Bringing intersectionality to the forefront: a call for transformation in UK inclusive education

While higher education institutions prioritise inclusion for moral, ethical, legal, and performance-related reasons, current approaches to equality, diversity, and inclusion often still prove in practice to be exclusive and ineffective. This article studies how inclusive education can benefit from, and be employed through, the intersectionality lens. Using the Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis method, as applied to the educational sector for the purposes of documentary research, the findings of this study show that the Inclusive Education Framework, whilst a positive addition to the UK educator’s resource bank, still has a way to go to explicitly cater to intersectional disadvantage – termed here as unacknowledged disadvantage. The article discusses the opportunities available to the framework to explicitly incorporate intersectionally mindful inclusive education and highlights the challenges surrounding intersectionality as a concept.