We help school leaders answer a hard question:
"How can we help all our students — whatever their background — feel they belong and are included and respected here?"
For many students, an unspoken sense that "school isn't for people like me" becomes a real psychological barrier to engaging in school — one that shows up in attendance, behaviour and attainment. We are social psychologists finding new ways to understand and remove these barriers, and we help school leaders turn that research into practical action.
We offer tailored, practical support to school leaders over an extended period, in three stages.
If you are a leader in a school, local authority or multi-academy trust and would like to explore working with us, please get in touch. We'd love to hear from you. You can contact us at contact@schoolinclusion.org.uk
Our approach, put to the test.
Our approach is to work collaboratively with teachers to identify gaps in outcomes between groups of students, to diagnose which psychological processes are contributing to those gaps, and then co-design initiatives and interventions to target those processes.
We’ve now conducted and published in an internationally-renowned, peer-reviewed journal a pre-registered trial of our approach across two schools in England. We analysed school admin data to identify the main outcome gaps in the schools, diagnosed the specific barriers the students were facing that were contributing to those gaps, and then delivered a brief, tailored intervention that we designed to target those precise processes. This approach led to significant gains: it improved the attendance of students from low-income households by four full days in the school year and closed the attendance gap with their peers by 60%. It also cut the average time Black students spent in detention from 176 minutes to 90 minutes, narrowing that gap by around 83%. The gains were greatest for the students who were experiencing the barriers our diagnostic work identified were driving the gaps. This is exactly the approach we take at the School Inclusion Groups, which we outline below.
*Hadden, Harris & Easterbrook (2025), Journal of School Psychology.* — Read the study here, or on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2024.101401
Our Three-Stage Approach
We use data-driven strategies to identify any psychological barriers that are contributing to inequalities in your pupils’ attendance, behaviour and attainment. Read more
We run interactive workshops with senior school leaders to increase our understanding of the psychological barriers that your students are facing, and develop targeted initiatives to reduce those. Read more
We provide hands-on, practical, long-term support to senior school leaders to develop, deliver, and evaluate a concrete action plan for these targeted initiatives. Read more
Headteacher Testimonial:
“The results have been remarkable. The teacher noted a marked improvement in students’ attitudes to learning and engagement, which increased her own enjoyment of teaching. We also saw marked improvements in her students’ attainment scores… which we directly attribute to the work we did in collaboration with Matt and the School Inclusion Group.”
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