Inclusion Without 30 Different Lesson Plans
When teachers hear the word differentiation, it can sometimes sound like an impossible workload: different worksheets, different tasks and different lesson plans for every learner in the room.
But effective inclusive teaching does not have to mean creating a separate lesson for every student.
A new 2026 guide from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) puts strong everyday classroom teaching at the heart of inclusion, with carefully chosen adaptations and additional support used when pupils need them. EEF
That distinction matters.
Start with what everyone needs
Before asking, “What special activity do I need for this student?”, it can be more useful to ask:
“What might prevent students from accessing this learning in the first place?”
Perhaps the instructions contain too much language. Maybe students are expected to remember several steps at once. The example is not clear enough. Key vocabulary has not been taught. Or students are being asked to work independently before they have seen enough modelling.
Addressing those barriers can improve the lesson for many students - not just those identified as needing additional support.
A teacher might:
break instructions into smaller steps;
model an example before independent work;
pre-teach essential vocabulary;
provide sentence starters or a visual prompt;
check understanding before students begin;
give students different levels of support while keeping the learning goal ambitious.
None of these requires three separate lesson plans.
Adapt the support, not automatically the expectation
There is another important question to ask when adapting learning:
Are we helping this student access the challenge - or simply removing the challenge?
Imagine a student struggling to write an analytical paragraph.
Giving them an easier question may allow them to finish something, but it may also remove the thinking we wanted them to practise.
Instead, the teacher might keep the same analytical goal while providing a paragraph frame, highlighted evidence, vocabulary bank or worked example. As the student's confidence grows, those supports can gradually be removed.
This is where professional judgement matters. Not every strategy will work for every learner, class or school context.
Make adaptation part of professional learning
Inclusive teaching is therefore difficult to improve through a workshop that simply gives teachers a list of differentiation strategies.
Teachers need opportunities to try an adaptation, observe what happens and adjust it.
In a department meeting or professional learning community, teachers could choose one learner or one common classroom barrier and ask:
What is the barrier? What small adaptation could we try? What evidence would tell us whether it helped?
Try it for a week or two. Bring back student work, observations or reflections. Then decide whether to keep, change or remove the support.
That cycle-identify, adapt, observe, reflect -turns inclusion from an idea discussed during professional development into something visible in classroom practice.
At The Teaching Practice, that is the kind of professional learning we believe matters: practical, responsive and grounded in the students teachers actually teach.
Inclusive teaching does not mean creating thirty different lessons.
It means designing one strong learning experience-and thinking carefully about what different students may need to access it.
The Teaching Practice — From Practice to Progress in Every Classroom.
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