How to Spend the Inclusive Mainstream Fund on Practical Science

For once, the money is not the hard part. The Inclusive Mainstream Fund puts £400 million into mainstream schools in 2026-27, the first instalment of £1.6 billion over three years announced in the Schools White Paper, and schools do not have to bid for it: allocations are formula-driven and published, with a further £47 million for early years and £83 million for 16 to 19 providers (DfE written statement, 2026). The hard part is what comes with it. From December 2026, every school must publish an inclusion strategy explaining how it delivers inclusive, evidence-based support, and that strategy is what schools will be held accountable against. The question for leaders this term is not how to get the money. It is what to write in the strategy and what to buy that makes the strategy true.

This guide makes the case, with the fund's own language, for putting practical science near the top of that list, and shows what a defensible spend line looks like.

What Is the Fund Actually For?

The DfE's framing is unusually specific. The fund exists to help schools move towards practice that is "inclusive by design," to provide "early support directly to children without the need for diagnosis or statutory process," and to "remove commonly occurring and predictable barriers to learning" (DfE, 2026). Each phrase rules something out. "Inclusive by design" rules out provision that works for most pupils with adjustments bolted on for the rest. "Without the need for diagnosis" rules out support gated behind an EHCP queue. "Predictable barriers" tells schools to fix the obstacles they already know about rather than waiting for individual children to hit them. Allocations, methodology, and conditions of grant are published alongside the fund, and spending decisions sit with school and trust leaders (GOV.UK, 2026).

December Turns the Money Into a Public Commitment

The inclusion strategy requirement is the fund's accountability mechanism, and the DfE has published guidance and a template for writing one (DfE, 2026). It also does not arrive alone. From September, Ofsted's updated toolkits examine inclusion across four groups of pupils and expect it to be owned by leaders throughout the school, subject by subject, judged against schools with a similar intake. We covered those changes, and what inspectors will look for in science, in our guide to evidencing inclusion for the new Ofsted toolkit. Read together, the message of the two policies is the same: by this time next year, a school should be able to point at any subject, including the one taught in a laboratory, and show that every pupil genuinely takes part.

Why Practical Science Belongs in the Strategy

If the test is "commonly occurring and predictable barriers," the school laboratory fails it more visibly than almost any other room in the building. The barriers are physical: fixed benches, fine motor demands, glassware, and flames. They are sensory: noise, smells, and crowding that can make a lab unusable for some neurodivergent pupils. They are financial: EngineeringUK reports that around a quarter of schools cannot afford the practical equipment they need (EngineeringUK, 2025). And they are already excluding at scale: the share of students doing practical work at least fortnightly fell from 44 per cent in 2016 to 26 per cent in 2023 (Royal Society, 2024). Every one of these barriers is predictable in exactly the fund's sense: a school does not need to wait for a diagnosis to know that some of its pupils cannot use a Bunsen burner safely, cannot manage a crowded bench, or will spend the practical watching a partner work.

What a Defensible Spend Line Looks Like

A strategy line the fund's conditions were written for has three parts: a named barrier, a universal provision that removes it, and an evidence measure. Applied to science, that looks like this. The barrier: physical, sensory, and equipment constraints prevent a proportion of pupils from performing practical work themselves. The provision: a simulated laboratory platform on the school's existing devices, so that every pupil in every science class performs full practicals individually, alongside rather than instead of the department's hands-on programme. The evidence: per-pupil participation and progress records, broken down by the pupil groups the strategy covers. A subscription of this kind consumes a small fraction of a typical school's allocation, requires no capital works, and serves every pupil in the school rather than a handful, which is precisely the "universal practice" the fund asks schools to strengthen.

How WhimsyLabs Matches the Fund's Language

We built WhimsyLabs for exactly this shape of provision, so the mapping is direct. It is inclusive by design: every pupil performs the whole practical themselves, in a fully physics-simulated lab on a Chromebook or in VR, with no bench heights, no tremor-hostile glassware, and no sensory overload, so no child needs a special adapted version of the lesson. It provides early support without diagnosis: WhimsyCat, our AI tutor, infers struggle, hesitation, and disengagement from what each pupil does and surfaces it to the teacher, which means a child who needs help gets noticed on the day, not after a referral process. We have seen what that does for pupils the traditional lab was quietly leaving out, including SEND students whose engagement with a virtual kidney dissection surprised their own teachers. And it produces the strategy's evidence automatically: because assessment is based on each pupil's process, the participation and progress data your December strategy commits to is generated by the lessons themselves.

Five Lines for the Strategy Document

For leaders drafting with the DfE template this autumn, the practical-science section can be short. It needs to say:

• The barrier: named, specific, and predictable (physical, sensory, and equipment barriers to practical participation in science).
• The provision: universal simulated practicals for all pupils, funded from the IMF allocation, alongside the existing hands-on programme.
• Who benefits: all pupils, with particular impact for the four groups Ofsted's toolkit names, without diagnosis-gated access.
• The evidence measure: per-pupil practical participation and progress records, reviewed by group each term.
• The review point: judged against the similar-schools comparison when results and inspection data arrive.

Our Inclusive Mainstream Fund guide has the full details, including free demo access and strategy support, and our grants and funding guides cover the other routes schools use to fund science provision, from Royal Society Partnership Grants to Pupil Premium.

Spend It Where the Barriers Are

Funds like this one have a familiar failure mode: absorbed into general staffing, spread thinly across a dozen intentions, and impossible to evidence when the accountability arrives. The schools that will get this right are the ones that pick a small number of named, predictable barriers and remove them completely. The laboratory is one of the clearest candidates in the building: the barriers are well documented, the fix runs on devices already in the cupboard, and the evidence writes itself. £400 million is in schools' budgets this year to make mainstream education inclusive by design. Practical science is one of the places it can visibly, measurably do that by December.

Related Articles

• How to Evidence Inclusion in Science for Ofsted's New Toolkit
• What the 2026 SEND White Paper Means for Science Teaching
• Virtual Kidney Dissection Enhances SEND Student Engagement
• Making Premium Science Education Accessible to Every School