Co-creating neuroinclusive secondary STEM classrooms with Educational Niche Analysis

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The education system in the UK is currently experiencing a ‘SEND crisis’ (according to the UK Parliament, 2025). One of the main factors is a rising awareness of neurodiversity and its relationship with education. This has increased demand on schools’ SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) provisions, and schools are struggling to provide all the individual adjustments needed to ensure equitable opportunities and outcomes. Traditional SEND approaches adopt a medical model (Honeybourne, 2018) which aims to support neurodivergent students to better fit into standard educational environments by addressing their perceived deficits, mainly as determined by diagnostic criteria. In contrast, neuroinclusive approaches place the focus on the educational environments, and how they could be adapted to be better fitting environments for diverse students. This involves not only providing support for atypical challenges, but incorporating atypical strengths, and generally allowing for greater flexibility and interaction – i.e. treating diversity as a valued characteristic, and students as experts on their own experiences.

Educational niche analysis (ENA) is a neuroinclusive approach to predicting and adapting better fitting educational environments for diverse learners. The process is currently under development, most recently in the project ‘EcoNiches of Learning: Applying socioecological niches for the organisation of secondary STEM classrooms as neuroinclusive environments’ (funded by the Kusuma Trust and BERA). For this, Dr Carla Finesilver (PI) and Jonathan Berliner (teacher-researcher) conducted case studies of KS4 students learning science and maths in alternative education provision, using a framework developed originally as part of Berliner’s doctoral research. Adopting a socioecological perspective based on Bronfenbrenner (2005), learners are considered in constant interaction with their environments on multiple systemic levels (including their internal bodily experiences, classroom, wider culture and ecosystem).

In this seminar, Finesilver and Berliner report on the participatory co-creation of more neuroinclusive classroom environments in a local context, and the potential of ENA as an alternative way of adapting classrooms, teaching practices, and school systems as supportive environments for neurodivergent learners.

Meet the speakers

Dr Carla Finesilver

Dr Carla Finesilver is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics Education and Inclusion in the School of Education, Communication and Society, and a member of the CRESTEM research group. Through both research and teaching, she aims to make mathematics, STEM subjects, and education in general more inclusive, accessible and relevant for diverse learners. Prior to academia she taught for 10 years in secondary mainstream, PRU and special schools in London, including setting up and heading the mathematics department at a specialist school for students with Specific Learning Difficulties. Carla has contributed to national guidance on dyscalculia, and international discourse on inclusive education and maths difficulties. She specialises in qualitative research, often working with multimodal data and designing bespoke methodologies. Her research has included studying students' creative and nonstandard representational strategies in arithmetic, and teachers’ attitudes to inclusion; current interests include creating more positive experiences and outcomes for students from whom 'traditional' school maths is a poor fit, and anti-ableist work in a variety of education contexts.

Jonathan Berliner

Jonathan Berliner is a PhD candidate in the school of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London. His doctoral research focuses on the experiences of neurodivergent learners of secondary chemistry and looking in detail at neuroinclusive methodology for educational research and neuroinclusive pedagogical approaches. Aside from his academic research into neuroinclusive education, Jonathan teaches secondary maths and science at an alternative educational provision for learners who experience emotional-based school avoidance. He is also an expert on using song to communicate and teach science. His educational music videos, funded by the institute of Physics and the Stephen Hawking Foundation and are used by teachers internationally and he has performed comedy science songs at many scientific institutions such as CERN in Geneva and the Royal Institution in London.