Intersectional SEND Toolkit

Toolkit collated by Domini Choudhury

What Is Intersectional SEND?

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) is a broad term describing the range of learning differences, physical disabilities, and neurodivergent conditions that may mean a child or young person requires additional support to access education and reach their full potential.

Intersectionality, a framework developed by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, describes how different aspects of identity such as race, gender, disability, class, and sexuality overlap and interact. When multiple marginalised identities combine, the result is not simply the sum of separate disadvantages, but a distinct and compounded experience of exclusion that cannot be understood by looking at any single characteristic alone.

Intersectional SEND refers to the specific experiences of children and young people who are disabled or neurodivergent and also hold one or more other marginalised identities; for example, being Black and autistic, or a girl with ADHD. Research shows these young people are more likely to be misidentified, underdiagnosed, excluded, and unheard. Their disability may be read through the lens of their race, and their race through the lens of their disability, with neither fully seen or adequately addressed.

The Belonging Effect’s Intersectional SEND Toolkit

We are collating a growing bank of resources to support educators, leaders, and advocates in understanding and responding to these intersecting experiences, with the goal not simply of awareness, but of action. Here are some questions to reflect on:

How well does your school's approach to SEND take account of the other identities a child holds, and what would it look like to truly see the whole child, not just their diagnosis or their need?
What assumptions, conscious or unconscious, might be shaping which children get referred for SEND support, which get excluded, and which get written off as ‘challenging behaviour’?
How diverse is the workforce making decisions about children with SEND in your setting, and whose lived experience is, or isn't, represented in those conversations?
When a child from a Global Majority background is struggling in your school, how confident are you that race and disability are both being considered as potential factors, rather than one being used to explain away the other?
What would it mean to move beyond awareness of intersectional SEND towards genuine advocacy, and what would that require of you personally, and of your school as a system?
How are the voices of children and young people who hold multiple marginalised identities actively sought and centred in decisions about their education, support, and futures?
Looking at your school's exclusion, referral, and EHCP data, if you disaggregated it by both ethnicity and SEND status together, what patterns might you find, and what would those patterns demand of you?