Many universities have developed frameworks, strategies and guidance to support inclusive practice, but translating these into everyday curriculum design can be a challenge. Staff often understand why inclusion matters but not what it looks like in module design or review. As such, inclusive curriculum design can feel like an add-on, rather than something integrated into institutional systems and processes.
We developed the Inclusive Curriculum Toolkit in response, and here are tips based on our experience.
Listen before designing
Inclusive curriculum design starts with listening to the people involved in designing curricula. This helps build a shared understanding of your institution’s approach to inclusivity and ensures solutions and resources address genuine challenges rather than assumed needs.
Ask colleagues about the challenges they face, what they would like to change and what support and resources they needed. Faculty-wide development days, school-level discussions and workshops are good places to gather insights. Tools such as Padlet and Microsoft Forms and Post-it note activities offer multiple ways to contribute.
By exploring colleagues’ knowledge of inclusive teaching, learning and assessment, you can identify knowledge gaps, share good practice and identify existing strengths. Asking staff to discuss experiences with colleagues from different disciplines can help pinpoint disciplinary-specific issues – inclusive curriculum design looks different in laboratory teaching, creative practice, professional courses and classroom-based subjects.
Consultation needs to also include professional services staff who support students’ learning journeys.
During this process, it became clear to us that staff wanted tools rather than prescriptive guidance.
Over the two years from design to implementation, we offered colleagues multiple opportunities to trial, appraise and discuss the toolkit. This ongoing consultation allowed us to sense check materials, ensure they were accessible to those new to inclusive practice, explore how the toolkit could most effectively be embedded in existing course design and quality processes and encourage continued staff buy-in. We also sought external scrutiny from other institutions to make sure that our toolkit aligned with sector practice.
Listening should not be a one-off activity. Provide opportunities for staff to review and feed back on work in progress to ensure that their needs are met.
Let students define inclusion
Listen to students to understand what inclusion feels like from their perspectives. Find out about their experiences of belonging, exclusion and engagement.
Peer research can support here. It involves employing and training students as researchers to consult with peers, providing access and insights previously out of reach to staff researchers. The use of a variety of consultation methods can encourage a diverse range of students to contribute their perspectives.
For example, group interviews allow students to share their own stories and identify common experiences. Text-based online tools such as Padlet create safe spaces to voice opinions for those less comfortable with verbal consultation methods.
In our experience, students rarely spoke about policies or institutional frameworks. Instead, they described everyday experiences that made them feel included or excluded. For example, they welcomed lecturers who encouraged respectful discussion, classmates who collaborated as equals and opportunities to contribute in different ways. Barriers identified included unfamiliar academic language, limited representation within teaching materials, differing educational backgrounds and experiences of stereotyping or exclusion.
These conversations shifted our thinking. Course design is not simply about what is taught, but also about how students experience learning. Questions around induction, classroom expectations, assessment, representation and communication became central to our toolkit because they reflected key issues identified by our students.
From concept to concrete resources
Once you create your resources, consider where they will sit (for example, on an internal website) and who has responsibility for reviewing and updating them. Also, think about how these resources can be embedded in, rather than simply added on to, existing processes.
Rather than presenting staff with another lengthy guidance document, we translated the consultation into a series of reflective prompts supported by practical resources. These open questions encourage dialogue and reflection, and each is linked directly to practical support, including case studies from colleagues, institutional guidance, videos, examples of effective practice and external resources and links to professional development opportunities. This allows staff to move from reflection to action without needing to search across multiple systems.
The toolkit acts not only as a source of guidance but also as a mechanism for sharing expertise and celebrating innovation across disciplines. Having institution-specific resources highlights the relevance to staff, and the use of a range of media models inclusive practice and universal design for learning principles.
Embed into systems and processes
Guidance on inclusion needs to be embedded across university systems and processes if it is to become embodied in teaching practice. There are multiple ways to do this, and all require cooperation between different areas of the university.
Collaborating with your university’s quality unit can highlight aspects of course approval, validation and review policies that refer to equity, diversity and inclusion or where an inclusivity resource can be referenced. Partnering with staff development and academic practice teams can lead to incorporating inclusivity guidance into staff training. We have partnered with our university’s academic practice team to include the toolkit in the academic induction process and the course that leads to Advance HE Fellowship. Working with the student union can help raise awareness of institutional approaches to inclusivity.
The process of developing an inclusive curriculum matters as much as the final product. A toolkit built in this way becomes more than a repository of resources; it becomes a bridge between institutional ambition and everyday teaching practice.
You can access the toolkit here.
Emma Whewell is an associate professor and head of school – Sport and Public Health. Sian Davies-Vollum is a professor and deputy dean in the Faculty of Education, Arts, Science and Technology. Faith Tucker is a senior lecturer in geography. Helen Tiplady is a senior lecturer in education. All work at the University of Northampton.
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