Nessy

‘Inclusive by design’ has quickly become one of the defining phrases within the government's SEND reforms and the new Inclusive Mainstream Fund (IMF) guidance.

But while the direction of travel is becoming clearer, many school leaders are now asking the same question:

What does inclusive practice actually look like day to day in mainstream classrooms?

As we explored in our previous article, Inclusive Mainstream Fund 2026: What Schools Need to Know About Inclusion Strategies, the government's SEND reforms are encouraging schools to take a more proactive approach to inclusion, identifying and addressing barriers to learning earlier.

The Department for Education's guidance places strong emphasis on adaptive teaching, early intervention, accessibility, and strengthening the universal provision available to all learners. Alongside this, schools will be expected to publish inclusion strategies by December 2026, outlining how they identify and respond to the needs within their cohort.

For many schools, this highlights what they have already been feeling for years: intervention is coming too late. Instead, support is increasingly expected to be embedded into the everyday classroom experience - available earlier, delivered more consistently, and accessible to a wider range of learners.

Inclusion Is No Longer Separate from Teaching

Historically, support for pupils with additional needs has often relied heavily on specialist intervention once difficulties became more significant.

The challenge is that this model is becoming harder to sustain.

Schools are balancing increasing levels of need, stretched specialist services, growing SENDCo workloads, and rising expectations around evidence-informed practice. At the same time, there is growing recognition that pupils benefit most when barriers are addressed early, before confidence and engagement begin to decline.

This is why current guidance places such a strong focus on strengthening support that is available to all learners.

In practice, this means thinking carefully about how teaching, curriculum design, classroom environments, and literacy support can be made more accessible from the outset - not only for pupils with identified SEND, but for all learners who may need additional scaffolding at different points in their education.

Why Literacy Often Becomes the First Barrier

Literacy sits at the heart of inclusive practice.

Every child deserves the opportunity to access learning with confidence. Yet for many pupils, literacy difficulties can become a barrier long before additional support is put in place. When children struggle to read, they often struggle to access the wider curriculum. Over time, this can affect participation, confidence, attendance, wellbeing, and independence.

The DfE's Reading Framework highlights the importance of structured, explicit teaching alongside early identification and targeted support. Similarly, guidance from the Education Endowment Foundation continues to reinforce the value of evidence-informed literacy approaches, particularly for pupils who may struggle to access traditional teaching methods.

For schools developing their inclusion strategies, literacy is becoming increasingly important -  not just as an attainment priority, but as a key part of creating more inclusive classrooms.

What Inclusive Literacy Practice Looks Like

Across schools, inclusive literacy provision is taking many different forms.

Some are investing in more structured approaches to phonics and reading intervention. Others are strengthening small-group support, pre-teaching vocabulary, or creating more consistent home-school learning pathways. Increasingly, schools are also exploring how adaptive digital tools can help provide personalised support while reducing pressure on specialist teams.

What matters most is not whether support happens inside or outside the classroom, but whether it is responsive, accessible, and sustainable.

This is one reason many schools are moving towards approaches that combine universal and targeted provision more closely together. Rather than waiting for pupils to ‘fall behind’ before intervention begins, support can be embedded earlier and adjusted as needs change.

Bridging the Gap Between Policy and Practice

Nessy's Universal Literacy Offer was designed around many of these same principles.

As schools look to strengthen both their universal offer and targeted provision, many are seeking approaches that are evidence-based, scalable, and sustainable within the realities of mainstream education.

Grounded in the Science of Reading and developed over more than 25 years, the Nessy literacy suite enables schools to provide structured, adaptive literacy support that can be delivered across both universal and targeted provision.

Tools such as Hairy Reading, Dyslexia Quest, Nessy Reading & Spelling, and Understanding Dyslexia help schools combine early identification, personalised intervention, independent learner support, and staff development within one connected literacy pathway.

Importantly, the approach is designed to work within the realities of mainstream education, supporting teaching assistants, non-specialist staff, and classroom teachers to deliver evidence-informed literacy support without relying solely on specialist intervention.

Building Sustainable Support

One of the clearest themes emerging from the SEND reforms is the need for approaches that are both scalable and measurable.

Schools are increasingly being asked to demonstrate how they remove barriers to learning, strengthen universal provision, support early intervention, improve accessibility, and evidence impact across their cohort.

At the same time, many leaders are trying to balance these expectations against workload pressures, staffing challenges, and limited specialist capacity.

This is why sustainable systems matter.

Approaches that provide built-in assessment, adaptive learning pathways, progress monitoring, and opportunities for independent practice can help schools deliver more consistent support while also strengthening their wider inclusion strategy.

Looking Ahead

The shift towards ‘inclusive by design’ practice is not about adding more layers of intervention onto already stretched systems. It is about rethinking how support is built into everyday teaching so that more learners can access success earlier.

For many schools, literacy is becoming a central part of that conversation.

As inclusion strategies begin to take shape across the sector, schools are increasingly exploring how structured, evidence-informed literacy approaches can help strengthen both universal and targeted provision, while creating learning environments where every learner feels supported, included, and able to thrive.

Nessy's Universal Literacy Offer was developed to help schools put these principles into practice. Combining structured literacy instruction, adaptive learning pathways, screening, intervention, and staff development, it provides a connected approach to strengthening literacy support across the school.

Learn how the Universal Literacy Offer supports early intervention, adaptive teaching, and accessible literacy support across your school.