The Education Inclusion Strategy 2025 is framed around belonging. This is what inclusion means to us in Cardiff - we want all children and young people to feel they belong in their school or setting.
Our vision is that we work together and take collective responsibility for the belonging and success of all children and young people in Cardiff.
There is much to celebrate in Cardiff, and our Inclusion Strategy builds on the strengths and excellent practice that exists across our education system.
Over recent years, schools and education settings have shown remarkable resilience by adapting to the challenges brought by the pandemic and responding to the evolving needs of learners.
We are ambitious for our learners, and we want and need to do more to help all our learners thrive and achieve. Our data shows that inclusion indicators are strongly correlated with a number of factors such as:
- socio-economic background, and
- having additional learning needs.
Few will be surprised and none of us can be happy with this. If all children and young people belong and succeed:
- no child or young person would be excluded from school
- all children and young people would be in provision appropriate to their needs, and
- all young people would make positive progress into post 16 education, employment or training.
We know these are hard things to achieve but they are the ambitions and aspirations that will guide us.
5 key areas of the strategy
The strategy sets out 5 key areas for action and identifies what we are going to do to make a difference for our learners:
Deepening and embedding inclusive practice
This includes developing a Cardiff Inclusion Framework to make sure every school celebrates diversity and supports pupil wellbeing. We also want to make sure that inclusion is embedded within our new school improvement arrangements - building on the work Collaborative Learning in Partnerships (CLIPs) are doing to improve attendance.
Strengthening learner engagement
Reading, speech, language and communication are core to inclusion. We will prioritise this and develop teachers understanding of the process of learning to help meet needs. Other examples of our actions include developing a Cardiff wide approach to the use of smartphones in schools.
Right provision and best support
We have started to re-model alternative provision for learners and those who are educated other than at school - we will maintain momentum. Other changes we want to see include making sure we have a clear graduated response and multi-agency based approaches to dealing with attendance and challenging behaviour.
Meeting the needs of all learners
Enhancing teachers' skills in adaptive teaching and improving earlier identification of Additional Learning Needs (ALN) and appropriate Additional Learning Provision (ALP) will help us make sure that all teachers feel confident to be teachers of ALN. This will also make sure mainstream schools can accommodate the vast majority of learners' needs. We recognise though that more specialist provision within Cardiff would reduce reliance on costly independent placements.
Supporting and strengthening the workforce
The skills, knowledge, experience and dedication of our workforce is the most powerful means of change we have. We also want our workforce to feel they belong to their school or setting and to Cardiff as a learning community. Across all schools we want our practice and approaches to learning to be trauma-informed. A workforce strategy will help us increase workforce diversity and develop specialist expertise to meet evolving needs.
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