Research School Network: Personal Development for Every Pupil: Making Inclusion Explicit our ELE, Alice Pettit, demonstrates how deployment of educational equity is key in the personal development of all pupils

Imagine asking a class to discuss what makes a healthy relationship, identify careers they might be interested in, or explain how they would manage a monthly budget. These are common activities in personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education lessons and might appear to be accessible questions. But what knowledge, vocabulary, experiences and confidence are we assuming pupils already have?

Personal development is intended to prepare pupils for life beyond the classroom. Yet pupils do not all start from the same place.

The Education Endowment Foundation’s Guide to Inclusive Teaching, published in July 2026, describes inclusive teaching as supporting every child to participate and succeed, including disadvantaged pupils and pupils with SEND. It recognises that pupils may face multiple and overlapping barriers to learning. (EEF, 2026). This raises an important question for personal development:

How can we make sure that the curriculum we intend every pupil to access is genuinely accessible to every pupil?

Equity, not equality

It is tempting to think of inclusion as giving every pupil the same opportunity. However, as Lee Elliot Major and Emily Briant argue in Equity in Education, an equitable approach recognises that some pupils experience additional barriers and may therefore need different forms of support to access the same opportunities. Their equity framework challenges us to move from equality to equity and from deficit thinking to recognising pupils’ capacity and strengths. (Major and Briant, 2023). This feels particularly relevant to personal development.

A careers activity might ask pupils to identify people in their network who could help them explore a career. A work experience placement might require pupils to find an employer, make contact, travel to an unfamiliar workplace and navigate the expectations of a professional environment. A financial education lesson might assume familiarity with household bills, saving or budgeting. A discussion about relationships might draw on experiences that pupils have not had, or may not feel confident discussing. The answer is not to avoid these topics. It is to recognise the knowledge, experiences and resources we are asking pupils to bring with them.

What do we assume pupils already know?

The importance of prior knowledge is well established in educational research. Ausubel in Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View (1968) placed what learners already know at the heart of meaningful learning. More recent EEF research reinforces why this matters when we consider disadvantage. The EEF’s 2026Growing Apart research found that prior attainment is strongly associated with later attainment gaps. Earlier attainment accounted for a substantial proportion of later disadvantage gaps, although the researchers emphasise that these findings are associative rather than causal. For personal development, this prompts us to think beyond academic prior attainment.

What vocabulary, background knowledge, experiences and opportunities are we assuming pupils already have?

Making these things explicit can remove unnecessary barriers.

Inclusive does not mean less ambitious

The EEF’s new inclusive teaching model brings together universal approaches with adaptations and additional support where these are needed. The two should work alongside one another rather than being treated as separate stages. This is an important distinction. Inclusive teaching is not about creating a less ambitious personal development curriculum for some pupils.

Consider a lesson asking pupils to discuss the factors that influence healthy relationships. Rather than simplifying the question, a teacher might introduce and revisit key vocabulary, provide relevant background knowledge, model one response, allow thinking time and use structured prompts before asking pupils to discuss the issue independently.

The destination has not changed. The teacher has made the route to getting there clearer.

The same principle can apply across personal development:

Make the knowledge explicit.

Identify the vocabulary and background knowledge pupils need rather than assuming it is already secure.

Model participation.

If pupils are expected to debate, reflect, evaluate or make a decision, model what successful participation looks like.

Check for understanding so everyone participates.

Use whole-class or ​‘mass’ checks for understanding, such as mini whiteboards, retrieval questions, polls, written responses or targeted questioning, rather than relying on pupils who volunteer answers. This gives teachers information about the understanding of the whole class and creates opportunities to address misconceptions before moving on.

Consider the barrier created by the task.

Think about language, processing demands, reading and writing, confidence and sensory needs alongside the content itself. These are not strategies that need to be reserved for particular pupils. They are examples of strong teaching that can increase access for everyone.

Personal development for every pupil.

There is a particular opportunity here. Personal development can broaden pupils’ knowledge of the world, expose them to experiences and perspectives beyond their immediate circumstances, and explicitly teach skills that some pupils may have had fewer opportunities to develop.

EEF evidence on social and emotional learning, for example, supports approaches that explicitly develop skills such as decision making, social interaction and self-management. The EEF’s current Toolkit (2025)review reports positive average effects on academic outcomes alongside benefits for attitudes to learning and relationships.

So perhaps inclusive personal development starts with a deceptively simple question:

What are we assuming pupils already know, understand or have experienced?

From there, we can consider what needs to be made explicit, what barriers pupils might encounter and how we can support every pupil to participate.

The goal of inclusive personal development is not to lower the ambition of what pupils learn or experience. It is to make the knowledge, language and participation required to succeed increasingly explicit, so that every pupil has the opportunity to engage, contribute and benefit.

Further Reading

Ausubel, D. P. (1968) Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View

EEF (2026) Guide to Inclusive Teaching

EEF (2026) Growing Apart: The Evolution of the Disadvantage Gap

EEF (2025) Social and Emotional Learning Teaching and Learning Toolkit

Major, L. E. and Briant, E. (2023) Equity in Education: Levelling the Playing Field of Learning