Inclusive Education is essential if all students are to be given every opportunity to reach their potential. In the Advance HE Educational Excellence Symposium in December 2025, we explained our approaches to inclusive education on the Fellowships programmes in Cardiff University. However, the presentation began with a madcap dash across campus in the rain, and a (successful) hunt for an alternative room, when a fire alarm went off 2 minutes before our online slot - the introductions were a little adrenaline-charged!
Inclusion IS teaching…
For us, inclusive education IS teaching: it is ensuring that we empower all students to reach their potential, in order to further social justice, through the removal of systemic and cultural barriers to learning and inequities in education. Awarding gaps between different groups of the population, and challenges to students’ sense of belonging in Higher Education have been highlighted time and again in educational research.
With 200,000 Fellowships now awarded, Advance HE Fellowship recognition is now central to learning and teaching professional development across the HE sector in the UK, with growing engagement internationally. Implied within the old UKPSF via the professional values, but explicit in the new PSF 2023, ‘effective and inclusive’ education is a core premise, with the expectation that this is central to teaching leadership, design, delivery, assessment and support for students. Inclusive education should therefore be a key component of provisions for Fellowship.
In Cardiff University we successfully applied for accreditation for a suite of Fellowships programmes in 2021. We collaborated with staff across the institution, in a variety of roles, in the creation of our programmes, and have consulted with students to gain their understanding of what inclusive education would look like, for them. In designing the programme of workshops for Associate Fellow, Fellow and Senior Fellow categories, we made the decision to make inclusive education a core component of the programmes, and therefore created a ‘spiral curriculum’ across the three categories. We also committed to ‘practice what we preach’: that all of our programmes would foster a sense of belonging, be supportive and inclusive, and would follow the principles of Universal Design for Learning.
A spiral curriculum for grassroots change
Having worked in a number of universities, and acted as an external examiner, Ceri observed a traditional pattern in approaches to inclusive education on professional development programmes, with considerations often being subsumed in a ‘student support’ element, frequently following a pattern similar to that in Figure 1, below:
However, as the majority of research suggests inclusive education is a core principle of teaching, and requires an institution-wide approach, such a structure does not enable teachers to pay attention to fostering a sense of belonging, or give them the skills to ensure inclusive design, delivery and assessment of learning. We also wanted to create grassroots change-agents who had both the understanding and practical skills to model and promote inclusive practice in their Schools or departments.
The spiral curriculum was therefore designed to address inclusive education as a core component, embedded in each of our three programmes at Associate Fellow, Fellow, and Senior Fellow Programmes, in each workshop. In the Associate Fellow programme, participants reflect on their own diversity and that of their students, use personas to identify the barriers to learning they might inadvertently create, and consider strategies for inclusive teaching practice and assessment and feedback. In the Fellowship programme, inclusive education is embedded in each workshop, as highlighted in the outline in Figure 2, below:
In the Senior Fellow Programme, participants consider models and strategies for inclusive leadership, reflect upon and develop their plans for supporting others to develop their inclusive education practices, and apply the principles of universal design for learning to their large-scale design of programmes and assessment and feedback strategies.
Evaluation of the approach
When the new PSF 2023 was published we were delighted we’d already embedded this approach! Action research (presented in the Advance HE Equality Diversity and Inclusion conference in 2024), was completed in 2023, to examine the impact, drawing on evaluation data, focus groups, portfolio evidence and case studies from participants. It found that participants valued the emphasis on inclusive education, and that there was a positive relationship between membership of marginalised groups and satisfaction with the programmes. The majority of participants had discussed embedding elements of inclusive education in their practice in their portfolios:
I now like to take on board each student’s background and personality and how this can have an affect on their learning and the way they respond to teaching and learning environments (Evaluation feedback, Fellow programme)
Having this training gives a motivation and institutional backing for the leadership of new initiatives and the implementation of new practices in EDI (Evaluation feedback, Senior Fellow Programme)
However, participants also demonstrated awareness of the many challenges remaining, and in the early days of the programmes some explained the isolation they experienced as grassroots inclusive education change-agents in schools or departments new to the principles. Fortunately, concurrent to the development of our Fellowships Programmes, our Inclusive Education project, led by Professor Helen Williams (now Dean for Student Success), has been driving forward change across the institution so the embedding of the spiral curriculum in Fellowships has become but one component of our wider strategy.
Key take-home and a challenge:
- Practice what you preach: enact and model inclusive practice and Universal Design for Learning in everything you do.
- Everyone has a part to play in inclusive education: what will you do to ensure inclusive education in your programmes?
Dr Ceri Morris is Senior Fellowship Programme Lead and a member of the Inclusive Education team in the Learning and Teaching Academy at Cardiff University. She leads on Universal Design for Learning, assessment and feedback, and disability.