Your Child's School Now Gets £48,000 for SEND Inclusion — Here's What That Should Look Like

The headline in plain terms

From the 2026–27 academic year, every mainstream state school in England is receiving a new, ring-fenced pot of money for inclusion. The average primary school is set to receive £14,000 from the fund in 2026-27, while the average-sized secondary will receive £48,000. It is called the Inclusive Mainstream Fund (IMF), and it comes with a condition: all individual schools are required to publish an inclusion strategy statement for the academic year 2026 to 2027 and must do so by 31 December 2026.

If your child has special educational needs or disabilities (SEND), or any additional need the school is already aware of, this matters. The money is not going into the general budget, and the strategy is not an internal document. Both are things you can — and should — ask about.

Where the money comes from, and how much

The IMF is part of the government's wider SEND reforms. The average secondary school will receive around £48,000 in 2026-27 on top of its core funding allocations, the DfE said. Primary schools get less because they are smaller. Payments go directly to academies from DfE, and to maintained schools via their local authority.

The fund is significant in scale. This fund is part of £3 billion aimed at creating 60,000 new specialist places, including inclusion bases and new special-school places. The schools element alone runs at around £400 million a year and is confirmed for three years.

Crucially, it is not a one-off top-up to plug gaps in existing SEND budgets. The money is ring-fenced. It cannot disappear into the general budget, and the inclusion strategy must show how it has been spent.

What the money is meant to pay for

The DfE has told schools to plan spending against seven themes. In practice, this means the fund should be visible in the classroom, not just on a spreadsheet. Legitimate uses include:

• Small group interventions to remove ongoing barriers to learning; for example, to develop language skills or to pre-teach vocabulary to help pupils access the curriculum.
• CPD for leaders and teachers "to support the deployment of effective, early targeted smaller-group interventions for pupils who need it most".
• Teaching assistant training.
• Specialist programmes, family engagement work, and curriculum resources aimed at inclusion.

What it should not be spent on: paying for provision the school was already legally required to deliver, or absorbing it into general staffing costs unrelated to inclusion.

The inclusion strategy — and how to read yours

By 31 December 2026, every mainstream school in England must publish its inclusion strategy. This is the document parents should look for, and it should be available on the school's website alongside the SEND information report.

A well-written strategy should tell you:

• The commonly occurring needs the school has identified in its current cohort (not a generic list copied from guidance).
• How the IMF money is being spent across the seven themes.
• What the "universal offer" looks like — the classroom adjustments and support every child benefits from, before any individual plan is triggered.
• Which targeted interventions are running, who leads them, and how pupils are identified for them.
• How the school will know whether any of it is working.

If the document you find is short on specifics — lots of aspiration, no numbers, no named interventions — that is a fair question to raise with the SENCO (special educational needs co-ordinator) or at a governors' meeting. The strategy is a statutory publication for a reason.

What "inclusion bases" are, and why they might change your child's school day

The other half of this story affects families whose children currently travel out of the local mainstream school to access specialist support. The DfE is standardising the patchwork of on-site specialist units that already exists in some schools.

The term 'inclusion bases' replaces SEN unit, resourced provision, and pupil support unit. These definitions will replace the current system of resourced provisions, SEN units and schools running their own informal support units.

There will be two kinds. The guidance says that inclusion bases "typically operate on a continuum". The provision will range between support bases commissioned by schools themselves and specialist bases commissioned by local authorities. Under the reforms, pupils receiving support through new targeted plus or specialist tiers of SEND support will access this through inclusion bases.

The DfE has said inclusion bases will provide "a dedicated safe space away from busy classrooms where pupils can access targeted support that bridges the gap between mainstream and specialist provision".

The intent is that more children get specialist-level support inside their local mainstream school, rather than travelling to a separate setting. That is the theory. In practice, the rollout will be uneven. The government wants an inclusion base in every mainstream secondary but lacks basic data on what specialist facilities already exist - and Tes analysis reveals huge regional gaps in provision. Space is another constraint — many schools simply do not have a spare room to convert.

If your child currently attends a resourced provision or SEN unit, none of this removes the placement overnight. But over the next few years, the language on paperwork will change, and the way local authorities commission places will shift towards mainstream inclusion bases where they exist.

Questions worth asking your school

You do not need to wait until December 2026 for the published strategy. If you have a child on SEN Support or with an EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan), reasonable questions to put to the SENCO or headteacher this term include:

• How much has the school received from the Inclusive Mainstream Fund this year?
• Which of the seven themes are you prioritising, and why?
• What specific interventions are running that my child could access?
• Is the school planning to establish, or apply to host, an inclusion base?
• When will the inclusion strategy be published, and will parents be consulted before it is?

Most schools will welcome the questions. SENCOs have been asking for ring-fenced inclusion money for years, and this is the first time they have had it in this form. A parent who has read the guidance is an ally, not a nuisance.

What this does not solve

It is worth being honest. £48,000 is meaningful in a secondary school of a thousand pupils, but it is not transformative on its own. It does not create EHCPs, cut waiting lists for educational psychology assessments, or resolve the disputes many families are having with local authorities over specialist placements. The reforms sit alongside those problems, not on top of them.

What the IMF and inclusion bases do offer is a clearer framework — money that must be spent on inclusion, a strategy that must be published, and a nationally consistent name for the on-site specialist provision your child might one day access. For parents who have spent years piecing together informal support, that framework is worth using.

The next step, in one line

Look up your child's school website in January 2027 and read the inclusion strategy. If it is not there, or it does not say anything concrete, ask why.