Inclusion bases: what the DfE guidance expects, and how to tell if yours is working

What is an inclusion base, and what is it not?

A base is a resourced space and a staff team that give pupils with additional needs, often SEMH or autism, the support they need to stay in a mainstream school and to spend most of their time in mainstream lessons. It is not an internal exclusion room with a new name, a nurture room where the difficult pupils go, or a place pupils are sent when a lesson goes wrong. The guidance published on 25 June 2026 is non statutory. A base is inspected as part of the school, and inspection looks at whether it meets pupils' needs.

What does the guidance expect?

In plain terms:

• A clear purpose and a defined cohort.
• Day to day responsibility held by a teacher, a senior leader accountable for it, no less access to a qualified teacher than other pupils, and staff trained for the needs in the room.
• A written route in and a written route out, with reintegration into lessons planned from the first day.
• A curriculum that connects to what the rest of the school teaches.
• Never used as a sanction or to remove pupils from lessons.
• Oversight by leaders and governors so the school knows whether it is working.

ASCL's general secretary told Tes when the guidance was published that this "cannot be done on the cheap", and the staffing point is where most bases struggle.

How does a base drift into a sanction room?

Quietly, and within a term. It starts with one pupil sent down because a lesson could not continue. Nobody writes down when they will go back. Staff start calling it "the unit". Without written criteria, whoever runs the base ends up accepting whoever is sent, through no fault of their own. By Christmas the register shows the same pupils every day, suspensions have not fallen, and the base is doing the job of a withdrawal room at the cost of a specialist one. The fix is not more space; it is entry reasons, exit criteria and reintegration dates for every pupil, and someone whose job it is to check them.

What should leaders and governors ask each term?

• How many pupils used the base, for how long, and why.
• How many went back to full timetables and how many are still there a term later.
• Who runs it and what training they have.
• What the pupils' suspension and attendance figures look like compared with the term before.
• What changed in the mainstream classrooms those pupils came from.

The second question is the one that shows whether the base has an exit.