Lincolnshire's Inclusion Strategy 2025-26

We want every child and young person and their families to receive the right support, at the right time, in familiar local settings.

Support should be easy to access, without delays or barriers.  

We are enhancing early support and intervention to meet needs before they escalate, reducing reliance on specialist services.

Our local offer will be clear, visible, and easy to navigate for families and professionals.

What we have achieved so far:

• Lincolnshire’s local offer has continued to be developed by the multi-agency local offer qorking group to further expand its information and use by families and professionals  
• the family hubs have continued to be developed to meet identified needs, with further opportunities for multi-agency work taking place to identify and meet needs through earlier interventions
• as part of the family hub programme, antenatal Solihull sessions have been developed and are in place across the family hubs and children centre networks.  They are offering face-to-face groups delivered at times most suitable to prospective parents, such as evenings and weekends. These supplement the current online offer
• through the family hubs programme, a speech and language early support offer for children in their early years aged three to four years has been piloted within Lincolnshire’s children's centres.  There are over 800 families accessing this offer, with positive feedback regarding the provision and support they received
• we have developed home learning environment outreach support to early years settings through our professional development offer for settings.  This includes a sustainable approach for making it real through a train the trainers approach, which is being delivered countywide  
• we have developed quality 0-2 years provision support as part of the childcare reforms.  Nearly 800 families have been supported via this offer, which is continuing to narrow the gap with national levels in ‘good level of development’ outcomes for children with SEND at the end of their foundation stage
• following the release of the best start for life Government strategy in July 2025, we have started the work to further enhance our support and provision through the development of Lincolnshire’s new best start for life strategy 
• the inclusion quality and effectiveness team has been set up in direct response to feedback from school leaders.  The team will be providing strategic support for Lincolnshire’s mainstream schools to effectively meet the additional needs of their pupils and increase school confidence in their ability to do this
• partnerships for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools (PINS) is a national needs-led project.  It brings together health, education, and parent, carer specialists to test a new model for supporting good outcomes in mainstream schools for neurodivergent pupils.  Lincolnshire, with Lincolnshire Parent Carer Forum (LPCF) playing a lead role, participated in the initial year of the project, focusing on strengthening knowledge, skills and environments to better meet the needs of neurodivergent children 
• every school in Lincolnshire has a nominated member of their senior management as their attendance champion. Close working with attendance champions has meant that every school has a single point of contact for attendance, and training.   Guidance delivered by the local authority has equipped them to ensure that early identification of poor attendance remains a priority for all schools
• attendance of children and young people with an EHC plan has continued to be an area of focus with new processes introduced to ensure attendance remains a priority for these children and young people 

What we need to do next:

• Lincolnshire’s local offer will be reviewed and strengthened to ensure it continues to develop as a user-friendly platform that navigates easily and delivers precise, up to date information on available services and resources  
• the antenatal Solihull programme will continue to be developed and strengthened, expanding its reach area and accessibility for families, with a stronger focus on supporting first-time parents through the face to face offer across the children centre and family hub networks 
• building upon the family hubs programme speech and language assistant practitioner pilot, the speech and language therapy (SALT) service is piloting a move away from specialist speech and language clinic-based support to a specialist drop-in service co-located with partners across the family hub networks for children aged three to four years.  This will be considered to further strengthen speech, language and communication support as early as possible to maximise positive impact  
• we will continue to expand the early years support offer to two-year-olds.   We will enhance the special approach to making it real for parents and carers of children with SEND, to improve the way practitioners work with families, building knowledge and confidence through meaningful early literacy activities to support the early home learning environment and ultimately improve literacy and wider outcomes. Engaging parents in their children's early literacy development has been shown to improve children's outcomes and narrow attainment gaps   
• following the release of the best start for life government strategy, we will enhance our support and provision through the development and publication of Lincolnshire’s new giving every child the best start in life strategy.  The strategy will identify key areas of development to support children to achieve a good level of development and will be developed in alignment with the new family help strategy
• we will review our best start Lincolnshire and other commissioned early years services that delivery across our children’s centre and family hubs networks in order to ensure these service are aligned to updated local and national strategies to further strengthen our fully inclusive commissioned early years offer that supports all children to achieve a good level of development, including children with SEND  
• we will develop new early years SEND effectiveness advisors to maximise the help available to families.  Each family hub will have a children and family services professional specifically trained in working to support parents and carers of children with SEND who may need extra help early on
• the early years SEND inclusion funding enables early years settings to access top up funding where there is a need to implement additional resources as part of robust early intervention for children with SEND.  We will review and strengthen this process, moving to an automated system from a current paper-based process
• the inclusion quality and effectiveness team will embed their offer, working collaboratively with mainstream school leaders to effectively meet the additional needs of their pupils and increase schools’ confidence in school’s ability to do this 
• health Visitors will increase the number of antenatal contacts being delivered in Lincolnshire, whilst continuing to offer 100% of the mandated contacts, which include the antenatal (from 28 weeks of pregnancy), the primary birth visit (day 10-14 after birth), 6-8 week, 8-12 month and 2-2 ½ year assessments
• to determine the future commissioning of services we will complete a review of our commissioned services that provide early intervention, such as behaviour outreach support service (BOSS) and autism learning difficulties outreach service, and that provide disagreement resolution, such as regional SEND mediation, advice and disagreement resolution service
• Lincolnshire will embed the learning from the partnerships for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools (PINS) project with a focus on further strengthening knowledge, skills and learning environments to better meet the needs of neurodivergent children
• we will continue to work together to improve school attendance across Lincolnshire and embed a whole school approach, with a ‘support first’ ethos, in tackling attendance issues 
• we will continue to support and develop schools in interrogating their whole school attendance data, which is now readily available to them via the Department of Education (DfE). We aim to ensure that all children in Lincolnshire attend school regularly and best practice guides will be shaped by data, helping to pinpoint key areas for improvement 
• we will review and evaluate current established mechanisms for communicating with partners across the sector to understand what is working effectively and what is not, so that all stakeholders are informed and knowledgeable about systems, processes, and provision available to support children and young people with additional needs
• the partnership will continue to support and challenge schools in the early identification of children and young people’s needs, further collaborating with school leaders to support and challenge schools to provide early intervention to reduce suspensions and permanent exclusions of children and young people