The Inclusive Mainstream Fund: what it can and cannot pay for

What it is and what you get

The Inclusive Mainstream Fund is worth over £500 million a year across the three year spending period, of which £400 million a year goes to schools. Local authorities received it at the end of June 2026 and academies in early July, as one payment covering the 2026 to 2027 financial year.

Your allocation is built from four parts.

First, a lump sum of £3,000 for every school, whatever its size.

Second, a basic rate for each pupil, which is £16 in primary including reception, and £14 in secondary for pupils up to age 16.

Third, a weighting for pupils with low prior attainment, at £79 a pupil in primary and £88 in secondary.

Fourth, an adjustment for your area, using the same area cost adjustment as the national funding formula.

In most secondaries the low prior attainment weighting is the largest single part of the allocation. In primaries it is often about the same as the lump sum and the basic rate put together, so the balance shifts a good deal between one school and another.

For established schools the pupil numbers come from the October 2025 census and the low prior attainment figures from the 2025 to 2026 authority proforma tool. If your school opened in September 2026, or opened within the past seven years and is still adding year groups, the October 2026 census is used instead and your allocation is confirmed in February 2027 for payment in March. Either way it is a formula, not something you bid for.

Schools Week analysed draft allocations for more than 19,800 schools and found an average of £13,485 for primaries and £47,531 for secondaries. The spread is wide. It also found that 1,399 primaries, about one in twelve, were due under £6,000, and that only 15 schools in the country were due more than £100,000. So look up your own figure in the allocations spreadsheet on gov.uk rather than planning from an average.

What it can be spent on

Everything has to fall under at least one of the seven principles of inclusion. In short form those are ambitious leadership and governance, evidence based support prioritising early intervention, high quality adaptive teaching, enriching provision beyond the classroom, a safe and respectful culture covering belonging and attendance, strong partnerships with families and wider services, and inclusive environments with continuing improvements to accessibility. Those are my shortened labels; the full wording is on gov.uk.

Spending also has to be evidence informed and aimed at the barriers your own pupils face.

You do not have to cover all seven. Spending well on two is likely to do more good than a thin spread across the lot, and nothing in the conditions rewards covering the full list.

One thing that is easy to miss. The conditions say schools should use the allocation alongside their core budget, including the notional SEND budget. It is meant to add to what you already fund, not to become the only money doing this work.

What it cannot be spent on

The exclusions get far less attention than the rates, so here they are in full. The conditions of grant rule out general school running costs or operational expenditure, subsidising spending on pre existing activity, time for staff to undertake activities unrelated to inclusion, capital works, and any activity that does not align with at least one of the seven principles.

The second one is where I think most schools will slip. If you already run a nurture group and you simply move its cost onto this grant, that is subsidising pre existing activity. The test is whether the money has bought something that would not otherwise have happened.

On record keeping, schools have to maintain clear records of income and expenditure for the grant, including evidence of how the funds were used. Those records are open to inspection by the Secretary of State and by the Comptroller and Auditor General, who may also carry out examinations into the economy, efficiency and effectiveness with which the funding has been used, under section 6 of the National Audit Act 1983. If the conditions are not met, the Secretary of State may recover some or all of the allocation, by invoice or by offsetting it against later payments.

If you are planning an inclusion base

Capital works are excluded, so this grant cannot pay for knocking a wall through, fitting doors, laying flooring or buying furniture. The conditions do contemplate the fund sitting alongside separate capital investment in developing or expanding inclusion bases, but the building work itself has to be funded from somewhere else: your own capital budget, your trust's capital, or high needs provision capital allocations from the local authority, which are a separate capital stream.

What is less clear is the revenue work that comes before a building project. The conditions do not define capital works anywhere, and they say nothing either way about planning and preparation. Professional fees tied to a building scheme are often treated as part of the capital cost, so if you intend to charge any of that to this grant, agree it with your finance lead, your responsible officer or auditor, and your local authority or trust first, and write down your reasoning at the time. There is more on what that planning involves in the guide to what an educational brief contains.

The inclusion strategy, due 31 December 2026

Every school has to publish an inclusion strategy statement for the 2026 to 2027 academic year on its website by 31 December 2026.

If you do not use the DfE template, four things are mandatory: the barriers to learning and participation you have identified across your cohort, the activities you are investing in to reduce those barriers, the intended outcomes, and a review of the previous academic year. Budgeted costs have to be in it as well.

It has to be updated each year. If you are an academy in a trust, your school publishes its own statement, not one statement covering every school in the trust. That holds even where the trust has pooled the money.

The Department will review a sample of published statements. Governors and trustees are expected to scrutinise the statement and the outcomes achieved in the previous year. The statements are available to inspectors when they evaluate inclusion, and the supporting guidance says Ofsted will assess how leaders ensure the strategy is embedded in practice and how far staff are equipped to deliver it. So the statement needs to describe what you actually do.

If you opt for a multi year strategy you must review it annually and note that on the cover page.

If you do not spend it all

You are not required to spend the whole allocation this year. Some or all of it can be carried forward, but it has to be used by 31 March 2028, it has to meet the conditions of grant for the year in which you spend it rather than the year you received it, and it has to be accounted for in the strategy statement for the academic year it is spent in.

Carrying money forward is allowed and is sometimes sensible if you are part way through planning something. The risk is simply forgetting it is there.