The Impact of Board-Level Policy on Classroom Inclusion

Does Inclusive Leadership Stop at the School Door?

Inclusive leadership in education is often framed as something that happens inside schools—inside classrooms, inside professional learning communities, inside carefully bounded institutional spaces. It is assumed to be exercised primarily by teachers and principals through instructional strategies, student supports, and in-class interventions.

This work matters. But when inclusive leadership is defined only by what happens within school walls, it quietly creates a structural blind spot—one that obscures how system-level decisions, especially those made by school boards, directly shape equity, safety, engagement, and belonging long before a student ever enters a classroom.

As a community leader and education advocate, I have come to see this “within-schools” leadership archetype as incomplete. Not because classroom leadership is insufficient—but because it cannot succeed when upstream instructional failures go unexamined.

Instruction Is Not Just Pedagogy

To understand this problem, we need to expand what we mean by instruction.

Instruction is not limited to lesson plans or teaching strategies. It is any intentional process through which learners—children or adults—are taught expectations, practices, and skills required for meaningful participation. From this perspective, the ways in which school boards instruct adult learners—superintendents, principals, and system leaders—on safety, equity, and inclusion are themselves instructional practices.

And those practices have consequences.

When adult learners are inadequately instructed, assessed, or supported in implementing equity and safety mandates, the downstream effects are felt in classrooms as instability, inconsistency, and harm—no matter how committed individual educators may be.

The Hidden Barrier: Passive Policy Dissemination

One of the most entrenched—and least examined—system-level instructional practices in education is what I call passive policy dissemination.

In this model, school boards “instruct” adult learners by posting Ministry mandates online, circulating PDFs, or issuing memos—without monitoring understanding, assessing implementation, or creating feedback loops. Compliance is assumed because information has been transmitted.

From an adult-learning (andragogical) perspective, this is not instruction. It is abdication.

Superintendents and principals are treated as passive recipients of information rather than learners who must be taught, assessed, and supported to implement safety-critical and equity-critical practices with fidelity. The result is a predictable gap between policy intent and lived reality.

This gap is not theoretical. When it comes to student safety, it shows up in classrooms where safety plans are missing, accommodations are inconsistently applied, parents are provided incorrect information, and vulnerable students remain exposed to preventable harm.

Why This Undermines Learning

Hammond (2015) reminds us that cognitive engagement cannot occur when foundational physiological and safety needs are unmet. Safety is not an “add-on” to instruction; it is the baseline condition that makes learning possible.

When adult learners are not instructionally prepared to implement safety and equity mandates, classrooms become spaces of implicit threat—especially for medically fragile students, students with disabilities, and students already marginalized by race, language, or identity. In such conditions, even high-quality pedagogy cannot compensate.

Inclusive leadership, then, cannot be confined to classroom practice alone. It must also address the instructional integrity of the systems that shape classroom conditions.

How Passive Policy Instruction Reproduces Inequity

This instructional failure operates through three interconnected mechanisms:

Mandate erosion. Ministry directives—such as life-preserving requirements under PPM 161—are treated as abstract documents rather than obligations. Without instruction and verification, their protective intent is diluted.

Content erasure. Board policies frequently implement mandates partially. A posted “updated” date creates the appearance of compliance while masking omissions that materially affect students and their families.

Instructional abdication. By equating policy posting with completion, boards avoid teaching, assessing, or verifying adult learners’ operational competence. Safety becomes symbolic rather than enacted.

Together, these practices transform inclusion into performance—severing the relationship between policy, practice, and protection.

A Different Model: Relational Accountability as Instruction

If equity leadership is instructional, then it must be designed like instruction.

That means moving from passive dissemination to relational accountability—an approach that treats equity and safety as shared learning work rather than bureaucratic compliance.

This requires several shifts:

Information integrity as a condition of trust. Drawing on the First Peoples Principles of Learning, which emphasize that learning is relational, accurate and complete information becomes foundational. Systems cannot claim inclusion while eroding the fidelity of safety and equity policies.

Community knowledge as formative assessment. Families identifying gaps are not being disruptive; they are providing feedback. When treated as instructional data, community experiences become formative assessment for adult learners—revealing whether system understanding of equity and safety is accurate and complete.

This reframing humanizes leadership—while still insisting on accountability.

Restoring the Instructional Integrity of Inclusion at the Board Level

This is not about expanding the definition of inclusive leadership. It is about ensuring it’s represented at all levels.

When leadership is confined to what happens “within schools,” systems become insular. Safety is treated as separate from equity. Institutional reputation is prioritized over student well-being.

But inclusive instruction cannot flourish where fiduciary duty is breached upstream.

True inclusion requires recognizing equity as a shared andragogical project—one in which adult learners are taught, assessed, supported, and held accountable for the instructional conditions that make engagement, accessibility, and belonging possible for every student.

This post was adapted using AI from a required exercise in a doctoral course on Inclusive Leadership, addressing the bias that inclusive leadership could only occur “within schools.”