The UK government’s recent announcement of £3 billion in new funding for specialist places in mainstream schools marks a significant moment for education, especially given the current rocky landscape.

It’s a clear signal of intent: inclusion matters, and mainstream settings must be equipped to support a wider range of learner needs.

But while funding is a critical first step, it also raises an important question for school and trust leaders:

How do we ensure this investment translates into real, day‑to‑day impact for pupils and staff?

Unsurprisingly, the answer lies not only in physical spaces or specialist provision, but in the digital infrastructure that underpins teaching and learning.

Inclusion Is About Access – Not Just Provision

As the number of SEN students within mainstream schools expands, educators are being asked to support pupils with increasingly diverse needs, often within the same classroom. This requires flexibility, clarity, and consistency — all areas where digital tools can either help or hinder, depending on how they’re implemented and used.

When EdTech ecosystems are fragmented, difficult to access, or inconsistently managed, the burden often falls hardest on the pupils who need the most support.

Multiple logins, unclear data permissions, and disjointed platforms can quickly become barriers to learning rather than enablers, blocking access for those students who need it most, as well as proving a catalyst for low level disruption to occur within a classroom.

True inclusion means ensuring that every learner can access the right tools, at the right time, with minimal friction.

The Hidden Risk: Complexity at Scale

Many schools already use a wide range of digital tools to support SEND provision, personalised learning, and differentiated instruction. With SENCO’s and teachers being stretched further than ever before, striving to offer personalised learning and differentiated instruction, the hasty introduction of flashy digital tools may be too shiny to resist. As funding increases, so too does the likelihood of additional platforms being introduced.

Without a clear strategy, this can lead to:

• Increased cognitive load for pupils navigating multiple systems
• Additional workload for staff managing access and compliance
• Reduced visibility over which tools are being used — and whether they’re delivering value

In this context, digital complexity becomes a safeguarding, inclusion, and sustainability issue — not just a technical one.

Rethinking Digital Infrastructure for Inclusive Learning

To make the most of new investment, schools and trusts are beginning to ask a different set of questions:

• How do we make digital access simpler for young and neurodiverse learners?
• How do we protect pupil data while scaling digital provision?
• How do we ensure that new tools support pedagogy, rather than distract from it?

The answer isn’t necessarily more technology, but better-managed and easier to access technology.

A unified digital approach can help schools to:

• Remove unnecessary barriers to access through single sign-on
• Ensure consistent data protection across all tools
• Give educators confidence that technology is supporting, not complicating, learning

From Funding to Impact

The £3bn investment is all well and good, but it must be realised that it also presents a genuine opportunity to rethink how digital tools are selected, deployed, and experienced across mainstream education.

When digital infrastructure is thoughtfully designed:

• Pupils experience technology as an invisible support, not an obstacle
• Teachers spend less time troubleshooting and more time teaching
• Leaders gain clarity and oversight over digital strategy and spend

In other words, inclusion becomes truly operational, not aspirational.

Leading with Purpose

Across the UK, forward-thinking trusts are already demonstrating how strong digital foundations can support inclusive education at scale. By aligning pedagogy, technology, and access, they are showing that digital transformation isn’t about innovation for its own sake… it’s about outcomes. Genuine outcomes.

As schools prepare to deploy new funding, the most impactful decisions will be those that prioritise simplicity, accessibility, and sustainability.

Because inclusion doesn’t start with a platform or a policy — it starts with making learning accessible to every child, every day.

If you’re reviewing your digital strategy in light of the new funding, now is the time to ask whether your technology is truly working for all learners.

Use the button below to connect with the Skolon Team for a chat about how Skolon helps schools centralise EdTech, reduce complexity, and create inclusive digital learning environments that can be replicated across yours.

This is Skolon – we gather the best digital educational tools and make them work in the classroom.

Skolon is an independent platform for digital educational tools and learning resources, created for both teachers and students. With Skolon, accessing and using your digital educational tools is easy – security increases, administration decreases, and there’s more time for learning.

The digital educational tools come from both small and large providers, all of whom have one thing in common – they create digital educational tools that are beneficial for the school environment.