Executive summary

Hampshire’s Accessibility Strategy (2026-2029) sets out our vision and commitment to ensuring that every child and young person, regardless of their SEND needs, receives high quality support and opportunities to thrive within an inclusive community.

We work to ensure our strategy is aligned with Hampshire’s Strategic Plan 2025-2028 and Local Area Partnership Action Plan and Self Evaluation.

Accessibility is fundamental to our ambition to create a truly inclusive system. It is about ensuring children and young people, and their families can:

  • access high-quality education in their local community wherever possible
  • engage with, and choose education settings that are welcoming, inclusive, and accessible from the outset, including during visits and admissions processes
  • participate fully in school life and their wider community
  • receive information in ways that meet their individual needs
  • learn in environments that actively support their physical, sensory, and communication requirements

In line with Schedule 10 of the Equality Act 2010, local authorities must prepare accessibility strategies for the schools for which they are the responsible body. These strategies must address three key areas over a prescribed period:

  1. increasing disabled pupils’ participation in school curriculums
  2. improving the physical environment to enable disabled pupils to take advantage of education, benefits, facilities, or services and
  3. improving the delivery of information to disabled pupils in accessible formats, within a reasonable time and in ways determined after considering pupils’ disabilities and preferences

Local authorities must keep strategies under review, revise them if necessary, and implement them.

We recognise that improving accessibility is not a standalone activity. It is fundamental to improving attendance, reducing exclusions, supporting inclusion, and ensuring that children and young people are prepared well for adulthood.

Our approach is rooted in partnership. Education settings, the Local Authority, health and social care services, and children, young people and families all have a role to play in improving accessibility. This strategy sets out our shared priorities and how we will work together to deliver them.

This strategy is strengthened by innovative approaches to participation, including the Accessibility Ambassadors Programme, which empowers young people to actively assess and improve accessibility within their communities; including in education settings.