Over the last 30 years, the English educational system has been shaped by an increasing marketization of schools, and a growing focus on targets, standards, increased school autonomy and competition (Higham, 2014; Wilkins, 2015). As part of this process, a new type of school - free schools - was introduced in 2010. Free schools are government funded, but can decide on their own curriculum, staffing and admissions arrangements. Little work has been done on free schools with specific reference to children with special educational needs, and most of the literature on free schools and inclusion focuses on the location of new schools and schools admissions policies (e.g. Green et al., 2015; Morris, 2014; West, 2014) rather than the everyday practices and the experiences of staff and different groups of parents and children at the schools. This presentation reports on findings from a research project carried out in 2016-2018 at a newly established English secondary free school. Inclusion was set as an explicit aim of the school, which aimed to achieve this through its architecture and design, an admissions policy which brought students from four ‘nodes’ across the city, mixed ability class organization and inclusive teaching practices. The project examined how staff understood the needs of children with special educational needs and how effectively the school provided an inclusive and equitable educational experience for them. Through a discussion of the day-to-day experiences and practices of staff members, students and parents at the school we analyse the extent to which the school enabled an inclusive education. To analyse our findings, we draw on the classic theoretical distinction between ‘education’ and ‘schooling’ (Levinson and Holland, 1996; Osborne, 2009), as it provides a useful framework to identify and discuss the varied perceptions of our study participants and some of the overlaps and tensions between process and outcome oriented practices in relation to inclusion. We argue that schools which explicitly set out to foster a broad educational ethos in their day to day practices, may, to some extent, manage to bridge the gap between the schooling and the education of different groups of children. They are, however still exposed to a range of external pressures, which may result in schooling outcomes being prioritised over educational processes and outcomes.

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