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It’s been clear since the reforms were first announced that ministers believe having more inclusion bases in mainstream schools can play a significant role in solving the special educational needs and disabilities crisis.

Inclusion bases are seen not only as a way of better meeting the needs of pupils with SEND but also a method for driving down spending on transport costs by having more children educated closer to home.

The stated aim is for every secondary school to have a base and for the same number of places to be created in primary schools.

And with the government publishing guidance on inclusion bases yesterday, we now know more about what those bases are going to look like and how the government wants them to work.

Inclusion bases guidance

So have the concerns that school leaders expressed in the run-up to the release of this guidance been allayed? I think the picture is mixed.

Some in the sector have found it jarring that a drive to inclusion can be best achieved by making sure all schools have separate bases where pupils with SEND can go. Indeed, there have been fears that this approach could actually represent exclusion in its “worst sense”.

And I have also heard from experts that there is another danger within these reforms: by creating new types of bases and new tiers of support (targeted, targeted plus and specialist) for pupils with SEND, the sector may focus its attention solely on the additional steps it can take to make mainstream schools more inclusive, rather than sufficiently thinking about the universal offer available to all pupils and a whole-school approach to inclusion.

In fairness to the Department for Education, it has tried to address these fears. It sets out how these settings can be either specialist or support bases, and encourages schools to prioritise movement towards models of inclusion that support children and young people to spend more time in mainstream classes.

It also states that schools should focus on developing an inclusive and high-quality universal offer across the whole school before setting up an inclusion base, and stresses that bases must never be used as a sanction or as a way of removing pupils from the classroom.

Funding fears

But if I were a school leader, my burning questions this morning would be: can we afford this? What will our base teach? How will we be held accountable for what is delivered?

On these points, the DfE guidance might do little to reassure them.

On funding, Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has already indicated that headteachers are “not convinced that the government has allocated enough money to deliver the massive expansion of SEND support in mainstream education it envisages”.

Meanwhile, on curriculum, the government guidance makes it clear that inclusion bases should be ambitious for pupils, and it emphasises the aspiration that the education follows the mainstream curriculum as closely as possible.

However, the curriculum review has been widely criticised in the sector for not doing enough to build inclusivity into the core of what schools teach: as ����Vlog revealed earlier this year, critics have suggested that the government SEND reforms have not included significant enough change or flexibility on the curriculum and qualification routes schools can offer.

And in terms of accountability, there are already major concerns about how Ofsted is inspecting schools on attainment under its new report card framework.

I wonder whether the DfE has almost boxed itself and schools in by attempting to reform SEND provision after changes to Ofsted inspection have been made and a curriculum review has been carried out?

The government’s mantra throughout has been that high academic standards and inclusion “are two sides of the same coin”.

This works very well as a political soundbite for a government needing to reform the system and not wanting to appear soft on standards.

But if schools in the post-SEND reform world are still facing the same funding pressures, the same pressure for academic success, and broadly the same curriculum expectations, then the question is: will inclusion bases really be a solution to help schools become more inclusive, or simply another very difficult expectation and another way to potentially fall down?