Inclusion of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities in schools – how can local areas support schools?

This research by What Works in SEND researchers at Warwick Business School focuses on exploring the key ingredients that facilitate the inclusion of children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities in schools.

  • Theme: Achieving long-term outcomes and making a difference to lived experiences
  • Strength: Robust
  • Breadth of Impact: Promising
  • Status: Quality Assured

This research by What Works in SEND researchers at Warwick Business School focuses on exploring the key ingredients that facilitate the inclusion of children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND1) in schools. In doing this, the authors have particularly concentrated on understanding what local areas can do, to better support schools to become more inclusive, improving outcomes for children and young people with SEND and their families.

The objectives of the research were to:

  • Explore and understand the strategic local area context of schools to identify specific practice, policies and actions that facilitate inclusive practices (and the barriers);
  • Explore and understand what encourages and enables schools to be more inclusive in terms of values, culture, and behaviours in the local area context (and the barriers);
  • Explore and understand the journeys of local areas, and schools within them, towards inclusive practices and the steps they have taken to achieve this (and the barriers);
  • Gather examples of the policies and practices at a local area partnership level that help support the values, culture and practice of inclusivity.



[1] For ease of reading, we use the term ‘SEND’ to refer to disabled children, young people and children and young people with special educational needs.