What the inclusive mainstream fund means for your school's belonging data

The inclusive mainstream fund is part of the policy push to help mainstream schools support more pupils with SEND in their own settings. Funding can add places, adjustments and staff capacity, but it cannot tell you whether a pupil with SEND feels they belong in the classrooms you already run. This evidence has to come from pupils, families and staff and it is the part of a bid or spending plan that most Trusts have least of.

This article sets out what is known about the fund and what you should check before relying on it. It then covers which perception questions give a reliable read on inclusion, how to compare academies fairly, and how to turn the results into a funding case and a termly routine.

What the fund is and what to confirm before you plan around it

The fund sits within the policy direction set by the Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper (February 2026). Its stated aim is to help mainstream schools meet a wider range of needs, so that more children with SEND can learn alongside their peers rather than moving to specialist provision.

Allocations are based on pupil numbers and prior attainment and academies receive theirs directly while maintained schools receive it through the local authority. Spending has to fit the DfE’s principles of inclusion, such as inclusive leadership, early intervention, adaptive teaching and partnership with families. It cannot cover general running costs or activity a school already funds.

Before you plan around it, confirm three things. First, check your school’s current allocation and whether your Trust pools the funding centrally. Second, check that what you have in mind maps clearly to one of the principles. Third, check that it can be reflected in the inclusion strategy statement each school must publish. Conditions are set year by year, so check the latest DfE guidance before you commit to anything beyond the current year.

Why inclusion funding needs experience evidence next to attendance and attainment

Most Trusts already hold a solid set of inclusion data: the SEND register, attendance, suspensions, progress and attainment by group. These measures are essential and they all arrive after the fact. A pupil has to miss school, be sanctioned or fall behind before the data moves. None of them says how included a pupil feels on an ordinary Tuesday.

A common assumption is that a school with a high proportion of SEND pupils on roll must be inclusive. Presence is not participation. Two schools can have the same SEND percentage and very different experiences for those pupils: one where they join clubs, are asked their views and have a trusted adult, and one where they sit at the edge of lessons and spend lunchtimes in a support room. The register cannot tell those schools apart, pupil voice can.

There is a research basis for treating belonging as something that connects to later outcomes. The Education Endowment Foundation has published guidance and evidence summaries on attendance and on behaviour that treat pupils' relationships with school as a factor worth addressing and peer-reviewed work on school belonging has long linked it to engagement and attendance.

Belonging data can flag academies and cohorts at risk of rising absence, suspensions and exclusions up to 18 months before they appear in attendance or behaviour data. Belonging data gives you an earlier read than outcome data, and it works best alongside it.

Perception questions that show whether mainstream provision is working

The useful questions are specific to experience. A single "do you like school?" item will not tell you whether provision for SEND pupils is working. Ask about the things inclusive practice is meant to change.

Pupil voice

Ask whether pupils feel listened to, whether they can take part in lessons and in clubs and trips, and whether they have an adult in school they trust. Add a direct belonging item such as "I feel I belong at this school". Split results by SEND status, and by need type where cohort sizes allow. Small groups can be misleading, so set a minimum group size before you report any breakdown and combine need types if a single category is too small to read safely.

Family voice

Parents and carers of pupils with SEND see things pupils cannot report. Ask whether they feel informed about their child's support, involved in decisions, and confident the school understands their child. Ask whether communication is timely and whether they know who to contact. Responses here often explain a pupil dip: a family that feels unheard tends to be a family with a child who is struggling to feel settled.

Staff voice

Inclusion is only sustainable if the adults delivering it can keep going. Ask staff how confident they feel meeting varied needs in their classroom, whether they can get SENCO support when they need it, whether training matches what they face, and what inclusion adds to their workload. Staff who feel unsupported are a risk to the provision and to retention.

Practical choices

• Keep each survey short enough to finish in a few minutes, or response rates fall in exactly the groups you most need to hear from.
• Use accessible formats, with read-aloud and translation for pupils and families who use English as an additional language.
• Decide before launch whether responses are anonymous or named and tell respondents which. Named responses allow follow-up with individuals. Anonymous ones tend to be more candid.

Worked example: a Trust comparing inclusion across five academies

This is an illustration, not a real client. Suppose a trust runs the same termly survey in all five of its academies. Attendance for pupils with SEND looks similar across the five. Yet Year 7 pupils with SEND score noticeably lower on "I feel I belong" in two of them.

The Trust reads the result in a set order. First it checks response rates and cohort sizes. If only a handful of Year 7 SEND pupils answered in one academy, the gap may be noise, so the Trust sets that result aside until the next round. In this scenario both academies have enough responses to read with reasonable confidence.

Next it compares cohorts. Do Pupil Premium pupils with SEND score lower again? Are EAL pupils affected in the same way? Overlapping groups often explain more than any single label. In this case the dip is concentrated among Year 7 pupils with SEND who are also eligible for Pupil Premium, and it is absent from Year 8 and above.

Only then does the Trust read the targeted questions. Pupils at one academy mention lunchtimes: nowhere to go and nobody to sit with. At the other, responses focus on lessons, with pupils saying they are unsure whether they are allowed to ask for the adjustments they have been given. The first points to unstructured time and transition. The second points to how adjustments are communicated and used in class.

These responses supports different decisions in each academy. One academy could direct spending to a structured lunchtime offer and a transition buddy system for Year 7. The other could put training and SENCO time into classroom adjustments. Each action gets a named owner and a measure, for example the Year 7 SEND belonging score and the share of pupils who say they can ask for help, to be checked in next term's survey.

In Perceptions, cohort breakdowns come from the MIS, and the Trust-wide dashboard puts the five academies side by side. This removes the manual spreadsheet work in this example, so the leaders' time goes into reading the results and deciding what to do.

Turning survey results into a funding case and a spending plan

A strong evidence narrative has five parts, and each should fit in a sentence or two:

1. A baseline from perception data, with the survey date and group sizes.
2. A named need, such as Year 7 pupils with SEND reporting low belonging around unstructured time.
3. A specific intervention, with cost and owner.
4. A measure of change, stated before the work starts.
5. A review date, usually the next termly survey.

Pair this with the data you already hold. Attendance, suspensions, progress and the SEND register show what is happening and perception data shows why and where to look. When the two point the same way, your case triangulates. When they differ, as in the five-academy example where attendance looked similar, the difference is itself a finding worth presenting.

Report back honestly. Show trustees the baseline, the actions taken and the movement in the repeat survey, including where scores did not shift. A result that stays flat after a well-run intervention tells you the cause was different from the one you assumed, and a Trust that says so clearly is easier to trust with further funding. Present the data as planning information for leaders, not as a judgement on any academy.

Inspection and DfE expectations on inclusion are relevant here as context. If you reference the current Ofsted framework in a bid or board paper, check its present wording first and quote it accurately. The stronger argument is the one your own evidence makes: what pupils, families and staff told you, what you did about it and what changed.

A termly cycle for acting on inclusion data

The cycle is simple and repeats each term:

1. Measure with the same short survey, at the same point each term.
2. Segment results by cohort, including overlaps, and apply your minimum group size.
3. Share results with the staff who work with those pupils.
4. Assign a named owner to each low-scoring group, with one action and one measure.
5. Re-measure the following term and compare with the baseline.

Timing affects the quality of what you collect. Avoid exam periods and the first fortnight of term, when pupils and staff are settling and responses reflect that. Leave time between surveys to feed results back to pupils and families. When people see that their answers led to something, response rates hold up. When they hear nothing, they stop answering.

Three mistakes recur. The first is surveying without a plan to respond, which costs goodwill and gives you data nobody acts on. The second is reporting only whole-school averages, which hide exactly the cohort differences that matter for inclusion. A school can score well overall while one group scores far lower. The third is sharing results with the senior team but not with the teachers, support staff and SENCO who can change what happens in classrooms and at lunchtime.

One step to take this term before any bid or spending decision

Start by confirming the latest fund details on GOV.UK: name, purpose, allocation route, eligibility and dates, as published as of October 2026. Record the publication date of each page you rely on.

Then run a short, segmented belonging survey this autumn. Include pupils, families and staff, and make sure you can break results down for SEND and your other priority cohorts. That gives you a baseline to cite in a bid, a starting point for your spending plan and a clear comparison when you repeat the survey next term.

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