Inclusion Bases in Mainstream Schools: Opportunity, Challenge and a Leadership Imperative

michaelgreeneducat
Jun 28
5 min read

This week, the Department for Education published its long-awaited guidance on Inclusion Bases in Schools, providing the first detailed national framework for how mainstream schools should develop specialist provision while remaining firmly committed to inclusion.

For school leaders, this is much more than a facilities document. It represents another significant step in the government's wider SEND reform programme and reinforces a central principle: mainstream schools should be increasingly equipped and supported to meet a broader range of pupils' needs, whilst ensuring specialist provision remains available for those who need it most.

What is an inclusion base?

The guidance defines an inclusion base as specialist provision located within a mainstream school for children and young people with additional needs. While many will support pupils with SEND, they may also provide targeted support for pupils with behavioural, pastoral or attendance needs.

Importantly, the DfE makes clear that an inclusion base is part of the mainstream school, not a separate provision operating alongside it. Its purpose is to strengthen inclusion, not replace it.

The guidance also recognises two broad models:

Some bases are school-commissioned (often referred to as support bases), where the school identifies need within its own cohort and develops provision accordingly.
Others are local authority commissioned (often referred to as specialist bases), where places are allocated through local authority processes for pupils with more complex or specific needs.

Understanding this distinction is important, as it influences admissions, funding, accountability and the level of specialist provision required.

Inclusion is a continuum

Perhaps the most significant feature of the guidance is the introduction of a continuum model. Rather than viewing inclusion bases as fixed units, the guidance recognises that schools may operate at different points along a continuum.

For some pupils, the base provides occasional targeted intervention while they remain predominantly in mainstream classrooms. For others, particularly those with more complex needs, the base may become their primary learning environment with carefully planned opportunities to participate in mainstream lessons and wider school life.

Crucially, the guidance encourages schools to continually review whether pupils can spend increasing amounts of time in mainstream provision wherever appropriate, whilst recognising that some pupils will require longer-term specialist support. This is a much more nuanced approach than simply asking whether a pupil is in or out of mainstream.

Six principles that every leader should know

The guidance is built around six key principles. Schools should ensure:

A whole-school approach to inclusion
High-quality curriculum design
Effective use of assessment and outcomes
Skilled leadership and workforce development
Environments designed around pupils' needs
Effective commissioning and partnership working.

Although these principles are written for schools developing inclusion bases, they are arguably characteristics of highly inclusive schools more generally.

The biggest message: inclusion starts before the base

One of the strongest messages in the document is that schools should not view an inclusion base as the starting point for becoming more inclusive. Instead, the DfE states that schools should first establish a strong whole-school inclusive culture and high-quality universal provision before creating a base. The base should complement excellent classroom practice rather than compensate for weaknesses within it. That is an important distinction. There is a danger that some schools may see specialist provision as somewhere to place pupils who struggle in mainstream lessons. The guidance firmly rejects that approach.

Belonging matters as much as attainment

Another feature is the emphasis placed upon belonging. The document repeatedly stresses that pupils accessing an inclusion base should participate fully in school life through clubs, educational visits, school performances, leadership opportunities and friendship groups.

Practical suggestions include buddy systems, reverse integration, shared activities and ensuring parents of pupils accessing the base experience exactly the same school events as everyone else. This reflects a growing understanding that inclusion is not simply about where pupils are taught. It's about whether they genuinely feel they belong.

What does this mean for school leaders?

For many schools, the guidance will prompt important strategic questions.

Do current intervention spaces genuinely promote inclusion, or have they unintentionally become places where pupils are removed from learning?
Are specialist staff working alongside classroom teachers to build universal practice, or has expertise become isolated?
Do leaders routinely evaluate how successfully pupils move between specialist support and mainstream learning?
Is the school measuring belonging, participation and independence alongside academic outcomes?

These are increasingly leadership questions rather than solely SENDCO questions.

Potential challenges: ambition must be matched by investment

Whilst the guidance provides a clear vision, many school leaders will read it through the lens of a far more immediate reality.

Across the country, mainstream schools and trusts are increasingly establishing support bases not because they have proactively chosen to do so, but because local specialist provision is simply unavailable. Lengthening waiting lists, rising levels of need and increasing pressure on special school places have left many leaders with little alternative but to develop their own in-house provision.

As Pepe Di'Iasio, General Secretary of ASCL, observed following the publication of the guidance, many schools are already doing this out of necessity rather than choice. The guidance is therefore helpful, but it cannot be viewed in isolation from the wider pressures facing the SEND system.

The financial picture is equally complex. The new Inclusive Mainstream Fund represents a significant investment of £1.6 billion over three years, designed to strengthen inclusive practice and increase the capacity of mainstream schools to meet a broader range of needs.

However, the distribution of this funding is far from uniform. As Schools Week has previously highlighted, some schools will receive substantial allocations, while others facing equally significant challenges will receive relatively modest funding. The result is that schools with very similar levels of need may have markedly different capacity to develop specialist provision.

Even where funding is available, money alone is unlikely to solve the challenge. Many schools already struggle to access educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, CAMHS professionals and specialist advisory teachers. Recruiting experienced SEND practitioners is equally difficult in many parts of the country, while many local authority support services remain under considerable pressure.

An inclusion base can only be as effective as the expertise available to support it. Without timely access to specialist services, there's a genuine risk that mainstream schools become expected to meet increasingly complex needs without the multidisciplinary support required to do so successfully. This creates an important tension at the heart of the guidance. The vision is the right one: more children should be able to succeed in high-quality mainstream education. But if schools are to become increasingly inclusive, policy ambition must be matched by sustainable funding, improved access to specialist expertise and sufficient capacity across the wider SEND system. Otherwise, there's a danger that inclusion bases become not centres of excellence, but a symptom of a system that continues to ask mainstream schools to fill gaps elsewhere.

Links to inspection

The publication also aligns closely with the direction of travel within the renewed Ofsted framework. Inspectors are placing greater emphasis on inclusion, adaptive teaching, participation and how effectively schools meet the needs of all pupils through everyday classroom practice. Schools that develop inclusion bases without strengthening universal provision are unlikely to achieve the intended impact. Those that embed specialist expertise across the whole school, however, are likely to demonstrate precisely the sort of inclusive culture that the new framework seeks to recognise.

Final thoughts

The publication of this guidance marks another milestone in England's SEND reform journey. Inclusion bases shouldn't be viewed as specialist classrooms hidden away from the rest of the school. At their best, they become centres of expertise that strengthen inclusive practice across the entire organisation. For school leaders, the challenge is clear. Success will not be measured by whether a school has an inclusion base. It will be measured by whether every child experiences high expectations, genuine belonging and access to the education they deserve. If inclusion is to move from aspiration to reality, schools and trusts need more than guidance. They need the confidence that funding, specialist expertise and wider system capacity will keep pace with the expectations being placed upon them. Ultimately, the guidance reminds us that inclusion is not a place. It's a culture.

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