The Hidden Cost of Outsourced Inclusion

As schools across the region continue to strengthen their commitment to inclusion, many have turned to outsourced support models to meet the growing needs of students with special educational needs. Learning support assistants, shadow teachers, therapists, and external specialists are now a familiar presence in mainstream classrooms. On the surface, this expansion appears to signal progress.

Yet, as we enter 2026, it is worth pausing to ask a more uncomfortable question: what is the true cost of outsourced inclusion, and who ultimately pays it?

While outsourcing has offered timely and practical solutions, it has also given rise to a quieter set of challenges that are less visible, but no less significant.

1. When Inclusion Lives Outside the Classroom

Outsourcing inclusion often begins with the best of intentions. Schools are responding to rising referrals, increasing complexity of need, and parental expectations for immediate support. External professionals bring valuable expertise, particularly in assessment, therapy, and short-term intervention.

However, when inclusion is delivered primarily by individuals who sit outside the school’s core teaching structure, a subtle shift occurs. Responsibility for a student’s learning, engagement, and progress can begin to move away from the classroom and towards the support professional.

Over time, inclusion risks becoming something that happens alongside teaching rather than within it.

Teachers may start to view certain learners as “supported elsewhere,” while support staff become the main holders of strategies, insight, and accountability. Unintentionally, the classroom itself becomes less inclusive, not more.

2. The Financial Cost

The most visible cost of outsourced inclusion is financial. Shadow support, private therapists, and external services represent a significant and often growing expense for families. For some, this creates a painful reality where access to effective inclusion depends not on need, but on affordability.

Yet the deeper costs are less easily measured.

When inclusion is outsourced, schools may invest less in developing internal capacity. Professional learning becomes fragmented. Teachers receive reports and recommendations, but rarely sustained coaching or shared problem-solving. SEN knowledge remains with individuals rather than becoming embedded across the school.

Over time, schools risk developing dependency without development. Support exists, but expertise does not grow.

3. The Impact on Students

For students, outsourced inclusion can be a double-edged sword. While individual support may help them cope day to day, it can also unintentionally reinforce separation.

Students who are supported primarily by an adult at their side may:

• Engage more with the support adult than with peers
• Be perceived as “managed” rather than actively taught
• Miss opportunities to build independence and self-advocacy

In some cases, students are physically present but socially and cognitively isolated. They attend lessons, but do not fully participate in the shared learning experience of the classroom.

This form of exclusion is rarely intentional, yet its impact can be long-lasting.

4. The Cost to Teachers

Teachers remain at the heart of inclusive education, yet outsourced models can quietly erode their sense of ownership. When strategies are designed externally and implemented by others, teachers may feel sidelined from the inclusion process itself.

This can lead to:

• Reduced confidence in supporting diverse learners
• Over-reliance on specialists for everyday differentiation
• Inclusion fatigue, where teachers believe deeply in inclusion but feel ill-equipped to deliver it

In the long term, this weakens one of the most powerful drivers of inclusion: teacher agency.

5. Inclusion as a School Culture

Perhaps the greatest cost of outsourced inclusion is cultural. When inclusion is treated as a service rather than a shared responsibility, it becomes vulnerable to inconsistency, turnover, and fragmentation.

True inclusion does not sit in a department, a job title, or a contract. It lives in:

• How lessons are designed
• How assessments are structured
• How behaviour is understood
• How progress is measured

Outsourcing can support this work, but it cannot replace it.

6. Rethinking the Role of External Support

None of this suggests that schools should abandon external expertise. On the contrary, specialists play a vital role when their work is integrated rather than isolated.

As schools look ahead, it may be time to reframe the purpose of outsourced inclusion:

• From doing inclusion to building inclusion
• From supporting individual students to strengthening classroom systems
• From dependency to capacity-building

External professionals are most effective when they coach, model, and collaborate, enabling schools to develop their own inclusive practices over time.

A Question for the Year Ahead

As a new academic year begins, school leaders may wish to reflect not only on whether inclusion is in place, but on where it truly lives.

• Is inclusion embedded within teaching and learning, or does it sit alongside it?
• Are teachers equipped to lead inclusion, or primarily to refer it?
• Are students supported towards independence, or sustained dependence?

The cost of outsourced inclusion is not simply financial. It is measured in culture, confidence, connection, and long-term sustainability. The most inclusive schools may not be those that outsource the most support, but those that invest deeply in owning inclusion from within.

Author;

Dr Massrat Shaikh

Educational Psychologist.

www.massratshaikh.com

massrat@ahlameducation.com

Dr. Massrat Shaikh is an Educational Psychologist specializing in diagnostic assessment and educational intervention for students with special educational needs, working in partnership with schools to support inclusive practice.