By Kathryn Morgan, ASCL Leadership and Workforce Specialist

There is something reassuring about a plan. Faced with complexity, setting out priorities and actions provides clarity. Yet our reliance on plans can create problems when things closely connected in practice become separated in strategy.

I recently spoke to author and former teacher Alex Quigley about his argument that literacy should not be perceived as an addition to inclusive practice. Much of what we describe as inclusive teaching, he argues, is excellent teaching that enables pupils to access the language and curriculum of school. You can see our full discussion in our recent ASCL Policy Snapshots podcast (Connection, Not Competing: Literacy, inclusion and adaptive teaching | October 2026). 

This matters when we consider how improvement priorities accumulate. A school may, for good reasons, have separate SEND, literacy, pupil premium, teaching and learning, and CPD plans. Yet those distinctions can become unhelpful for the teacher standing in front of 30 pupils. What matters is whether pupils can access what is being taught, whether the teacher recognises when they cannot, and whether they have the knowledge and confidence to respond. 

My colleague, ASCL SEND and Inclusion Specialist Margaret Mulholland recently made a related argument about preparing new teachers to teach pupils with SEND. Simply equipping trainees with a toolkit of SEND strategies is not enough. They need to learn to notice barriers, interpret pupils’ responses and make thoughtful adaptations, becoming experts not in labels but in the pupils they teach.

Removing barriers
That distinction matters well beyond initial teacher training because teaching involves a constant stream of small but consequential decisions. Has an instruction been understood? Is the language of a task creating an unintended barrier? Does an explanation need breaking down? Would another example, a prompt, more time or a different approach help? Alex describes this as “disciplined innovation and improvisation”, in which teachers anticipate where pupils might struggle, assess what is happening and adapt accordingly. 

For me, this offers a helpful way of thinking about inclusion by design. At its heart is intentionality: considering what pupils are being asked to learn, the barriers that might limit access, and how teaching can reduce those barriers from the outset.

This does not mean anticipating every individual need, preparing multiple versions of every lesson, or matching strategies to SEND labels. It means designing for access without lowering ambition: holding high expectations while being flexible about how pupils are supported to reach them. Removing barriers should enable pupils to participate in the same ambitious learning, not create a diluted curriculum.

Professional expertise and development
However, design can only take us so far. We cannot anticipate everything that happens in the classroom. Inclusion also depends on the professional expertise to notice when access is breaking down, understand why, and respond thoughtfully.

There is an interesting parallel with Sam Gibbs and Adam Kohlbeck’s recent argument about CPD. Schools can have carefully sequenced, evidence-informed professional development yet still see little meaningful change in classrooms. Their challenge is to consider not only what teachers learn, but how new knowledge interacts with existing expertise and classroom realities.

Professional judgement sits at the heart of these arguments. Showing teachers a strategy and asking them to reproduce it may generate consistency, but responsive practice requires more. Teachers need to understand what a strategy is trying to achieve, what to notice in pupils’ responses, when it might be useful and when something different is needed. The leadership question is therefore not simply whether a plan exists or training has been delivered, but what capacity teachers are being supported to develop over time. 

Integration and connection
Education has an unfortunate tendency to respond to important priorities by creating additional things: another plan, another CPD strand, another set of strategies and another expectation for already stretched teachers. During our conversation, Alex suggested an alternative: integration. Rather than beginning by asking what else schools need to introduce, leaders might consider where existing work can be better connected. 

Literacy provides a useful example. Reading, writing, vocabulary and talk are not generic additions to the curriculum; they are fundamental to how pupils access it. A history teacher is not being asked to become an English teacher, but to understand what it means to read, write and talk successfully in history. Viewed in this way, literacy, inclusion, curriculum and professional development look less like separate priorities and more like different parts of the same endeavour. 

For ASCL, there is an important leadership dimension here. School and college leaders need the space and trust to build coherent approaches around their pupils’ needs, rather than feeling compelled to demonstrate progress through an ever-growing collection of separate plans. Leadership is about creating clarity and alignment across curriculum, professional development, inclusion and improvement priorities, while supporting teachers to develop the judgement that responsive, inclusive teaching requires.

This is not an argument against planning. It is an argument against mistaking the existence of a plan for the development of practice. If inclusion by design is to make a meaningful difference, perhaps leaders should spend less time asking what else needs to be added and more time asking how what schools already do can work better, more coherently and more inclusively, for every child.