The Balancing Act: Integrating Strategy and Compassion for Inclusive Leadership

 

This blog is based on a presentation for the Church Of England’s Flourishing Trust Network and is a deeper exploration and continuation of previous blog:

Cassie Young - SEND and systems: A reflection toolkit

This is aimed specifically at Trust leaders, CEOs, and school leaders and builds on the foundational principles that guide our roles in fostering a balanced, inclusive culture in our schools.

As leaders, we navigate the complexities of head and heart, making decisions that balance strategic foresight with empathy and compassion. Inclusion lies at the very core of this responsibility, challenging us to hold our values steadfastly while responding to the needs of our pupils, teams, and communities. In this reflection, we will delve further into the vital components of effective communication and curriculum design, emphasising practical strategies that bring inclusion to life.

 

The Head-Heart Balance in Leadership

 

As Trust leaders, you share a responsibility to lead with both head and heart. This balance is at the core of the challenging and rewarding roles we occupy. Compassionate, empathetic decisions with children at the heart of our work are essential, yet we are also strategic leaders required to make difficult decisions. These decisions may not always align with popular opinion but are necessary for the overall success and health of our schools. Nowhere is this balancing act more critical than in fostering true inclusion.

Inclusion challenges us to confront our own biases, and sometimes to become an ally, even when it means challenging others within our own organisation. We’re pulled in multiple directions, often making decisions at a pace that can feel overwhelming. Research suggests that educators make 1,500 decisions in a day – everything is important to the person asking for your time. 

 In this post, we’ll discuss how leaders can maintain a culture of inclusion through consistent communication and curriculum strategies, focusing on the importance of daily practices over one-off gestures.

Inclusion is not a one-off event. It’s not a special week or something tucked into a school development plan. Real inclusion happens in the day-to-day—through the consistency of our practices and decisions.

However, we find ourselves in a landscape of uncertainty—political shifts, changes in the curriculum, and tight funding. Many of these are outside our control, but as leaders, we need to focus on what we can control. The decisions we make have to be sustainable and long-lasting.

You’ve all noticed that your roles are becoming more critical, particularly in well-being, recruitment, and retention. You’re often the protective barrier for your teams, shielding them from external pressures. And let’s be honest: sometimes, we’re just trying to survive.

But as leaders, we can’t afford to only survive. We must thrive and flourish—our teams, communities and children in our care depend on it.

 

Key Reflection Question: How Inclusive is Your Trust?

Reflect on this: How do you truly know how inclusive your organisation is?

Inclusion is more than a value or vision statement; it is an everyday practice. 

Are your inclusion vision and values evident in the daily life of your organisation? How do you gauge the inclusiveness of your Trust? 

Who are the key individuals supporting you in measuring this?

 

The Fundamentals of Inclusive Schools

Through extensive experience across various schools and Trusts, four essential areas consistently emerge as crucial in supporting our most vulnerable pupils effectively:

 

Behaviour: Cultivating positive behaviour systems that embed whole-school inclusion as the norm.

Communication: Ensuring all stakeholders are informed and aligned, living out the Trust’s vision for inclusion.

Identification: Early, accurate identification of individual needs.

Curriculum: Providing accessible, inclusive learning for every child.

In this blog, I’ll concentrate on Communication and Curriculum, as these areas are most likely to undergo adaptations amidst future changes.

 

Communication: The Glue Holding Inclusion Together

Consider the network of people involved in the education of a child with SEND: the child, parents or carers, the SENCo, teachers, support staff, and external specialists such as educational psychologists or therapists. Each brings a different perspective, yet all rely on effective communication. For children with multiple identifiers—such as being Looked After, Pupil Premium, or supported by social workers—this network becomes even more intricate as we look at every pupil with SEND in the school, and multiplied by the number of schools within a trust, federation or cluster of schools. 

Within these communities, communication is not just important; it’s essential. It creates cohesion, transparency, and trust. However, our current framework often fragments communication. With outside agencies frequently interacting directly with schools, coupled with statutory requirements, exhaustive paperwork, and pressing deadlines, this approach can compromise cohesion.

 

Key Reflection Question:

How do you, as Trust leaders, communicate your vision for inclusion?

Who are your essential contacts who regularly “temperature check” this vision?

 

To streamline communication, I have five approaches for your consideration:

SEND Clinics: Regular, dedicated time for reviewing individual cases. An open door at a regular time for staff to talk through concerns or specific ideas with your most skilled and knowledge staff members for SEND. I have seen these become just general ‘chats’ so ensuring there is a clear structure and being outcomes driven can be supported by….

Leadership Principles: Clear, trust-wide principles around inclusive practice and language. This is shared with every single member of the Trust…as everyone is seen as a leader in their own right.  Ensuring that all members of the Trust are seen as professionals and trusted to act in a way that is wholly child centered and actively pro-inclusion, really can both reassure trust leaders, but also can show when people fall out of these boundaries.

 

1:1 Meetings: Regular catch-ups between school leaders and trust leaders to share updates, challenges, barriers and strategies that are working well.

Team Around the Child (TAC) Meetings: Bringing together all key players around the child to streamline support. Replacing Pupil Progress Meetings, so that SENCo’s are not doubling up on meetings and all voices can be heard together. These aren’t cozy catch ups, but opportunities to voice and lay out resources, strategies and balance expectations. Teachers being part of these meetings can be transformative in the sense they can professionally develop and ensure full understandings around need.

Pupil Voice: Incorporating the perspectives of students with SEND at a trust level. CEO’s often go into school to just talk to pupils with SEND and other focus groups. This is a really fantastic way to temperature check. 

 

Key question:

How do you, as Trust leaders with the highest vantage point, communicate your vision for inclusion?

Who are your key people to regularly check the pulse on this?

Curriculum: Embedding Inclusivity from the Start

I’ll assume that within your trusts, you’ve worked hard to build broad and balanced curriculums that offer cultural capital and build confident, knowledgeable children and young people.

But the question remains: How accessible is this curriculum?

Does your curriculum naturally lend itself to inclusive access, or do you find that pupils with SEND need significant adaptations or bespoke plans to engage with it? 

Micro-questions like

 “Do SEND students need extra scaffolding for this lesson?”

and macro-questions like,

 “Does our entire curriculum framework consider different learning needs from the start?”

both matter.

Inclusion shouldn’t just happen through interventions—it should be embedded into the very fabric of the curriculum. 

Ask yourself:

Have we built a curriculum that can be adapted by teachers to meet the needs of all pupils?

Or have we designed a curriculum where inclusivity is woven in from the start, allowing all students to access it without major alterations? This will not only support your teacher’s workload, but also ensure that inclusion is considered as an integral part of the whole, not a bolt on.

Example A: History lesson containing dense reading text, no visuals or simplified versions. No alternative formats are provided for content. Verbal instructions are provided with the assumption that everyone processes and holds information at the same rate. Pupils will write up their work to demonstrate their knowledge, all children are working independently and there is no expectation on noisy levels, behaviour, and no time scale given to complete the work until the bell goes for break time.

Example B: The same History lesson: Resources with key terms provided, simplified texts provided with a breakdown of the key points, audio versions available to complement texts (not removing the reading! Important that expectations are still high, stretching and challenging children) Opportunities built in for children to discuss their thinking, to ensure adults can listen and assess understanding and alternative ways for children to demonstrate their knowledge using Edu tech, verbal or written presentations. A quiet space for children to work and clear timescales and countdowns for those who struggle to manage time or transitions.

This could potentially (assuming atypical presentations) support pupils with ADHD, ASD, SLCN, SEMH, Anxiety, fine motor difficulties, cognition and learning difficulties..and more.

I’m not suggesting every single approach should/would be used, but alongside teachers deep knowledge of pupils, they can add and remove approaches and strategies as needed to provide scaffolding and adaptations to ensure the inclusion of all pupils.

There’s often a temptation to try to “fix” everything at once. We need to avoid building our strategies on sand—rushing to tick every box without creating a sustainable foundation.

We operate in a time of uncertainty, with many factors out of our control. But as Trust leaders, we can focus on the things we can control. We can shape communication systems that build trust and streamline processes. We can build a curriculum that supports inclusivity by design, not as an afterthought.

Our roles are incredibly challenging, but they’re also an opportunity to make a lasting impact on the lives of thousands of children. By balancing head and heart, focusing on sustainable strategies, and addressing the fundamentals of inclusion, we can build truly inclusive trusts.

Let’s continue to ask ourselves the hard questions:

How do we know how inclusive our organisations are? 

and 

How can we ensure our vision for inclusion is lived out in every classroom?

By focusing on key areas like communication and curriculum, we create lasting change. This supports not only our vulnerable learners but the wider school community as well. We have the power to make a tangible difference that will last long beyond our leadership roles. It’s a privilege, but also a responsibility.