Stop Bolting On: Why Inclusive Design Should Come First, Not Last
During this episode of UDL in 15 Minutes, Julie Carson, Director of Education at Woodland Academy Trust, describes a UDL flip the entire school made. They now ask the important questions first and build the curriculum second. “In the past,” she explains, “we built the curriculum first. And then after that, we thought about adaptations or differentiation or intervention where people struggled.” The problem? By then, the barriers are already baked in.
During the podcast, Julie defines what she means by curriculum, because the word is often misunderstood. For her, it isn’t simply a list of subjects or schemes of work. It’s the full learning journey that encompasses what children learn, how they learn it, and how they show what they know. When you look at curriculum that way, the question of who it’s designed for becomes impossible to ignore.
That shift in thinking, from curriculum as content delivery to curriculum as intentional design, is exactly where Universal Design for Learning (UDL) comes in. When Julie’s team discovered UDL, the connection felt immediate. “Curriculum is what we teach,” she says, “but UDL shapes how it’s designed so that absolutely everyone can access it.” Julie’s description of the path Woodland Academy followed and it perfectly aligns with how UDL defines curriculum: goals, methods, materials and assessments.
Julie describes becoming crystal clear on the core learning. This means knowing what every child actually needs to know and understand. Once that’s established, flexibility follows naturally. When you know the destination, you can open up multiple routes to get there.
The second shift is removing barriers earlier. This is part of determining the methods and materials that will be used. Rather than waiting to see who struggles and then responding, the team began interrogating their designs upfront. What’s the vocabulary load? How much reading is required at each stage? Are there children for whom anxiety or attention challenges will make this inaccessible before the lesson even begins? Supports got built in from the start, not bolted on afterwards.
The third shift is perhaps the most visible: broadening how pupils can show their learning. For example, asking a child to write up a science experiment tells you whether they can write, not whether they understand the science. When children can demonstrate understanding through video, explanation, drawing, or spoken word, you get a far truer picture of what they actually know.
What’s striking about this approach is what it isn’t. Julie is clear that UDL was never seen as a support tool for a specific group of children. “It was about designing our curriculum correctly,” she says, “which made it inclusive, engaging, and really just so ambitious for our children because more children can succeed with it.”
That last point matters enormously. Inclusive design isn’t a lowering of the bar, inclusion is a widening of the door. When the curriculum is built from the ground up to be accessible, the children who were previously excluded by the design itself get to show what they’re truly capable of. Ambition and inclusion, it turns out, are not in tension. They reinforce each other.
So, the next time curriculum planning begins, the question worth asking isn’t “how do we support the children who struggle?” It’s “who might our design unintentionally exclude and how do we prevent that from the very first step?” This is a wonderful way to help learners gain agency.