Inclusion in Schools
Beyond the Dashboard: Evidencing Inclusion, Safety and Belonging at secondary school level
The most difficult question facing secondary-school leaders in 2026 may not be whether they have enough data. It may be whether they are asking the right questions of it.
Schools now possess an extraordinary volume of information about pupils: attendance, behaviour, assessment, safeguarding records, SEND provision, exclusions, destinations, pastoral contacts, parental communications and increasingly sophisticated digital-platform data. Yet a pupil can be simultaneously visible in a school's information systems and invisible in the experience that matters most: whether they feel safe, known, included, challenged and able to participate.
This distinction matters particularly for pupils whose circumstances create barriers to learning. Disadvantage, SEND, caring responsibilities, family instability, poor mental health, social care involvement, poverty, discrimination or online vulnerability do not operate as neat categories. They intersect. A pupil may have 94% attendance, be making broadly expected academic progress and have no current safeguarding referral, while nevertheless spending every break alone, avoiding particular lessons, experiencing online harassment at night and quietly disengaging from school.
The challenge for secondary schools, therefore, is to move from counting provision to evidencing lived experience. This reflection on the challenge we face as school leaders draws particularly on EEF evidence reviews on SEND, metacognition, social and emotional learning and implementation; DfE's 2026 Keeping Children Safe in Education; DfE attendance guidance and 2025/26 attendance statistics; and the emerging 2026 education-inspection evidence base. (EEF)
Progress must mean more than attainment
Academic outcomes remain indispensable. They tell us whether pupils are learning and whether gaps are closing. But attainment data alone cannot adequately evidence the progress of pupils facing barriers to learning.
The Education Endowment Foundation's evidence on metacognition and self-regulation is instructive. Its synthesis of 355 studies identifies these approaches as high-impact and particularly relevant to disadvantaged pupils, while emphasising that pupils need explicit teaching of strategies for planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning. (EEF)
This suggests that a sophisticated picture of progress should include not only what pupils achieve but how increasingly independently they learn. For a pupil with SEND, for example, progress might include increased independence, improved self-advocacy, greater willingness to attempt challenging work or reduced dependence on adult prompting. For a young carer, it might involve sustained engagement despite considerable responsibilities outside school.
The EEF's work on SEND is particularly important here. Its evidence review stresses that pupils with SEND are entitled not simply to achievement but to provision that supports both achievement and enjoyment of school. (EEF)
That phrase—enjoyment of school—should provoke leadership reflection. How many school dashboards can demonstrate it?
Schools should therefore triangulate attainment and progress data with pupil voice, work scrutiny, curriculum participation, intervention records and qualitative evidence. Crucially, the question should be: What changed for this pupil as a consequence of what we did?
That is a much more demanding question than Did the intervention happen?
Participation is the missing middle
Between attendance and attainment lies participation.
A pupil can attend school without meaningfully participating in it. They can be physically present but socially isolated, routinely silent, excluded from enrichment, reluctant to contribute in lessons or absent from the informal life of the school.
This is where pupil experience needs to become a leadership evidence source rather than an occasional consultation exercise.
Schools should be able to answer questions such as:
· Who participates in clubs, trips, student leadership and enrichment?
· Who is represented in positions of responsibility?
· Which pupils report having a trusted adult?
· Which groups are less likely to contribute in lessons?
· Who is repeatedly removed from learning through internal exclusion, isolation or behaviour processes?
· Which pupils are over-represented in sanctions and under-represented in celebration?
· Do pupils with SEND, disadvantaged pupils and those experiencing vulnerability report the same sense of belonging as their peers?
Social and emotional learning research provides a useful foundation. The EEF's synthesis identifies positive effects not only on academic outcomes but on attitudes to learning and social relationships, with evidence suggesting particularly promising effects for secondary-age pupils. (EEF)
This matters because belonging is not a decorative feature of school culture. It is part of the conditions under which learning takes place.
The strongest evidence of inclusion will therefore be convergent evidence: quantitative patterns that are supported—or challenged—by what pupils actually say and experience.
Safeguarding in an AI-shaped childhood
The safeguarding question has become substantially more complicated in 2026.
The publication of Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, now in force in England, makes clear that safeguarding expectations apply to all school staff and that online safety remains an integral part of safeguarding rather than a specialist technical issue. (GOV.UK)
But compliance with KCSIE is not the same thing as readiness for the realities pupils encounter online.
AI has changed the nature of online harm. The issue is no longer simply whether pupils encounter inappropriate content. Generative systems can produce convincing misinformation, manipulate images, facilitate impersonation, generate sexualised material, intensify bullying and create new forms of coercion and exploitation. The boundary between a school-based incident and an online incident has effectively disappeared.
Government action in 2026 reflects the speed of this change. The national response has specifically highlighted AI-related risks, deepfakes and the need for stronger protection from harmful online content. (GOV.UK) The DfE's safe-use-of-generative-AI materials also identify safeguarding, ethics and data risks as issues requiring staff understanding and mitigation. (GOV.UK)
The question for school leaders is therefore not, Have staff completed online-safety training? It is, Could staff recognise an AI-mediated safeguarding incident if it presented to them tomorrow?
Training should increasingly use realistic scenarios: an intimate image manipulated by AI; a pupil being blackmailed with a fabricated image; a chatbot relationship becoming emotionally coercive; a pupil using generative AI to target another child; or misinformation being deliberately deployed to intimidate a vulnerable pupil.
The test of safeguarding culture is not whether the policy contains the right terminology. It is whether the adult closest to the child knows what to notice, what to say, what not to promise, and when to escalate.
Attendance is a symptom, not a diagnosis
Attendance data is arguably the most powerful early-warning system available to secondary schools—but only if leaders resist the temptation to treat absence as the problem itself.
The national picture is sobering. In autumn 2025/26, 21.53% of pupils in English secondary schools were persistently absent, compared with 21.09% the previous year. Overall absence among FSM-eligible pupils remained almost twice that of pupils not eligible for FSM. (Explore Education Statistics) These numbers should not simply trigger more attendance letters.
The statutory attendance guidance explicitly expects schools to identify and remove barriers and to work with families and partners where difficulties extend beyond the school gates. (GOV.UK) The emerging inspection evidence base similarly expects leaders to analyse attendance for different groups, identify causes, intervene early and make appropriate adaptations for pupils facing barriers such as SEND, disadvantage, social-care involvement and caring responsibilities. (GOV.UK) Attendance should therefore be analysed as a pattern of experience.
Does absence cluster around particular lessons? Mondays? Certain teachers? Assessment periods? Unstructured times? Particular year groups? Particular subjects? Is there a relationship with bullying incidents, sanctions, anxiety, SEND needs or changes in family circumstances?
Even the apparently positive statistic of improved attendance can conceal an inclusion problem if improvement is achieved through approaches that increase anxiety or alienate families.
The most useful attendance conversation is consequently not, Why isn't this pupil attending? but, What is happening in this pupil's experience of school that makes attendance difficult—and what can we change?
Sustainable leadership requires subtraction as well as addition
There is a final paradox. Expectations around safeguarding, inclusion, attendance, SEND, AI, curriculum quality and accountability continue to expand, while leadership capacity does not. The answer cannot be another layer of initiatives.
EEF research on implementation emphasises the importance of behaviours, contextual factors and a structured process for implementing change effectively. Its guidance argues that what matters is not simply selecting an attractive intervention but embedding it successfully within the realities of the organisation. (EEF)
For leadership teams, this means asking a harder question: What will we stop doing?
A sustainable school needs a limited number of strategic priorities, clearly defined responsibilities and reliable routines for reviewing impact. Safeguarding, attendance, inclusion and curriculum cannot operate as separate improvement projects. The same pupil may appear in all four.
Leadership capacity is therefore strengthened when systems are joined up.
A weekly attendance meeting that identifies a pupil experiencing school refusal should connect intelligently with pastoral, SEND, safeguarding and curriculum information rather than generating four parallel interventions. Similarly, AI safeguarding should not become another isolated training module; it should sit within digital literacy, RSHE, behaviour, relationships and staff professional learning.
The aim should be organisational coherence: fewer initiatives, stronger routines and better use of existing evidence.
What would convincing evidence of inclusion actually look like?
Perhaps the most important question is this last one.
What evidence would persuade us that all pupils can thrive and participate fully in school life?
It would not be a single dashboard. It would be a balanced evidence set showing:
1. Progress: pupils from different groups make strong academic and personal progress, with gaps reducing where appropriate.
2. Participation: pupils participate in enrichment, leadership, trips, classroom discussion, careers education and wider school life in broadly equitable ways.
3. Belonging: pupil voice demonstrates that pupils feel known, respected and safe, including those who are least likely to volunteer their views.
4. Attendance: attendance improves because barriers are understood and addressed, rather than simply because pressure has increased.
5. Safeguarding: pupils know how to seek help and staff can recognise both established and emerging forms of harm—including AI-enabled harms.
6. Inclusion: reasonable adjustments and adaptations are visible in everyday classroom practice, not merely in individual plans.
7. Experience: qualitative evidence demonstrates that pupils facing disadvantage, SEND or vulnerability experience the school as a place in which they can succeed rather than merely a place they are accommodated.
8. Sustainability: improvement does not depend on heroic individual leaders or pastoral staff working beyond reasonable capacity.
Ultimately, the strongest evidence of an inclusive secondary school may be found in the pupils who are easiest to overlook. Not the pupil who is visibly successful. Not the pupil whose attendance is already excellent. Not the pupil who confidently completes a survey.
But the pupil who is quiet, intermittently absent, anxious, disadvantaged, neurodivergent, caring for someone at home, navigating online pressures or simply unsure whether school is really for them.
If our systems can identify that pupil early, listen to them accurately, adapt intelligently and demonstrate sustained improvement in their experience, then we are doing more than satisfying accountability. We are evidencing inclusion and today, that may be the most meaningful test of school effectiveness: not whether every pupil fits successfully into the system, but whether the system is capable of changing sufficiently to allow every pupil to thrive.
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