At Dorothy Stringer School in Brighton, headteacher Matt Hillier says he spends £1 million a year more on inclusion than he did in 2019. In many ways, this investment has paid off. The school has two alternative provisions supporting more than 30 pupils a day: one at the heart of the school, with pupils going between mainstream lessons and extra support, and another outdoors classroom. Senior leaders have implemented curriculum changes, paid for minibus transport for pupils travelling the furthest to school and even worked with researchers at the University of Sussex to improve its pupil premium strategy. Hiller at Dorothy Stringer School As well as inclusion, the 1,650-strong school is the highest performing in Brighton and Hove and in the top 10 across East Sussex based on GCSE performance, attendance rates, class sizes and attainment 8 scores. But they still have a “sticky” absence problem, with a 90 per cent rate of attendance compared with the national average of 92 per cent. The school currently has an attendance rate of 81 per cent for pupils eligible for pupil premium, and 79 per cent for pupils with SEND. ‘Attendance is not where it needs to be’ “We’ve thrown the kitchen sink at it,” Hillier says. “We know our disadvantaged attendance is not where it needs to be. We know it’s the same for SEND as well.” He says there is an “absolute correlation” between these characteristics and attendance. Catchment changes, a lack of accessible public transport options and a growing number of pupils entitled to free school meals have all compounded challenges in recent years, Hillier explains. A heatmap carried out by leaders found a mixed picture of absence. While pupils travelling in from the furthest distance had lower attendance, it also found some pupils closer to the site were absent. While Hillier is faced with many questions, he hopes to find the answers within The Difference Schools Partnership. Dorothy Stringer was selected as one of 12 secondary schools that will receive a three-year support package to strengthen whole-school support and internal provision, such as inclusion bases. Schools minister Georgia Gould and The Differences Kiran Gill with the partnership schools Education charity The Difference will carry out leadership coaching and training and site visits. They will also develop a framework for schools to use to question what is working in their current provision, and how things could be improved. Participating schools will be able to network with one another to share best practice and spread what they have learnt among other schools in their local authority area or trust. ‘Strong foundations’ The Difference chief executive Kiran Gill says the charity looked out for schools with “strong foundations” of inclusion when assessing applications. Each participant had “roads to run and a journey to go on but wanted to go on it and had the ingredients to put something really special together”. The charity chose two maintained schools and ten that are part of an academy trust. They span from Brighton to Newcastle. The school’s journeys will then be evaluated by the charity’s researchers and shared as best practice. Gill says: “The whole point is to get a window for the sector about what the common challenges are that all these schools are facing, despite their different geographies, but also different intakes and different contexts.” Inclusion ‘a very long game’ In Pontefract, principal James Pape took Outwood Academy Hemsworth from an ‘inadequate’ to ‘good’ Ofsted rating last year – the first time in 20 years. The school, which joined Outwood Grange Academies Trust in 2018, faces extremely challenging circumstances. Areas of the catchment are among the top 1 per cent of the most deprived areas in England, according to the IDACI indices. While many school absence rates spiked post-pandemic, Outwood Academy Hemsworth was facing an attendance rate of 82 per cent and 52 per cent persistent absence in 2019. Toby Rutter, executive principal and trust lead for behaviour, also says they had low attainment rates and “unsafe” buildings. Pape adds: “When we talk about challenges, it was about having time to make sure that we weren’t just doing overnight fixes. “We had a very long game, and that is why we are in the position now to say we believe there are things that we do really well, and there are areas that we know we want to do better in.” Kiran Gill The school has already seen improvements. In 2023-24, 19 out of every 100 pupils at the school received one or more suspension. This has dropped to 11 so far this year. A trust-wide family and community engagement strategy provides academic and social, emotional and mental health support at an early-intervention hub, and an off-site alternative to suspension. The trust previously announced that it was rolling out a more “emotionally aware and intelligent” framework of belonging after it was criticised for its suspensions and exclusions rates. Leaders are hopeful that The Difference Schools Partnership will provide the specialised expertise needed to support their most vulnerable and complex cohorts. “We’ve got to a position now where we believe we are a strong enough entity to be able to partner with The Difference,” Pape says. “The opportunity to work alongside like-minded schools who are in similar positions – we want to share what we are doing really well, and we know there are schools that are doing things better than we are.” ‘The hardest gig you can get’ Russell Hobby, chief executive of The Kemnal Academies Trust, hopes the participation of Welling School in Bexley will impact the practices across his trust. The school sits as a strong performing comprehensive among Bexley’s selective grammar system, which is “the hardest gig you can get”, Hobby says. A recent Ofsted inspection of the school found that, while staff “have appropriate training about inclusive practices”, this is “not consistently implemented”. It has around double the national average of pupils with an education, health and care plan and supports vulnerable cohorts including young carers. Hobby says the school’s suspensions and exclusions rate is “too high”, with a suspension rate of 38.2 in 2024-25. But existing in a wider grammar system does not necessarily make it harder to be more inclusive. He explains: “I actually feel like we have got a head start, because we are inclusive in our intake, and we need to be good at it. So, for all of our teachers, it has to be a day-to-day job for them to be inclusive, but it does make showing the academic outcomes harder.” Hobby says that he and Brian Griffen, headteacher at Welling School, want to use The Difference Schools Partnership to question their existing practice. For example, “can I account for and justify the experience of every young person who is not on a mainstream timetable in our schools, and that we are doing it because it is the best thing for them and not the most convenient thing for us as a trust? Do I know what the plan is for reintegration and are we reviewing it regularly?” All schools will get access to the engagement platform, which gives insights into school attendance based on pupil characteristics. Hobby says access to this should stop leaders from looking “in the rear-view mirror” when “things have already gone wrong”. ‘Inclusion is expensive’ Each school will receive around £150,000 in support, which has been funded by philanthropy. This will fund The Difference’s work, rather than a direct payment for the school to use. Around 200 schools registered their interest, and 90 applied. The project comes as the government has pushed mainstream schools into the driving seat of its SEND reforms. The schools white paper says all secondary schools should have an “inclusion base”, where pupils with additional needs are supported. Leaders should also create individual support plans for relevant pupils. Reforms also set out multiple layers of support for pupils, from the “universal” offer to specialised support, emphasising the need for whole-school inclusion. Cassie Dale deputy head and Rob Allen internal SEND provision lead at Dorothy Stringer The Department for Education (DfE) has also set new AI-driven attendance targets for schools, and Ofsted now inspects attendance and behaviour as a single category – which many leaders oppose. Hillier says he was “concerned” about the new Ofsted framework. “You could just sit where you are, results are really good. I could sit here knowing that, if Ofsted come in, we would have strong outcomes in that area. But actually, my concern is the fact we know that attendance is linked in with behaviours. They go hand in hand.” The DfE will provide £1.6 billion of funding across three years for schools to implement these changes. But Schools Week analysis found the first year’s allocation had an uneven split, with 231 secondaries set to receive less than £19,000 each. Gill says: “Right now, is a really difficult time for schools… We all want our schools to be more inclusive, but that’s hard work, and it’s expensive, and there isn’t going to be loads of money. “So, it’s just going to have to be ingenuity and collaboration.”