Stop pretending containment is the same as inclusion

It started over a coffee, the kind of casual catch-up between two educators that usually revolves around marking loads or the countdown to the next half-term.

But then my friend, a primary school teacher in a large multi-academy trust in the north of the country, tossed a question across the table that completely span me sideways.

“Where do you stand on Inclusion?” she asked.

I stared at her for a moment, genuinely trying to process the syntax. It felt like being asked where I stood on the concept of gravity, or photosynthesis.

She must have seen the blank confusion on my face because she quickly elaborated. In her school, she explained, a heated, deeply polarising conflict was raging between the staff who “believe” in inclusion and those who “do not”.

Like it is the Easter bunny. Or the tooth fairy.

Initially, I found this wild. Super wild. How has a fundamental principle of basic human rights and educational ethics been reduced to a matter of personal faith?

But as she talked, the layers began to peel back, revealing a stark, chaotic reality that many primary school teachers will find intimately familiar.

She described a pressure-cooker environment in which the word “inclusion” is being used to cover up a system in active collapse.

Entire cohorts of children are missing out on core teaching because a few pupils with incredibly high, unmet needs are understandably dominating the learning environment.

Meanwhile, support staff are no longer running crucial literacy or numeracy interventions for struggling pupils because they have been redeployed as reactive crisis managers.

Dysregulated children are hitting, running in and out of classrooms and exhibiting high-level behaviours which put themselves and others at risk.

Then came the classic justification: “Well, it’s just more obvious in primary school.”

A much uglier truth

That phrase jarred. It forced me to take a hard look at what is actually happening in parts of our primary education system. We have weaponised the concept of inclusion, turning it into a banner, a totem or a shield to hide a much uglier truth.

What my friend described to me is not a failure of philosophical belief. To frame this as a debate between “pro-inclusion” and “anti-inclusion” camps is a gaslighting tactic of the highest order.

It shifts the blame onto overworked, stressed-out teachers for simply pointing out that the current model is broken.

When we look beneath the ideological surface, the chaos in our schools is not caused by inclusion. It is caused by a perfect storm of systemic abandonment.

It is caused by chronic underfunding and understaffing, where one teacher and a part-time teaching assistant can be expected to manage 30 children, three of whom require intensive one-to-one care.

It is fuelled by a training deficit which throws poorly paid support staff into complex behavioural situations without the specialised tools required to handle them safely.

Furthermore, we are witnessing a total collapse of the wider infrastructure: months or years-long delays for local authority support; glacial processing of education, health and care plans (EHCPs); a complete lack of joined-up working between overstretched child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), NHS therapies and schools.

Left in the lurch, school leadership is forced into survival mode, fire-fighting daily crises rather than having the breathing room for proactive, strategic planning.

To call a classroom with zero resources, zero external agency support and an overwhelmed teacher “inclusive” is a lie. It is not inclusion; it is neglect wrapped in a progressive buzzword.

True inclusion

True inclusion means providing every child with the environment, tools and specialised support they need to thrive. It protects the learning of the collective while meeting the needs of the individual.

What my friend’s school is practising is not inclusion. It is containment.

When we dump children with complex needs into mainstream classrooms without the prerequisite funding, staff or therapeutic infrastructure, we are not “including” them. We are setting them up to fail, pushing teachers to the brink of burnout, and depriving the rest of the class of the education they deserve.

It is time to stop letting the system off the hook by debating inclusion as if it is a fairytale we can choose to believe in or not.

The problem is not the ideology. The problem is that we are asking schools to perform miracles with loose change and good intentions – and then blaming them when the magic runs out.