✖
Last Updated:
July 9, 2026
DETAILED GUIDE for ScHools and Colleges
Written By:
Liz Robson
Inclusion bases are becoming a central part of how mainstream schools meet a wider range of pupil needs, vunerabilities and disarvantage. They give pupils with SEND access to specialist support without losing their place in the wider school community. Yet many leaders discover once a base is up and running that the specialist provision inside the base is only half the story. Whether it works depends just as much on the culture around it.
That is where pupil voice comes in. When you listen to young people and give them real roles in shaping their school, you build the belonging, connection, and peer relationships that any inclusion base needs to thrive. This guide explores why pupil voice matters so much for inclusion, how peer-led programmes create a culture of belonging, and how the Wellbeing Ambassadors programme can strengthen the conditions that make an inclusion base succeed.
Our whole school approach to positive mental health and wellbeing, combines positive and organisational psychology theory with mental health in schools guidelines and recommendations. Our system model represents the dynamic way mental health and wellbeing is developed in schools and colleges. We use it to provide a framework for planning, developing and embedding school wellbeing.
One thing to be clear about from the start: pupil voice and peer-led work do not replace specialist teaching, therapeutic input, or SENCo oversight. They strengthen the whole-school culture that sits around your specialist provision. Think of them as the soil, not the plant.
The good news is that you do not need a large budget or a significant amount of staff time to get started. Schools across the country are running sustainable peer-led programmes with two trained staff members and a cohort of motivated students. The investment is modest. The impact is not.
Inclusion is not something you can do to pupils. It is something you build with them. When you involve young people in decisions about their school, you gain insight you simply cannot get any other way.
Pupils know where they feel safe and where they do not. They know which corridors feel overwhelming, which transitions cause anxiety, and which spaces feel welcoming. When you ask and genuinely listen, you learn about the real barriers to learning rather than the ones adults assume exist.
Pupil voice supports inclusion in several important ways:
The DfE's Inclusion Bases in Schools guidance (June 2026) reinforces this. It asks schools to gather "the voices of children and young people" as part of ongoing assessment, and lists child, young person, and parent and carer voice as one of at least three quality-assurance sources a base should draw on each year. Pupil voice is not a nice extra. It is expected practice.
A sense of belonging is one of the strongest protective factors for young people's mental health. It also underpins engagement, attendance, and behaviour. When pupils feel connected and known, they are far more likely to come to school, settle into learning, and reach out when they are struggling.
Traditional, top-down approaches often struggle to reach every child. Peer-led programmes work differently. They spread responsibility for belonging across the whole community rather than relying on a handful of adults.
Peer-led support helps by:
This matters enormously for an inclusion base. The DfE guidance is explicit that schools must "guard against making children and young people who use the base feel, or seem as though, they are less valued than their mainstream peers." A strong peer-led culture is one of the most powerful ways to prevent that from happening.
The Wellbeing Ambassadors programme is a whole-school, pupil-led belonging and wellbeing intervention. It trains students to lead on wellbeing, run campaigns, support transitions, and offer visible, everyday routes into connection and support.
It does not replace the specialist teaching, therapy, or SENCo leadership that sit at the heart of an effective base. What it offers is the surrounding culture the DfE guidance repeatedly names as a pre-condition for a base to work well: active pupil voice, peer relationships, and a genuine sense of belonging that reaches across the boundary between the base and mainstream classes.
The programme is designed to be run by two members of staff who complete the train-the-trainer course. Once trained, they lead the programme in-house, with ongoing access to resources and support. There is no need for external facilitators to come back into school repeatedly, which keeps costs down and builds lasting internal capacity.
Here is how it strengthens each area.
Wellbeing Ambassadors are commonly paired with forms or individual pupils to offer friendly, consistent support. The DfE guidance suggests that "a well-structured 'buddy system' could help children accessing the base to feel better supported when accessing mainstream provision."
Extending an existing Ambassador buddy model to specifically include base pupils turns a proven structure into a direct answer to the DfE's own recommended strategy. Each base pupil can be matched with a trained Ambassador in a mainstream form, smoothing daily transitions in and out of the base.
At St Lawrence College, every Year 7 form was paired with two or three Wellbeing Ambassadors to support the move to senior school. Ambassadors also visited the Junior School to speak with younger pupils preparing for transition, and produced a peer-made video sharing what Year 13 pupils wished new Year 7s had known. The result was a structured, visible support network that cost very little to run but made a meaningful difference to how settled and safe pupils felt in their first weeks.
The DfE guidance recommends "reverse integration," where mainstream pupils spend time in the base. Wellbeing Ambassadors are well placed to lead this. An Equality and Diversity or Inclusion sub-group can design and run structured, low-stakes shared activities that bring mainstream and base pupils into the same space on equal terms.
This works well because it is not framed as help. It is framed as a shared activity, which lowers the barrier for everyone involved. At St Lawrence College, the Wellbeing Ambassadors ran a Board Games Club specifically for pupils who felt lonely or found unstructured time difficult. Pupils from across the school took part alongside one another, creating connection without any of the pressure or stigma that more formal support can sometimes carry.
Transitions are one of the highest-risk points for anxiety and disengagement, especially for pupils with SEND. Ambassadors can:
At The King's School Chester, the Mental Fitness Ambassadors programme was designed with structured transition support built in from the start. Ambassadors worked through a strategic action plan built around the SEARCH framework and were embedded into the school's tiered intervention and safeguarding policy as the "first line of defence" for early prevention. Deputy Head Lee Parkes describes how the programme sits within the school's formal processes: "I talk to them about them being our first line of defence, and our first line of defence is prevention." Importantly, the programme was designed to be handed over progressively to students themselves over four years, meaning sustainability was built into the model from day one.
One of the most practical things a peer-led programme can do is create structured, welcoming spaces for pupils who find unstructured time difficult. This is especially relevant for pupils accessing inclusion bases, who may find the playground or dining hall challenging.
At Rainey Endowed School in Northern Ireland, the Wellbeing Ambassadors set up a Wellbeing Dropin at lunchtimes for younger pupils. The club gave students a calm, structured environment during what can otherwise be an overwhelming part of the day. Staff at the school noticed that autistic and SEN pupils in particular benefited from having a consistent space where they could connect with peers, feel accepted, and build positive relationships across year groups. The programme became embedded in the school culture to the point where younger students were actively waiting to apply to become ambassadors themselves.
Rainey also made sure ambassadors were visible and easy to find. They wore bright badges and were stationed in high-traffic areas such as the gym and the dining hall. Simple decisions like these make peer support genuinely accessible rather than something students have to seek out on their own.
The DfE guidance asks schools to ensure that families of base pupils "have the same opportunities to access wider-school support, activities, celebrations and events." Because Wellbeing Ambassadors campaigns, assemblies, and awareness weeks are whole-school by design, deliberately inviting base pupils and their families into them is a straightforward way to meet this expectation. Ambassadors model a positive, visible culture that families can see and trust.
At St Lawrence College, Wellbeing Ambassadors ran a Culture Week and introduced Tolerance Pledges displayed in every room across the school. Initiatives like these create a whole-school identity that is visible to families and signals that inclusion is a lived value, not just a policy statement.
Ambassadors run "you said, we did" feedback processes, participation registers, and an annual culture report. Used well, these give base leaders a ready-made, documented source of pupil-voice evidence for their termly reviews and annual quality assurance. The key is to make sure feedback is gathered in formats that are genuinely accessible to all pupils, including those in the base.
At Rainey Endowed School, the programme was delivered entirely in-house from the start. A dedicated staff member set up a Google Classroom for resource sharing, ran weekly lunchtime meetings with ambassadors, and acted as a consistent point of contact. The approach was light-touch in terms of staff time but high in impact.
When one ambassador was going through a difficult period personally, the team simply shifted her role to designing posters and presentations rather than frontline peer support. This kind of flexibility is easy to build in and means the programme can keep running without putting pressure on individual students.
The programme acted as a catalyst for embedding mental wellbeing across the curriculum and sparked several other school initiatives. Staff observed a clear improvement in student behaviour and readiness to learn. As one leader put it, investing in this kind of provision is "hugely worth it" because of its wide-reaching impact.
At St Lawrence College, 54 trained ambassadors across Years 10 to 13 worked through three structured strands: Equality and Diversity, Anxiety and Stress, and Relationships. Each sub-group had a named adult to help them move from ideas into action, which is the detail that made everything else work.
Their initiatives included:
The scale of the programme at St Lawrence College shows what is possible over time. But it started simply, with a small group of trained students and a clear structure. You do not need 54 ambassadors on day one.
At Hazlehurst Community Primary in Greater Manchester, headteacher Anne-Marie Knowles started with a wellbeing monitor model that was easy to introduce and quick to become part of everyday school life.
Children nominate themselves each term to act as wellbeing monitors for their class. They use a self-regulation chart at the start of each day and check in with any classmate who has not moved to "green, ready to learn." As Anne-Marie explains: "If the teacher forgets or misses a child, the wellbeing monitors intervene and have a chat with that person and try and help them get to green."
The cultural shift was significant. "If someone is sad, several children will go over and try and help them, not just the wellbeing monitors. I think that's been a massive impact for staff and for children, just having that empathy for one another." Behaviour improved, staff felt more supported, and no child slipped quietly under the radar. It all started with a simple system that cost nothing to run.
If you are building or strengthening an inclusion base, the steps below will help you embed pupil voice and peer support alongside your specialist provision. None of these require a large investment of time or money. Most can be introduced one at a time.
This work does more than build a kinder school. It helps you evidence exactly what inspectors and the DfE are looking for.
The DfE's Inclusion Bases in Schools guidance (June 2026) is clear that a base only works well when the whole school takes shared ownership of belonging, peer relationships, and inclusion. Wellbeing Ambassadors maps directly onto several of the DfE's principles:
Ofsted's framework (from September 2026) inspects the base as part of the whole school. Peer-led pupil voice supports several key evaluation areas:
One practical note on evidence: keep simple records of your peer-led activity. Buddy pairings, drop-in numbers, feedback sessions, and reintegration meet-ups all count. You do not need a complex system. A shared spreadsheet or a simple log is enough to demonstrate impact rather than just describe it.
An effective inclusion base needs specialist teaching, therapeutic input, and clear SENCo oversight at its core. Those things cannot be replaced. But they also cannot succeed in isolation.
What makes a base thrive is the culture around it: a school where pupils feel they belong, where peer relationships reach across every boundary, and where young people's voices genuinely shape provision. That is the whole-school layer the Wellbeing Ambassadors programme is designed to build.
The schools in this guide all started with something small. A lunchtime club. A buddy pairing system. A small group of trained students with a simple brief and a named adult to support them. Over time, those small beginnings grew into something that changed the culture of their schools.
You do not need to do everything at once. You just need to start.
If you are preparing an inclusion base, or want to strengthen the belonging that surrounds one, the Wellbeing Ambassadors programme offers a practical, affordable, and sustainable way to put pupil voice at the heart of your approach. Find out more with our free Introductaion to Wellbeing Ambassadors Webinar.
