recognises, respects, and adapts to their unique needs and strengths.

For students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), this ethos is not just beneficial; it is essential if they are to fulfil their potential. Often, their experience of school is shaped not just by what is taught, but by how they are perceived, supported, and valued by their peers, as well as the adults around them.

Inclusion vs integration

Before exploring strategies to create inclusive environments, it is vital to draw a distinction between integration and inclusion, as the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, something that can result in limited success around inclusion.

With integration, students with special educational needs or disabilities are present in the classroom, but often with minimal adjustments to teaching methods and content or the environment. The result is that they may end up feeling isolated or marginalised, unable to fully contribute to classroom life.

Inclusion, on the other hand, is about universal design that develops systems from the ground up, to accommodate the diverse needs of all learners. This has significant implications for curriculum design and delivery, teaching and learning strategies, and the classroom environment, to ensure all students can participate and succeed together.

In short, inclusion invites us to shift our mindset from “How do we fit this student into the system?” to “How do we shape our system to meet the needs of every student?”

Common barriers to inclusion

Despite our best intentions, there are sometimes systemic, cultural, and environmental barriers that can hinder meaningful inclusion for students with special educational needs and disabilities:

• • Policies may refer to inclusion, but through the lens of compliance, rather than culture, making effective practice hard to define and embed.

• • Diagnostic labels can sometimes create inaccurate assumptions about ability, limiting expectations before a student has a chance to demonstrate what they can do. Focusing on a diagnosis can also mean we miss other contextual factors that may be having an impact.

• • Some school and classroom environments do not support sensory and emotional regulation, which can be overwhelming for some students and lead to behaviour that needs support.

• • Low staff confidence or inconsistent training can result in missed opportunities for connection and early intervention.

• • In some cases, the voices of students with SEND and those who support them are missing from key conversations about how our schools function and evolve. There can be a tendency to adopt a deficit-based rather than a strengths-based mindset, which can influence how we support individual students.