Research School Network: Inclusion by Design Phil Stock explains how the school created a framework for structuring teaching so all pupils can achieve, thrive and belong.

Over recent years, it became clear that if we, Greenshaw High School, were to realise our ambition of being a truly inclusive school where every pupil can achieve, thrive and belong, we needed to redesign our Teaching and Learning framework from the ground up.

Our Inclusion by Design model is built on a simple principle: that every pupil can succeed when everyday classroom teaching is well structured, inclusive and responsive to need. This places the focus on what happens in every lesson, for every pupil.

The EEF Guidance Report for Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools provides a useful starting point for this kind of work. In particular, it emphasises three areas:

• creating a positive and supportive environment for all pupils
• developing a secure understanding of pupils’ needs through the graduated approach, and
• ensuring access to high quality teaching for all pupils.

Informed by these recommendations, our Inclusion by Design framework is organised around three interrelated strands:

• Powerful Routines
• 100% Participation and
• Adaptive Expertise.

These strands work together to remove barriers to learning and participation and to secure ambitious outcomes for all pupils.

The following table highlights how each of these three components of high-quality teaching is necessary to create inclusive classrooms and what is the likely result when one or more component is missing from the teaching.

Each strand is underpinned by 12 teaching strategies, making 36 in total. Some are clearly defined practices. Some are rooted in values. Others are principles that are interpreted differently across subjects.

Together, they create consistency across classrooms and ensure fairness of expectation. They also support a relational approach to teaching and learning and strengthen teachers’ professional decision making.

This blog sets out the thinking behind our Inclusion by Design framework, with the aim of contributing to wider conversations about inclusive teaching and school improvement in this important and often challenging aspect of school leadership.

Powerful Routines: Securing consistency and high expectations

Powerful Routines create calm, predictable and purposeful classrooms. They are our most heavily codified and resourced strategies and are considered so important that they feature in almost every lesson.

In the second week of each half term, teachers and classroom support staff practise these routines in small, cross-curricular coaching groups led by our coaching team. Regardless of role or experience, all staff rehearse these strategies to support one another and sustain a whole-school culture.

Shared practices such as Threshold, Show Me, Do Now, Daily Check-In and Call and Connect help clarify expectations for pupils and reduce uncertainty.

Because these routines are used consistently across the school, pupils experience coherence from lesson to lesson. This consistency is particularly important for those more vulnerable pupils who benefit more from structure and stability.

Powerful Routines ensure that high standards are collective, not dependent on individuals.

100% Participation: Ensuring every pupil is thinking and involved

100% Participation ensures that every pupil is actively thinking and actively involved in the lesson. The strategies are less tightly defined than our routines and are rooted more in shared values than fixed processes.

As with routines, teachers and classroom support staff develop their understanding in cross-curricular groups. However, this work focuses more on exploring scenarios than rehearsing specific techniques. Consistency comes from shared values rather than identical practice.

In our model, participation is both cognitive and social. Pupils are expected to think, articulate and refine their understanding. They should also feel welcomed, safe and included as they do so.

Strategies such as Wait Time Plus, Connect Before Correct, Narrate That and Make the Weather strengthen academic engagement. They also support de-escalation, co-regulation and maintain a positive classroom climate.

No pupil is passive, peripheral or invisible in our classrooms.

Adaptive Expertise: Responding to need without lowering ambition

Adaptive Expertise is the strand most open to teacher and subject discretion. It is concerned with ensuring that all pupils can access ambitious objectives and achieve success.

It focuses on teacher decision-making. Teachers notice, diagnose and respond to barriers to learning in real time through a range of adaptive strategies. These are useful for all pupils but essential for some.

Teachers are expected to identify misconceptions, gaps in knowledge and moments of pupil uncertainty, and to adapt deliberately without lowering ambition.

Given its subject-specific nature, this strand is led by subject leaders in Subject Learning Communities. These consist of six extended Professional Growth sessions, one per half term, where departments collectively develop aspects of adaptive expertise most relevant to their departmental priorities.

Strategies such as Set the Scene, Model It All, My Turn, Your Turn and Hunting Not Fishing strengthen teaching and formative assessment practice. There is also a strong emphasis on disciplinary literacy so that pupils can access ambitious content across subjects.

Adaptive Expertise ensures that challenge remains high while support is precise and targeted.

Bringing it together

While presented as three strands, there is natural overlap between them. Teacher decision-making runs across all three, and in practice the boundaries are not fixed. What sits as adaptive expertise in one moment may become a routine over time, and strategies often operate across more than one strand.

The framework is not intended as a checklist of strategies to be recalled, but rather as a way of organising thinking about teaching. It provides a shared language and a set of tools that support both individual and collective practice over time. Supporting materials, including routine videos and short written explainers, are designed to make the framework clear and usable in practice.

Inclusion by Design brings these elements together into a coherent approach to teaching:

• Powerful Routines provide structure and consistency
• 100% Participation ensures that every pupil is thinking and involved
• Adaptive Expertise enables teachers to respond to need without lowering ambition.