Research Proposal Sample: Inclusive Pedagogy and Attainment in Primary Schools

Model Answer

Introduction and Background

Inclusion has been a stated policy commitment of the English education system since the Salamanca Statement first called for schools to accommodate all children regardless of their physical, intellectual, social, emotional or linguistic conditions (UNESCO, 1994), a commitment subsequently embedded in the Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice (Department for Education, 2015). Yet policy commitment to inclusion has not translated into a settled understanding of what inclusive practice should look like inside the primary classroom, nor into consistent evidence that inclusive practice, however defined, is associated with stronger attainment outcomes for the pupils it is intended to benefit.

Attainment data provide one indication of why this question matters. Department for Education (2022) Key Stage 2 headline figures show a persistent attainment gap between pupils identified with special educational needs and their peers, a gap that has narrowed only marginally over successive reporting years despite substantial policy and resourcing attention. Whether this gap reflects the limits of what any pedagogical approach can achieve, or reflects variation in how consistently and effectively inclusive pedagogy is actually enacted at classroom level, remains an open and empirically under-examined question.

Florian and Black-Hawkins (2011) offer an influential theoretical distinction that this proposal takes as its starting point. They distinguish inclusive pedagogy, understood as an approach to teaching that extends what is ordinarily available to all pupils in a class rather than differentiating additional provision for some, from more traditional models of inclusion built around individualised, deficit-framed support for pupils identified as having additional needs. This “everybody” rather than “most plus some” orientation, Florian and Spratt (2013) argue, requires a distinct and identifiable set of classroom practices, yet Norwich (2013) cautions that the dilemma between individual and common provision is not easily resolved in practice, and that teachers routinely navigate real tensions between these two orientations rather than adopting one cleanly.

What is largely missing from this theoretical literature is robust empirical evidence linking the classroom-level enactment of inclusive pedagogy, as Florian and colleagues define it, to measured pupil attainment outcomes in the English primary phase. Existing empirical work in this tradition, notably Black-Hawkins, Florian and Rouse’s (2007) study, has tended to explore inclusive practice through rich qualitative case study rather than through attainment data linked directly to observed classroom practice, leaving open the question of whether inclusive pedagogy, beyond its ethical and social justice rationale, is also associated with the attainment outcomes that schools, inspectors and policymakers are held accountable for. This proposal is designed to address that specific gap through a mixed-methods design combining validated classroom observation with linked pupil attainment data.

The question also carries clear policy relevance. Ainscow (2005) argues that sustainable inclusive school reform requires evidence that connects classroom practice to pupil outcomes if it is to compete successfully against the pull of narrower, attainment-focused accountability pressures within the wider English school system. Rix et al.’s (2013) international policy review similarly found that provision models vary considerably between and within jurisdictions, in the continued absence of a clear evidence base linking specific provision models to outcomes, a gap this proposal is positioned to help close within the specific English primary context.

The timing of this proposal is also relevant. Ongoing government review of SEND and alternative provision in England has renewed policy interest in what effective, sustainable inclusive practice within mainstream classrooms actually looks like, at a moment when rising numbers of pupils hold an Education, Health and Care Plan and mainstream primary schools face growing pressure to demonstrate that inclusive provision is both pedagogically sound and compatible with whole-class attainment expectations. A three-year PhD study is well placed to generate evidence directly relevant to this live policy conversation, precisely because it can combine the depth of qualitative case study with attainment data of a kind shorter, smaller-scale studies in this tradition have rarely been resourced to collect.

Research Aim, Objectives and Questions

Aim. To investigate the relationship between teachers’ classroom-level enactment of inclusive pedagogy and pupil attainment outcomes in English primary schools, and to explore how teachers understand and negotiate the enactment of inclusive practice in their own classrooms.

Objectives:

• To develop and validate a classroom observation framework operationalising Florian and Spratt’s (2013) principles of inclusive pedagogy for use in the English primary phase.
• To measure the extent of inclusive pedagogical practice across a purposively sampled set of primary classrooms using this framework.
• To examine the statistical relationship between observed inclusive pedagogical practice and pupil attainment in reading and mathematics, controlling for prior attainment, free school meal eligibility and special educational needs status.
• To explore, through interviews with teachers and special educational needs coordinators, the enablers and barriers that shape how inclusive pedagogy is enacted in practice.

Research Questions:

1. To what extent do primary teachers enact inclusive pedagogy, as defined by Florian and Spratt (2013), in their classroom practice?
2. Is there a statistically significant relationship between observed inclusive pedagogical practice and pupil attainment, once prior attainment and pupil characteristics are controlled for?
3. What do teachers and special educational needs coordinators identify as the principal enablers and barriers to enacting inclusive pedagogy?
4. How do quantitative patterns of association and qualitative accounts of practice inform one another in explaining variation in inclusive pedagogical enactment across schools?

Brief Literature Context

Florian and Black-Hawkins’s (2011) framework rests on three interrelated principles: extending what is ordinarily available to all learners rather than providing something additional or different for some; treating individual difference as an ordinary feature of human development rather than a problem to be corrected; and rejecting practices that imply a fixed ceiling on what particular pupils can achieve. This framework was developed in explicit contrast to the “additional needs” model that has historically underpinned much special educational needs provision, in which pupils identified as having additional needs receive individualised, often withdrawn, support distinct from mainstream classroom teaching.

Norwich’s (2013) analysis of tensions and dilemmas in inclusive education provides an important counterweight to this framework, arguing that the practical reality facing teachers rarely permits a clean choice between common and individualised provision, and that skilled teachers instead navigate a continuum of practice responsive to context, subject and pupil need. This suggests that inclusive pedagogy, as observed in real classrooms, may be enacted with meaningful variation in degree rather than as a binary presence or absence, an insight that directly informs this proposal’s decision to measure inclusive practice on a graded observational scale rather than through a simple present/absent classification.

The relationship between teaching quality more broadly and pupil attainment is well established in the wider effectiveness literature. Hattie’s (2009) synthesis of meta-analyses identifies specific pedagogical practices, including formative feedback, classroom discussion and appropriately challenging goal-setting, several of which overlap conceptually with Florian and Spratt’s (2013) principles of inclusive pedagogy, as associated with above-average effects on pupil achievement. However, Hattie’s synthesis does not examine inclusive pedagogy as a distinct construct, meaning its relevance to the present proposal is suggestive of a plausible mechanism rather than direct supporting evidence, reinforcing rather than resolving the gap this proposal addresses.

Black-Hawkins, Florian and Rouse’s (2007) study, “Achievement and Inclusion in Schools”, remains the most substantial empirical precedent for the present proposal, using classroom case studies across several English primary and secondary schools to explore how teachers reconciled inclusive values with attainment-focused accountability pressures. Their findings suggested that teachers who reported strong inclusive values did not necessarily translate these consistently into observable inclusive classroom practice, pointing to an important distinction between teacher belief and teacher enactment that this proposal’s observational, rather than purely self-report, design is specifically intended to capture. Their study, however, did not link observed practice to standardised attainment data, a methodological gap this proposal directly addresses.

At a systemic level, Ainscow’s (2005) analysis of levers for inclusive education reform argues that school-level change is more likely to be sustained where it is supported by evidence connecting practice to valued outcomes, attainment among them, rather than resting on ethical or social justice argument alone, however well founded. Rix et al.’s (2013) comparative policy review reinforces this point at an international level, finding considerable variation across jurisdictions in how inclusive provision is modelled, in the continued absence of a robust evidence base linking specific classroom-level provision models to pupil outcomes.

A further consideration concerns how attainment itself should be conceptualised within an inclusive pedagogy framework. Florian and Black-Hawkins (2011) caution against treating attainment purely as a fixed, individual trait to be maximised regardless of context, arguing instead that inclusive pedagogy is concerned with extending what all pupils in a class can access and achieve together. This raises a methodological question the present proposal must address directly: whether a relationship between inclusive practice and standardised, individually reported attainment measures, of the kind DfE Key Stage data provide, is even the right test of the framework’s central claims, or whether it risks importing the very individualised, deficit-oriented logic the framework was developed to challenge. This proposal takes the position that testing the relationship against standardised attainment measures remains a valuable and policy-relevant exercise precisely because such measures are what schools are held accountable against in practice, while acknowledging in its qualitative strand that teachers’ own accounts may surface a richer, less individually bounded understanding of pupil progress than attainment data alone can capture.

Taken together, this literature establishes both strong theoretical grounds for expecting a relationship between inclusive pedagogical enactment and attainment, and a persistent empirical gap in testing that relationship directly within the English primary phase, the gap this proposal is designed to close.

Methodology

Design. The study will adopt an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design (Phase 1 quantitative followed by Phase 2 qualitative) structured as a multi-site case study across six English primary schools, an approach well suited to examining a phenomenon, inclusive pedagogical enactment, that varies meaningfully both within and between school contexts (Yin, 2018). The quantitative phase will establish patterns of association between observed practice and attainment; the qualitative phase will then explain and contextualise those patterns through teacher and SENDCo accounts, purposively sampled from cases showing contrasting quantitative patterns.

Sample and Participants. Six primary schools will be purposively sampled to achieve variation in Ofsted rating, proportion of pupils with identified special educational needs, and proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals, using publicly available school performance data to inform selection ahead of formal gatekeeper approach. Within each school, all Key Stage 2 classes will be invited to participate, yielding an anticipated total of approximately thirty classes and around six hundred and fifty pupils for whom anonymised attainment data will be analysed. From the observed classes, twenty-four teachers, four per school, will be purposively selected for Phase 2 interviews based on their classroom’s Phase 1 inclusive pedagogy score, deliberately sampling teachers whose classrooms scored at the higher and lower ends of the observed range to maximise the explanatory value of the qualitative interviews. The school’s SENDCo will also be interviewed in each of the six schools, giving a total qualitative sample of thirty participants.

Data Collection. Phase 1 will use a structured classroom observation instrument developed for this study by operationalising Florian and Spratt’s (2013) three principles into an observable, graded rating scale, informed by existing classroom observation frameworks and refined through a piloting exercise in two non-sample classrooms prior to full data collection, with inter-rater reliability established between the researcher and a second trained observer on a fifteen per cent sub-sample of observations. Each participating class will be observed on three separate occasions across a single term, covering literacy, numeracy and one further curriculum area, to reduce the influence of lesson-specific factors on the resulting practice score. Pupil attainment data, comprising Key Stage 1 baseline scores and end-of-year teacher assessment or Key Stage 2 outcomes in reading and mathematics, together with free school meal eligibility and special educational needs status, will be obtained from participating schools’ management information systems with appropriate data-sharing agreements in place. Phase 2 will use semi-structured interviews of approximately fifty minutes, guided by a topic schedule developed from Phase 1 findings and covering participants’ understanding of inclusive pedagogy, perceived enablers and constraints, and reflections on their own observed practice presented anonymously in aggregate form.

Analysis Approach. The nested structure of the data, pupils within classes within schools, will be analysed using multilevel (hierarchical linear) modelling in R, following Goldstein’s (2011) approach to multilevel statistical modelling, with the inclusive pedagogy observation score entered as a classroom-level predictor of pupil attainment alongside prior attainment, free school meal eligibility and special educational needs status as covariates, and school and class included as random effects to account for the nested data structure. This approach allows the study to test whether classroom-level inclusive pedagogical practice predicts pupil attainment net of pupil-level characteristics, addressing a key limitation of simple correlational designs. Interview transcripts will be analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis, applying a framework approach to allow systematic comparison across the higher- and lower-scoring classrooms sampled for interview. Quantitative and qualitative findings will be integrated at the interpretation stage using a joint display comparing statistical patterns against qualitative explanatory themes, consistent with recommended mixed-methods integration practice.

Ethics. The study will be conducted in accordance with the British Educational Research Association’s (2018) Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research and will require both university ethics committee approval and individual school gatekeeper agreement prior to any data collection. Enhanced DBS clearance will be maintained throughout the fieldwork period given direct classroom access. Informed consent will be sought from participating teachers and SENDCos for interview participation, and from head teachers, as data controllers, for the use of anonymised, pseudonymised pupil attainment data; individual parental opt-out consent will be offered for the secondary use of anonymised attainment data in line with the school’s existing data protection policy and UK GDPR requirements, with no pupil-identifiable data leaving individual schools’ own systems. All classroom observations will be non-evaluative in framing, explicitly separated from any performance management purpose, and reported to schools only in aggregated, anonymised form.

Limitations. The purposive, six-school sample, while designed to capture meaningful contextual variation, limits statistical generalisability to the wider population of English primary schools, and schools willing to participate in an observational study of this kind may differ systematically from those that decline, introducing a plausible self-selection bias. Classroom observation, however non-evaluative in framing, carries an acknowledged risk of practice reactivity during observed lessons. Finally, the correlational nature of the quantitative design, even with multilevel modelling and covariate adjustment, cannot establish causality between inclusive pedagogical practice and attainment; the qualitative strand is intended to strengthen, but cannot fully substitute for, causal inference beyond the scope of a single three-year study.

A related limitation concerns measurement precision at the pupil level. Key Stage attainment data, while nationally standardised and therefore comparable across the six sample schools, capture only reading and mathematics outcomes and cannot represent the full breadth of pupil progress that inclusive pedagogy is intended to support, including social participation and engagement, which fall outside this study’s quantitative scope but will be partially addressed through teacher and SENDCo accounts in the qualitative interviews. The three-observation design, while an improvement on single-lesson snapshots common in prior classroom observation research, still represents a limited sample of each teacher’s overall practice across a full academic year, and observed practice may not be fully representative of typical teaching on days the study’s observers were not present.

Timeline

As a three-year, full-time PhD project, the study is structured across three broad phases summarised in Table 1: an initial development year covering ethics, instrument design and piloting; a fieldwork year covering both quantitative and qualitative data collection; and a final year for analysis, integration and thesis write-up, with a period reserved for viva preparation.

Expected Contribution

This study is expected to make three distinct contributions. Theoretically, it will provide one of the first direct empirical tests of the relationship between Florian and Spratt’s (2013) inclusive pedagogy framework, developed primarily through qualitative case study, and standardised measures of pupil attainment, addressing a gap explicitly acknowledged within that literature and extending an influential theoretical framework into a domain, attainment outcomes, it has rarely been tested against directly.

Methodologically, the study will produce a validated, graded classroom observation instrument operationalising inclusive pedagogy for use in the English primary phase, a tool that could be adopted or adapted by other researchers seeking to measure inclusive practice consistently across studies, an area where the existing literature relies heavily on either self-report survey instruments or unstructured qualitative observation, neither of which permits the kind of quantitative comparison this study’s multilevel modelling approach requires.

Practically and at a policy level, the study’s findings will speak directly to current debate around the DfE’s ongoing SEND and alternative provision reform programme, offering evidence-based insight into whether classroom-level pedagogical practice, rather than resourcing or provision structure alone, is meaningfully associated with attainment outcomes for pupils with additional needs and for their peers. This has clear relevance for initial teacher education curricula, where inclusive pedagogy is increasingly emphasised in professional standards but rarely evidenced against attainment outcomes, and for continuing professional development design within schools seeking to strengthen inclusive practice in a manner that is both ethically grounded and empirically supported.

The six participating schools themselves stand to gain directly from involvement, receiving an individualised, anonymised summary of their own classroom observation and attainment patterns alongside the wider study findings, providing a practical evaluative benefit that is not always built into doctoral research of this kind but which this proposal treats as an important element of reciprocity with participating schools and staff. Beyond the six case-study schools, findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publication and through accessible summaries shared with relevant professional networks, including initial teacher education providers and SEND-focused subject associations, with the validated observation instrument made available for use in subsequent research seeking to extend this study’s design to a larger, more representative sample of English primary schools.

References

Ainscow, M. (2005) ‘Developing inclusive education systems: what are the levers for change?’, Journal of Educational Change, 6(2), pp. 109–124.

Black-Hawkins, K., Florian, L. and Rouse, M. (2007) Achievement and Inclusion in Schools. London: Routledge.

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006) ‘Using thematic analysis in psychology’, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), pp. 77–101.

British Educational Research Association (2018) Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research. 4th edn. London: BERA.

Department for Education (2015) Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice: 0 to 25 Years. London: DfE.

Department for Education (2022) Key Stage 2 Attainment: National Headlines. London: DfE.

Florian, L. and Black-Hawkins, K. (2011) ‘Exploring inclusive pedagogy’, British Educational Research Journal, 37(5), pp. 813–828.

Florian, L. and Spratt, J. (2013) ‘Enacting inclusion: a framework for interrogating inclusive practice’, European Journal of Special Needs Education, 28(2), pp. 119–135.

Goldstein, H. (2011) Multilevel Statistical Models. 4th edn. Chichester: Wiley.

Hattie, J. (2009) Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. London: Routledge.

Norwich, B. (2013) Addressing Tensions and Dilemmas in Inclusive Education: Living with Uncertainty. London: Routledge.

Rix, J., Sheehy, K., Fletcher-Campbell, F., Crisp, M. and Harper, A. (2013) ‘Continuum of education provision for children with special educational needs: review of international policies and practices’, Educational Review, 65(4), pp. 439–457.

UNESCO (1994) The Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education. Paris: UNESCO.

Yin, R.K. (2018) Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods. 6th edn. Los Angeles: Sage.