A story about a young person, a camping trip, and what inclusion actually looks like. On equity, opportunity, and the relational integrity that holds it all together.
When Alex was in primary school, he found it hard to belong.
He had been bullied by teachers, struggled to make friends, and outside of football at break time barely interacted with the children around him. Most days school felt like a place to survive rather than a place to be.
His mother, hoping that a different environment might give him a way in, enrolled him in Scouts. Somewhere outside school. Somewhere he could try again with new people, new structures, a new chance to find his footing.
The Scout meetings happened in an old church hall. Noisy, crowded, unpredictable. The leaders were warm and well intentioned, but they had not worked with autistic young people before. Alex was often overwhelmed. His behaviour was sometimes described as challenging.
By the time the end-of-year camping trip came round, the leaders were uncertain. Should Alex come? Could they support him properly away from home, in a different setting, for several days? Conversations happened. Plans were made. After careful thought, the group decided he would come.
The camping trip became something nobody had quite expected.
Alex helped pitch tents. He joined the cooking team. He spent long stretches outside, where the noise of the church hall was replaced by the noise of trees and other children doing what they were doing. The structure was looser. The expectations were different. The pressure to perform inside a building wasn’t there.
When he came home, his mother asked what he had enjoyed most.
His answer wasn’t about the activities. It was about how the experience had made him feel.
What that story tells us about inclusion
Inclusion in education sits inside a long, hard-won policy framework. Decades of advocacy, legislation, EHCPs, SEND tribunals, statutory duties. All of that exists because people fought for it. Policy matters. The question is what policy alone can and cannot reach.
What Alex’s mother saw on the camping trip wasn’t a policy outcome. It was a felt experience of belonging that no inclusion policy could have produced on its own. Both are real. Both matter. They are not the same thing.
Inclusion, as Alex experienced it, was the texture of an environment. It was the absence of being managed-to. It was the presence of adults who had decided, after some hesitation, to make space for him. It was the feeling of being part of something rather than being processed through it.
That distinction is the one that matters most, and it is also the one that is hardest to design for. Policies can be written, audited, enforced. The texture of an environment can only be built. It is built through the everyday decisions adults make. Who belongs. Who is heard. Whose needs are treated as central rather than peripheral. Whether the school’s attention, resources and ambition are distributed equitably, or whether some children quietly receive less. Whether the opportunities created in the school reach every child, or whether some routinely watch from the side.
For schools and trusts, this is the work that does not show up cleanly in inspection frameworks but determines almost everything about whether a young person experiences inclusion as real. It is also the work that explains why two schools with the same SEND policy can produce opposite experiences for two similar children.
The same principle applies to the adults
The story I have just told is about a young person. The same dynamic operates for the adults in a school.
In my coaching work with headteachers and senior leadership teams, the conversations about inclusion almost always begin with structures, policies, accountability. Then, after a while, they move to the question underneath. What is it like to be a person in this organisation? What is it like to walk into the staffroom on a Wednesday afternoon? What does it feel like to be the deputy who is rarely asked what they think? What does it feel like to be the central team member whose name nobody quite remembers?
The texture of how adults experience their own organisation is what young people then experience too. It cascades. A school where staff feel unheard, managed-to rather than worked-with, will produce children’s experiences that follow the same pattern, no matter what the inclusion policy says.
This is why the slower, more relational work of culture matters as much as the faster, more visible work of policy. The relational density underneath an organisation, the substance of how people are with each other day to day, is what makes inclusion real or unreal. Policies set the floor. Relational density sets the ceiling.
And relational integrity holds the structure together. The honesty of whether the school’s stated values about belonging, equity and opportunity actually show up in the way adults treat each other, and in turn, the way children experience the place. The gap between what is written and what is lived is the gap relational integrity has to close.
What inclusive leadership actually requires
For school leaders trying to build something genuine here, my answer is usually shorter than they expect.
It requires noticing. Noticing who in the senior team is not speaking. Noticing which staff names you have not heard in a while. Noticing which children are being described in deficit language and asking why. Noticing which adults are being managed-to rather than worked-with. Noticing the gap between the inclusion policy on the wall and what would happen if a parent walked in with a story like Alex’s.
It requires noticing when the school’s relational integrity has slipped. When the values about belonging, equity and opportunity are spoken from the platform but not lived in the staffroom. When the inclusion policy is on the wall but the experience for a child like Alex is the opposite.
It requires honesty about what you find. Most schools have things they could name and do not, or will not, or have not yet found the language for. The honest noticing comes first.
It requires sustained relational work, not as an event or a project but as the texture of how leadership is held.
And it requires recognising that this work is not separate from school improvement. It is school improvement. The schools that move on this layer are also the schools whose attainment data, attendance data, and staff retention data all eventually move with it. Not because inclusion drives outcomes, but because the same relational density that produces inclusive experiences for children produces sustainable cultures for staff.
What the camping trip really showed
When Alex told his mother how the camping trip had made him feel, he was describing a moment when an environment had become inclusive for him. Nobody had written a policy about it. The Scout leaders had not been on a course. They had simply made a series of small relational decisions, sustained over a few days, that added up to belonging.
Belonging matters. Inclusion matters. Those words are important because they name something that can be felt in a place — not just written into a document. And beneath them both is something more fundamental: the quality of human connection in a school. When that connection is real, everything else has somewhere to grow.
Culture changes when relationships do. That is as true for the adults leading a school as it is for the children inside it.
The Single Collective works with MAT CEOs and senior leadership teams on the relational culture that shapes how adults — and young people — experience school. If you’re thinking about inclusion, belonging and what your school’s culture actually feels like, start a conversation.
About the author
Ali Durban MBE is the founder of The Single Collective and co-founder of Gesher School (three times Ofsted Outstanding and a national model for SEND education). She works with MAT CEOs and senior leadership teams across England on the relational culture work in the space between CPD and wellbeing.