Research School Network: Our Graduated Response: A whole school approach Phil Stock talks through a school’s move towards a whole school model of how to support pupils with different levels of need.

Where the Graduated Response comes from?

The SEND Graduated Response emerged as part of the broader evolution of inclusive education practices, particularly in response to the need for a structured approach to identifying and supporting children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

Rooted in the SEND Code of Practice, the model emphasises a tiered or ​‘graduated’ approach to providing increased levels of support based on rising levels of need.

Most iterations of the Graduated Response begin with high-quality teaching and universal strategies, often referred to as Wave 1.

They progress to wave 2, targeted interventions for those needing additional support, usually still within the classroom.

The typical model culminates in wave 3 interventions – highly personalised, specialist supports for children with significant needs that tend to occur through withdrawal.

The Graduated Response often remains confined within SEND.

How we have shaped our own Graduated Response

At Greenshaw High School, we’ve developed our own version of the Graduated Response, but one that serves as a school-wide framework to guide how we use deliberate strategies and interventions to intensify support in response to growing levels of need.

Our model is designed to extend beyond SEND, shaping how we allocate our limited resources and approach inclusion as an entire school community.

This model then articulates our approach to inclusion, outlining what it means in practice, who provides the support, and where it comes from. It demonstrates to our staff that inclusion means both inside and outside the classroom, benefiting all pupils, whether they have additional SEND or not.

If staff can see the bigger picture, they can understand how their individual role contributes to the overall organisational aims.

Unlike the traditional three-wave approach, our model features five stages, enabling a more nuanced and tailored response to individual needs. Like the tiered or wave model, it begins with universal interventions for all pupils, before progressing to increasingly specialised strategies and approaches.

Higher stages involve a broader network of staff and external professionals to address complex needs. Our approach is also additive – each stage includes supports from the previous level.

While the wave model implies one intervention stops as another begins, our Graduated Response shows how all lower level interventions continue as we explore what comes next.

What our model looks like in practice

Level 0

This is our universal provision. The idea of a universality is important: it signals that there are many things we do in all classrooms that should be considered interventions.

Our powerful classroom routines, for example, such as meeting and greeting pupils, or our relational approach to managing pupil behaviour, are deliberate strategies designed to anticipate the needs of some of our most vulnerable pupils and decrease the chances of them needing additional support further down the line.

These strategies help all our pupils to succeed with their learning, but they particularly support our most vulnerable.

Level 1

The next stage of our Graduated Response is Level 1, effectively a more targeted classroom approach that uses the same strategies and approaches as the universal provision, but with greater intensity for those most in need.

This is what we mean by the Focus Five. Now in its fourth year, the Focus Five approach is firmly embedded in our classrooms and provides class teachers and form tutors with a low cost, high impact way to meet the needs of their most vulnerable pupils every lesson, every day. We will look at the evolution of the Focus Five approach in subsequent blogs.

Level 2

Level 2 builds on these classroom-focused stages, adding further strategies and approaches from outside the classroom.

To identify pupils who need extra support, we developed the idea of The Hundred – shorthand for the 20 or so pupils in each year group requiring school-wide nurture and interventions to succeed academically and beyond. Details on how we identify The Hundred, academic and pastoral supports, and the accountability framework for their progress will be covered in a later blog.

The focus so far has largely been within the classroom – the strategies and supports that teachers and tutors adopt to support vulnerable pupils to build a positive self-conception and achieve success in lessons.

Levels 3 and 4

Levels 3 and 4 recognise that for a smaller cohort of our pupils, this level of support will still not be quite enough to meet their complex needs.

This is where more individualised plans are created and overseen by our recently appointed specialist head of year, who works with professionals inside and outside the school to develop appropriately bespoke plans.

Inclusion Management Team – the glue that binds everything together

Central to the whole structure of our Graduated Response is the evolution of our Inclusion Management Team (IMT). While we have always had some version of an inclusion meeting, in the last couple of years we’ve developed a much more robust approach to the way we share information about our vulnerable pupils and work collaboratively to problem-solve and identify the right support for them.

IMT comprises senior leaders, the SENCO, the attendance lead, the deputy DSL and other specialists who meet weekly to review referrals and evaluate the progress of existing plans.

Developing our Graduated Response

The development of our Graduated Response has enabled us to have absolute clarity across the school over where all the different supports and interventions that we have sit within the overall structure.

It has enabled us to be much more focused with our strategy for supporting our most vulnerable pupils at every level of need. But more than this, it has defined what we mean when we talk about being an inclusive school.

It adopts a practical, purposeful approach to managing finite resources to meet the needs of pupils with SEND, to an organisational understanding of what it means to support all pupils to be successful, but some with greater intensity at different points to get there.

Developing our Graduated Response has brought clarity to how ​‘all’ supports and interventions fit within our school’s structure, allowing us to focus strategically on supporting vulnerable pupils at every level of need.

More than this, it defines our vision of inclusion: a practical, purposeful approach to allocating finite resources, ensuring all pupils can succeed, with some requiring a greater intensity of support at different stages inside and outside the classroom to get there.