The inclusion resource gap: Sustainable strategies for uneven budgets
When a multi-billion-pound headline drops, those outside the education sector often assume a crisis has been solved. The launch of the Department for Education’s £1.6 billion Inclusive Mainstream Fund (IMF) was widely covered as a massive financial injection for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) support.
But for headteachers, Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) leaders, and School Business Managers on the ground, a stark reality has set in: £1.6 billion sounds like a transformative sum. Still, when spread across the system, it will not cover everything our school leaders tell us is needed.
The purchasing power of individual schools is already very uneven. While a few large settings and group can likely generate economies, thousands of smaller, or isolated schools are left with amounts that need careful planning. The move to encouraging grouped spending is welcome, but it needs real energy and thought to provide for competing needs.
If a school has limited inclusion funding, attempting to optimise the traditional, physical classroom is a huge challenge. We cannot solve a systemic crisis by telling teachers to “make classroom delivery more inclusive.” We need a radical rethink. To close the resource gap, we must change the system rather than just try to optimise it. From the thousands of schools we work with, we know that means accepting that high-quality online alternative provision is an ideal, sustainable solution.
The mirage of the billions: Examining the purchasing power disparity
To understand why the current framework requires a structural overhaul rather than minor adjustments, we must look at the actual school-level allocations. An extensive independent data analysis by Schools Week broke down the provisional figures for more than 19,800 schools. The data exposes an incredibly fractured landscape:
- The primary deficit: Nearly one in 10 primary schools (8%, or 1,399 settings) will receive less than £6,000 per year to support pupils with additional needs.
- The secondary gap: 231 secondary schools are set to receive less than £19,000 each; a sum that falls short of the starting salary for a single full-time teaching assistant.
- The per-pupil reality: When averaged across the board, the funding equates to just £60 per pupil for primaries and £52 for secondaries
For the vast majority of school leaders, these numbers do not grant the purchasing power needed to build the new internal provisions envisaged. Instead, the money in some settings will allow only limited intervention. Martin Vayro, head of Crow Lane Primary, noted that his school’s £11,200 allocation “merely served to enable us to set a balanced budget by the tightest of margins.”
When a school’s purchasing power is this low, the idea that billions are being poured into the system becomes something of a mirage. There is a danger that the money is spread too thin to make a tangible difference on the front lines.
Why “optimising the system” is a dead end
The standard advice given to schools facing tight budgets is to “optimise” – to train existing staff further and adjust classroom delivery. But this approach assumes that the traditional mainstream classroom can be retrofitted to meet every single level of complex need. It simply cannot.
When a school attempts to use a limited, uneven budget to optimise physical provision, they hit significant barriers:
- The recruitment crisis: To hire a fractional specialist teacher or an expert SENCO with a £6,000 or £19,000 is a real stretch. Even if you had the funds, the professionals are frequently unavailable, particularly in rural or disadvantaged areas.
- The estate constraint: True inclusion for high-need pupils often requires physical infrastructure: sensory spaces, low-stimulus environments, and quiet zones. Small grants cannot fund the structural modifications many settings need.
- The bureaucracy drain: New funding streams bring heavy administrative requirements. School leaders have pointed out that a significant portion of their small allocations must be spent simply on releasing SENCOs from teaching time to complete the extensive documentation required by the DfE.
"Throwing a tokenistic figure at schools will not solve the SEND crisis... My fear is the broken system at a local authority level is simply being moved to schools to deal with." — Thomas Moore, Headteacher, Bury CE Primary School
We have reached the limit of what can be achieved by tinkering with the edges of the traditional classroom. We have to stop trying to optimise a stretched system and start changing it entirely.
The radical solution: Accepting an online future
Thinking radically means moving past the assumption that every child must learn within the four walls of a traditional school building to receive a high-quality education. We have to accept that things must be done differently. We have to seize the opportunity to enable more students to learn online so they can get the education they need and deserve.
True inclusion isn’t about forcing a child with severe school-induced anxiety, complex sensory processing needs, or Emotionally Based School Non-Attendance (EBSNA) into a loud, high-stimulus environment of 30 peers. True inclusion is about ensuring they have access to quality, uninterrupted, specialised teaching in a format that actually works for them.
When inclusion funding is limited and uneven, we have seen time and again that accredited online alternative provision is a logical system-level solution. Instead of duplicating expensive, hard-to-recruit physical resources across multiple schools, a digital model centralises infrastructure, making high-quality provision accessible to any school, regardless of its independent purchasing power.
Why online provision maximises limited budgets
For schools and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) managing uneven budgets, partnering with an accredited online alternative provision like Academy21 is an incredibly efficient use of resources. It replaces high, fixed operational costs with a flexible, scalable model.
Online alternative provision directly solves the purchasing power trap in four distinct ways:
- Bypassing the recruitment crisis: Academy21 provides 100% live, interactive lessons taught by fully qualified UK subject specialists who are specifically trained in trauma-informed, adaptive teaching. Schools gain instant access to an expert workforce they will struggle to afford to hire full-time on a standalone budget.
- Targeted, scalable costs: Rather than sinking an entire minor grant into a fraction of a staff salary, schools can purchase precise, flexible online placements for the exact pupils who need them. Every pound goes directly into live instruction, not estate overheads or administrative compliance.
- Removing environmental barriers: For many vulnerable pupils, the physical school environment itself is the obstacle. A digital classroom removes the pressures of corridors, crowds, and social anxiety, allowing students to stabilise emotionally while maintaining full academic continuity.
- Rapid deployment: Digital provisions can be mobilised within 48 hours, providing an immediate, safe, and fully compliant educational framework for pupils at risk of exclusion or those out of school due to medical reasons.
Strategic pooling: Changing the ecosystem
The government’s long-term vision suggests that schools will eventually need to pool their IMF allocations to share resources. Progressive MATs and school clusters aren’t waiting; they are already doing this by building shared digital learning pathways.
By combining modest, uneven allocations across a trust or local network, leaders can build a highly resilient “hybrid” strategy. A cluster of five schools might not have sufficient funds to support their non-attender cohorts individually. But combined, that pooled budget can secure a dedicated tier of online provisions, ensuring that no young person falls through the cracks due to local physical capacity constraints.
This is what it means to change the system. It is a shift away from the defensive posture of trying to make a small budget “balance the books” and a move toward an agile, modern approach that uses digital infrastructure to deliver true equity of opportunity.
A new blueprint for high-quality provision
The £1.6 billion Inclusive Mainstream Fund proves that pouring billions into a physical school only model will never be enough to close the inclusion resource gap. As long as individual school purchasing power remains uneven, traditional optimisation will not meet the needs of our most vulnerable learners despite the best efforts of our school leaders.
School leaders must be empowered to think radically, drop the burden of unsustainable physical constraints, and embrace the structural efficiencies of the digital age.
Accepting that more students will learn online is a strategic victory for school budgets and student outcomes alike. By integrating accredited online alternative provision, such as Academy21, into their core strategies, schools can transform limited, uneven funding into consistent, world-class learning pathways for the children who need them most.
