Beyond Participation, Towards Meaningful Inclusion: An Experience-Sensitive Approach to Inquiry with Children and Young People with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND)

Contemporary participatory research has focused predominantly on procedural consultation while paying comparatively little attention to how participation is experienced by children and young people (CYP) and research teams, and how those experiences shape knowledge production. We argue that lived experience continues to occupy a peripheral position within scientific knowledge production, often informing rather than constituting evidence. To address this limitation, we propose the Experience-Sensitive Method of Inquiry (ESMI), a methodological orientation that places lived experience at the centre of knowledge production. ESMI is grounded in eight interconnected experience-sensitive dimensions that together provide its epistemological foundation. Central to this framework is participatory reflexivity, conceptualised as an ongoing methodological practice through which researchers examine how relationships, assumptions, environments and methodological choices shape what becomes knowable. Participatory reflexivity therefore functions as the mechanism through which experiential knowledge is recognised, interpreted, and integrated throughout the research process. In practice, ESMI may be operationalised through three interconnected methodological principles: Agency, Belonging and Collaboration (ABC). These principles function as a practical reflexive heuristic for designing, conducting, interpreting and translating participatory research. ESMI shifts attention from whether participation occurs to how participation is experienced and how experiential knowledge influences evidence generation. Although developed in the context of research with CYP with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, ESMI is intended as a transdisciplinary methodological orientation for experience-informed inquiry. It has two interconnected aims: first, to improve how children and young people with SEND experience research; and second, to strengthen the relevance, interpretability and trustworthiness of the evidence produced. The framework may inform a wide range of methodologies, including trials, longitudinal cohort studies, Delphi studies, experimental research, and qualitative inquiry, from question formulation through to dissemination. The extent to which these proposed benefits are realised remains an empirical question requiring future evaluation.