Every September starts with the same conversation. New classes, new information and new names to learn. Somewhere in the first fortnight, someone will say that this year’s cohort feels more complex than the last.
This September also comes with a deadline. Under the Department for Education’s guidance for the Inclusive Mainstream Fund, schools must publish an inclusion strategy statement by 31 December 2026, setting out the commonly occurring barriers within their cohort, what they have invested to alleviate them and what they expect that investment to achieve.
The DfE’s framing is worth noticing. It asks schools to describe their universal offer and expects this to include high-quality teaching within a curriculum designed for all learners.
The Education Endowment Foundation’s Guide to Inclusive Teaching, published in July 2026, places five approaches at the centre of universal provision: explicit instruction, effective feedback, scaffolding that builds independence, positive relationships and calm classrooms.
The guide is also direct about what can go wrong. Well-intentioned adaptations can reduce challenge and lower expectations. Adaptation should usually intensify good teaching rather than change the nature of the lesson.
That is a design responsibility as well as a teaching one.
Teachers adapt constantly.
Some adaptations are built into curriculum planning. Others happen live, when a teacher sees pupils stall over an explanation, idea or chunk of text. Further changes are made afterwards, when the lesson is reviewed and improved for next time.
Alex Galvin, Dan Belcher, Margaret Mulholland and Dylan Wiliam describe these as proactive, interactive and retroactive adaptations in their SSAT paper on adaptive teaching and formative assessment.
All three matter. Responsive teaching will always be necessary because no plan can anticipate everything that will happen in a classroom.
The timing of adaptation still tells us something important about the universal offer. When predictable barriers are addressed only after pupils have struggled, teachers are required to solve access problems in the moment that might have been reduced through curriculum design.
This is not a criticism of teachers. It is an invitation to look further upstream.
Where did the difficulty begin? Was it located solely within the learner, or did something within the curriculum, explanation or task make the intended learning unnecessarily difficult to reach?
Every pupil encounters the curriculum through language.
They use language to follow explanations, interpret questions, understand texts, connect new knowledge to what they already know, participate in discussion and communicate their thinking.
This is true in every subject. It is also easy to underestimate because teachers with secure subject knowledge process its language automatically. We may no longer notice the dense sentence, the ambiguous instruction, the assumed background knowledge or the relationship between ideas that has not been made explicit.
For a pupil, any of these can obstruct the route to the disciplinary thinking the lesson was designed to develop.
Look again at the EEF’s five universal approaches with this in mind. Every one of them is transacted through language. Language is not an additional strategy. It is the medium through which instruction, feedback, scaffolding and relationships operate.
At EAL Inclusive, this sits at the centre of our Designing Access work:
Access to ambitious learning requires us to identify where language is functioning as a barrier to disciplinary thinking.
This requires teachers to see the pupil, the curriculum and the language demands operating within it. A difficulty that appears to sit with the learner may tell us something important about the way knowledge has been explained, represented or assessed.
The response is not to make the curriculum easier.
Teachers need to distinguish between the language that is essential to the subject and language that makes access unnecessarily difficult. Essential disciplinary language must be made visible and taught. Ambiguity, unnecessary complexity and unspoken assumptions can be addressed without reducing the intellectual ambition of the lesson.
The important language stays. What changes is the teaching around it.
Schools already contain a great deal of adaptive expertise. Teachers pre-teach vocabulary, model responses, break instructions into stages, use visual representations and provide scaffolds.
The presence of these strategies does not, on its own, tell us whether access has been designed effectively.
A sentence stem may support one piece of disciplinary thinking while restricting another. An adapted text may improve immediate comprehension while removing the vocabulary pupils need to learn. A visual may clarify an abstract idea or add another layer of information to process.
The quality of an adaptation depends on the barrier it is intended to address, the learning it must preserve and what happens as pupils become more independent.
This is why inclusive curriculum design cannot be reduced to a list of techniques. The professional thinking underneath the adaptation matters.
Teachers need to understand:
The sequence, tools and professional learning that support this analysis form part of the developing Designing Access framework. Our work with schools is examining how this can become a sustainable part of curriculum planning, teaching and review rather than another set of resources added to teachers’ workload.
The inclusion strategy deadline creates an opportunity to look beneath descriptions of existing provision.
Leaders might consider:
These are questions about the quality and consistency of the universal offer. They cannot be answered fully by counting interventions, resources or pupils receiving additional support.
They require schools to look closely at what is being taught, how pupils encounter it and what happens when access begins to break down.
During this academic year, EAL Inclusive is developing the evidence base behind Designing Access through sustained work with teachers and schools.
We are interested in what changes when teachers become more precise about the relationship between the learner, the curriculum and its language demands. We are also examining how this affects proactive planning, responsive teaching, pupil access and the preservation of appropriate challenge.
This work draws on classroom experience, research and collaboration. It has also been strengthened by the thinking shared across Discovery Schools Academy Trust’s Belonging by Co-design conference, including Margaret Mulholland’s work on inclusion and Soofia Amin’s contribution to our curriculum design work.
The next stage is to test, refine and evidence the process carefully.
The universal offer is something a school designs. This term is a good place to look closely at how.
If your school or trust is reviewing its universal offer or developing its inclusion strategy, email anna@ealinclusive.com to discuss the Designing Access work and the emerging evidence base.
Anna Leaman is the founder of EAL Inclusive, which works with multi-academy trusts and international schools on inclusive curriculum design and multilingual literacy. Designing Access is an evolving programme of research, professional learning and curriculum development led by EAL Inclusive.
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