A plain-English guide for headteachers, SENCOs and governors. Everything here is drawn from the Department for Education's own guidance and Ofsted's framework; the sources are at the bottom.
Publish an inclusion strategy on your school website. It is a condition of the Inclusive Mainstream Fund grant. If you write a multi-year strategy, review it every year and say so on the cover page.
Each school gets a £3,000 lump sum plus per-pupil rates (£16 per primary pupil, £14 per secondary pupil, with higher rates for pupils with low prior attainment). Anything you fund with it must sit under one of the seven principles — and the strategy must show the budgeted costs.
Since 10 November 2025 Ofsted's renewed framework reports on inclusion as a separate evaluation area on the report card, looking at how leaders embed the strategy in practice and how staff are equipped to deliver it.
The DfE asks for a report of the activity and approaches you are investing in to remove the barriers to learning and participation that occur commonly in your cohort — not a restatement of statutory duties. It sits alongside your SEND Information Report; it does not replace it. If you don't use the DfE template, you must still cover four things:
Every funded activity must fall under one of these. The DfE's advice for this first year: do fewer things well, prioritise high-quality adaptive teaching, and build on what already works.
The green tags are where Empathia is honest, evidenced provision a school can name in its strategy. Leadership and governance, and enrichment beyond the classroom, are the school's own — a platform is not governance, and we don't run clubs or trips.
Thousands of schools will pour their strategy into the same DfE skeleton. The path of least resistance is generic, statutory language — and Ofsted is looking for practice that is embedded, not laminated. A credible strategy names your commonly occurring needs, your barriers, your provision and your measures. That is exactly what our free diagnostic produces: a first draft written from your own figures, with an evidence appendix and a check for any sentence that could appear on another school's website unchanged.
| Principle | What Empathia provides | Evidence base | The measure your school holds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 · Early intervention | Pupil social stories deployable universally and as targeted support — before and without formal diagnosis. | Social Stories™ (Gray); Zones of Regulation (Kuypers) | Pre/post regulation or engagement measure for pupils receiving stories |
| 3 · Adaptive teaching | Staff CPD plus consistent, quality-assured digital SEND content, reducing classroom-to-classroom variation. The DfE names technology and CPD as permitted activity. | DfE best-practice guidance; EEF inclusive teaching guide | Learning-walk / work-scrutiny consistency; CPD completion |
| 5 · Belonging & attendance | Stories for regulation, transitions and belonging, relationally framed. | Perry (regulation); Dix (relational practice) | Attendance and persistent absence for the target group; belonging survey |
| 6 · Families & services | Family communication in up to 72 languages and a parent portal — the graduated approach explained in the languages families read. | DfE names EAL and hard-to-reach family engagement as an inclusion concern | EAL / SEND parental engagement or review-attendance rate |
| 7 · Accessible environments | Avatar-delivered visual supports and communication aids; carefully selected adapted technology. | DfE lists visual supports, communication aids and adapted technology under this principle | Accessibility / access measure for the target need group |
| 1 · Leadership 4 · Beyond the classroom | Not Empathia. Board scrutiny and accountability are the school's own; clubs, trips and cultural capital are the school's own offer. Our stories can help anxious or SEND pupils get to the trip — the trip is yours. | ||
Schools that begin before half-term will have real outcome numbers under principles 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 in the strategy they publish — not intentions. Every Empathia line comes with the measure you'd hold, because provision without an outcome reads as laminated, not lived.
DfE, Developing an inclusion strategy using the inclusive mainstream fund (updated 7 August 2026) · DfE, Inclusive mainstream fund for schools: methodology 2026 to 2027 (updated 1 July 2026) · DfE, Conditions of grant 2026 to 2027 · DfE, Inclusive mainstream fund: best practice for schools · Ofsted, Education inspection framework: for use from November 2025. Checked 3 September 2026. Figures and dates are the DfE's; if guidance changes, this page is updated.