The Inclusive Mainstream Fund: what every college needs to know

By Chris Quickfall, founder and CEO of Cognassist

This summer, many colleges in England will receive a share of a new £83 million government fund to make mainstream education more inclusive.

You will not have to bid for it. The catch is what comes next: you must show what you did with it, and the first deadline is just weeks away.

It is called the Inclusive Mainstream Fund. I have spent the last few weeks and months talking the reforms through with college leaders, specialists and the civil servants behind them, and the most common reaction I still hear is “the what?” That worries me, because the clock is already running.

What the fund actually is

The Inclusive Mainstream Fund is the first significant funding to flow from the government’s special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) reforms, announced in this year’s schools white paper. It is worth £83 million this year for providers delivering 16 to 19 education, and approximately £64.6 million of that goes to colleges.

There is no application and no panel. One payment is expected in July 2026. Grants run from a £3,000 minimum to £1.38 million, depending on the size and shape of your cohort.

You do not apply because it is worked out for you, based on your learners with low prior attainment. The Department for Education (DfE) chose that measure deliberately, because it best reflects where students with additional needs are likely to be.

Your allocation is sized by the learners most likely to have needs that nobody has formally identified yet. Finding them is the first thing the fund expects you to do.

The reason that matters is stark. The government’s Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper reports that a young person who has low prior attainment, comes from a disadvantaged background and has SEND is almost three times more likely to end up not in education, employment or training.

New funding, new responsibility

The money is received easily, but it is publicly accountable.

Colleges must set out how they will use it within their accountability statement to the DfE, and for most that sits inside a deadline at the end of July. From September, Ofsted’s refreshed inspection toolkit folds the fund into its inclusion judgment too.

So, two different bodies will soon be asking the same question: did it actually improve things for learners?

The temptation to buy more of the same

When funding lands this easily, the natural instinct is to spend it on more of what you already do. That is the one instinct I would gently resist.

The guidance is steering colleges somewhere more useful: whole-setting inclusion that reaches every learner early, rather than support triggered only when a learner struggles or discloses. There are not enough specialists to meet rising demands the old way, and more headcount is hard to sustain once a three-year fund tapers away.

The strongest plans I have seen follow a simple cycle, the one the DfE’s own guidance describes: understand the needs across your whole cohort, turn that insight into support, equip every teacher to deliver it, and build the evidence as you go.

Whatever you choose, treat the decision like a clinical one, not an IT purchase: ask whether the approach is independently validated, because the liability sits with you, not the supplier.

Proving it is the hard part

The last step is the one most colleges underestimate. Plenty can tell you what they bought. Far fewer can show, learner by learner, what difference it made.

That gap was always a risk. Now that a graded Ofsted judgment looks at the same plan, it is a bigger one. The smartest spend both changes practice and proves it, making delivery and its evidence one task, not two.

None of this is exotic. It is the early, accurate identification and consistent support good colleges already value, applied across the whole cohort and recorded as you go.

Our dedicated Inclusive Mainstream Fund Hub includes a free tool that shows your college’s allocation amount and how much of that allocation is needed to assess and support all learners.

The question to ask before you spend

But before any of that, the more useful question for your leadership team this term is a simple one.

When the funding is spent, what will you be able to show for it?

The money is starting to flow. The colleges that can answer that now are the ones who will find this summer straightforward. If this was useful, please pass it to a colleague wrestling with the same thing.