The 2026 schools White Paper signals a clear direction towards every school establishing a resource base for pupils with special educational needs and disabilties.

While this plan has been welcomed as a commitment to improved inclusion, there has been a concern that these environments could become centres of containment if they are not properly implemented.

One proposal to stop this from happening is to use special-school knowledge and expertise when designing these resources.

Improving resource provision

It’s an approach that we at King’s Academy Binfield can certainly recommend after our trust was joined in 2024 by King’s Academy Lord Wilson (KALW), a special 11-16 setting, and it has helped us to shape practice in several ways.

Perhaps the most notable of these is in the insights and expertise that have helped us to refine the approach at a resource base provision set up in 2023 at King’s Academy Binfield in response to a clear need to support more pupils with additional needs.

It currently supports 26 pupils: 15 in secondary and 11 in primary, predominantly with the primary need being autistic spectrum condition (ASC) but also encompassing students with moderate learning difficulties (MLD).

The aim in both instances is to ensure that students retain a close connection to their school while receiving a mix of ongoing academic support as well as the necessary pastoral care to meet any support they require.

While the base was set up prior to KALW joining, since the special school has been part of our trust we have worked with staff there to help really hone this practice.

Inclusion with impact

For example, one recommendation was to use more specialised communication strategies to help neurodivergent students access complex academic content.

As such, we now produce summary videos where technical concepts are explained via a voiceover by the student’s trusted adult, leveraging the therapeutic bond to reduce performance anxiety and increase engagement.

Furthermore, we use social story production to deconstruct the “hidden curriculum” of exam season - mapping out the sensory and emotional journey of the exam experience - so the logistics of assessment don’t overshadow the student’s knowledge and skills.

By pairing these targeted tools with adapted personal development and life skills curricula, academic progress can be built on a foundation of emotional regulation.

This allows us to insist on academic rigour alongside this intensive therapeutic support, and it means we can push students to achieve Attainment 8 scores that match or exceed those of students with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) in mainstream settings nationally.

Strong academic outcomes

We are confident in this because of KALW: the school’s Attainment 8 score is 17.8 (four times the national average for special schools) while students have achieved a 55 per cent pass rate in IGCSE English and GCSE mathematics - far above the 2 per cent national average for special schools.

Now, in alignment with the recent White Paper, several schools within our trust are actively adopting specialised schemes of learning and bespoke resources to support the development of their own resource bases.

As part of this, KALW is acting as a central hub of expertise for our entire trust, ensuring that every learner benefits from our specialist insights.

This includes supporting mainstream academies through a teaching and learning forum focused on adaptive teaching and curriculum adaptation, so teachers can gain an understanding of how to develop individualised pathways of learning, moving beyond “one size fits all” models to more inclusive, high-impact instruction.

Through insights from KALW, we are now also ensuring that meetings with families take place in neutral or home environments to create a more relational and restorative dialogue so parents are partners in progress, not just recipients of negative reports.

A sector push

Ultimately, by using the expertise of special-school colleagues, we can ensure that every pupil, regardless of their starting point or setting, receives the specialised care and academic challenge they deserve.

Of course, not every mainstream school will have a special-school partner to call on, but the hope will be that, as more schools move towards the requirements of the White Paper over time, this sort of information sharing can become commonplace.

This will help to ensure that resource bases become vital infrastructure within the system rather than a peripheral bolt-on. Success is not found in lowering the bar, but building the infrastructure that allows every student to clear it.

Kerri-Anne Leavy is executive principal King’s Academy Binfield and Dr Nigel Matthias is executive headteacher at King’s Academy Lord Wilson. Both schools are part of King’s Group Academies