Inclusive teaching in practice: building stronger mental models for the classroom

Meeting the needs of every student in a diverse classroom is one of the most important priorities for any teacher - and most teachers are already working incredibly hard to do just that. But with the number of children being identified with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) steadily rising (Education Committee, 2025), the demand on teachers is growing.

In a class of 30, trying to implement a bespoke approach for multiple students can feel as if you need to be in five places at once. It’s no surprise that 9 out of 10 teachers say they need more help to support students with SEND (Teacher Tapp, 2024).

We know that high-quality instruction that meets the needs of all students as a default, not an add-on, is key to addressing this challenge (Mccrea, Baker & Goodrich, 2025). As the EEF’s (2026) Guide to Inclusive Teaching emphasises, “many aspects of universal provision are especially important for pupils with additional needs”. When these aspects are strengthened, more students are able to succeed, enabling teachers and specialists to direct their expertise and time towards those with the highest levels of need. 

Our focus then is on making high-quality instruction a reality: how do we help teachers feel confident in supporting every student in a diverse and complex classroom?

Right now, knowledge about SEND and knowledge about high-quality teaching often sit separately. We know what great teaching looks like, but we don't always connect it directly to specific learning needs - like knowing exactly which whole-class teaching levers are most vital for a student who struggles with social and emotional processing or speech and language.

If knowledge isn't integrated, it’s hard to use it in a busy classroom. The way that knowledge is organised forms a mental model - it’s an internal map for how we perceive the classroom, what we notice, how we interpret student’s actions and what we do in response (Mccrea, 2018). A strong mental model organises knowledge so that it’s highly accessible and usable. 

To empower teachers to better support their students with SEND, we think it’s useful to build stronger mental models around inclusive practice. 

That’s where our Inclusive teaching steps come in. We've built a professional development (PD) curriculum that addresses four of the most universal, prevalent and actionable barriers to learning:

• 1.
  A speech and language barrier (understanding and using language)
• 2.
  A social and emotional processing barrier (feeling safe and regulated)
• 3.
  An executive function barrier (focusing, organising, and starting tasks)
• 4.
  A cognitive load barrier (working memory capacity)

Strengthening teaching with the aim of reducing these four barriers is likely to improve teaching for all students, and will be particularly beneficial for the students who need the most help.

Leading with barriers rather than labels isn't about replacing diagnoses, which remain vital for understanding individual needs. Instead, it’s about giving teachers a usable framework for action.

Great teaching is more than performing a checklist of strategies - it requires teachers to understand the purpose of what they do so they can use the right strategies at the right time in the right way (Kennedy, 2016). Organising practices around specific learning barriers helps teachers to better recognise why and how different students might struggle with learning, and which levers they can pull to reduce that struggle. 

For example, when students find it difficult to get started with a task, a teacher can diagnose the underlying cause: Is this an executive function barrier requiring a broken-down checklist and a visual timer? Or is it a speech and language barrier requiring a sentence stem?

Our thinking here aligns closely with Ambition Institute’s (2026) Inclusive Teaching Framework. While our four barriers and their five areas of need aren't a one-to-one match, we share a common starting point: that understanding pupils' underlying needs helps teachers build stronger mental models that inform inclusive teaching.

Crucially, the steps that make up our new Inclusive teaching curriculums are not new. They are drawn directly from our core curriculums. We have simply reorganised them to help teachers develop an understanding of how and why these strategies work, in a manageable way.

The steps can be used flexibly - for group PD, in drop-ins or coaching. This means they can be used collaboratively as part of mechanism-rich PD, helping teachers to make meaningful and sustained improvements, in a way that suits each school’s context. 

To further build this understanding, each barrier in the Inclusive teaching steps comes with a comprehensive Insight study module that provides:

• 1.
  An overview of the barrier, how it affects learning and how it might manifest in the classroom
• 2.
  The evidence for each barrier, spanning cognitive psychology, diagnosis-specific research, and mainstream education practice guides
• 3.
  A video of great teaching with live expert analysis, unpicking how the teacher reduces that specific barrier
• 4.
  Nuanced case studies exemplifying effective practice and providing non-examples to refine understanding

We wanted to test this approach in real classrooms so we ran a pilot with a group of 10 schools over the summer term, and while a small pilot can't tell us everything, the early signs are encouraging:

• 1.
  85% of respondents felt more confident addressing specific challenges around the learning of children with SEND
• 2.
  Leaders reported greater consistency between the approaches taken to provide support by both teachers and teaching assistants 
• 3.
  Schools noted stronger coaching, collaboration and professional dialogue around SEND

By categorising these steps by barrier, we hope to provide teachers, teaching assistants and leaders with a shared language and framework for making inclusive teaching a reality. 

The Inclusive teaching steps will be released on 1st September 2026. We’re interested to learn how they work in more schools as we continue to refine and evolve our approach. 

If you aren’t yet using Steplab, book a demo to see how evidence-informed professional development and instructional coaching could support your school or trust.