Fit the Activity to the Child: SEND, Inclusive PE and Skipping

For a quarter of a century, skip-hop coaches walked into school halls with a bag of ropes. Some of those halls were in special schools and secure units. The pupils there taught us the most important thing we know about teaching skipping: if a child can’t do a skill the way we first imagined it, the skill needs to change, not the child.

That idea now sits at the centre of the national conversation about PE for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). This article looks at the wider picture, at what the Youth Sport Trust and Activity Alliance are asking schools and providers to do, and at how we have built skip-hop around it. It also explains why we want as many children as possible involved in everything skip-hop does.

The picture in schools today

One pupil in five in England has special educational needs. The Department for Education’s figures for January 2026 count more than 1.8 million pupils with SEN. That is 6.0% of pupils with an education, health and care (EHC) plan and 14.8% on SEN support, and both numbers are still rising. Autism is the most common primary need for pupils with an EHC plan. Speech, language and communication needs are the most common for pupils on SEN support. [1]

Those children want to move. In Activity Alliance’s 2025 survey of more than 1,000 children and young people, 85% of young disabled people said they like or love being active. Four in ten wanted to be more active, and school was the place where they were most often active. But only about one in four (26%) said they can always take part in school sport and activity, compared with 38% of non-disabled young people. Only half said sport and activity feel easy, compared with 76% of their non-disabled peers. [2, 3]

Sport England’s Active Lives survey tells the same story. In the 2024–25 school year, 30.5% of disabled children were “less active” (under 30 minutes of activity a day), compared with 26.2% of non-disabled children. [4]

In 2022 the UK Chief Medical Officers published physical activity guidelines specifically for disabled children and young people. They recommend 120 to 180 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic activity a week, which could be 20 minutes a day. They also recommend challenging but manageable strength and balance activities three times a week. [5] Skipping covers all of it: it raises the heart rate, it’s a jumping activity that builds strength, and it trains balance and timing.

The gap, then, isn’t about wanting. It’s about whether the activity on offer is built so that a child can join in.

What the law and the curriculum already ask

None of this is new. The national curriculum framework for England says plainly: “Lessons should be planned to ensure that there are no barriers to every pupil achieving.” It adds that “a minority of pupils will need access to specialist equipment and different approaches.” [6]

The SEND Code of Practice says that “high quality teaching, differentiated for individual pupils, is the first step in responding to pupils who have or may have SEN.” [7] Today the DfE’s teacher training calls this adaptive teaching. Under the Equality Act 2010, schools must make reasonable adjustments so that disabled pupils are not put at a disadvantage. [8]

In other words, adapting the activity to the child isn’t a kindness or an extra. It’s the expectation.

What the Youth Sport Trust expects

The Youth Sport Trust is the national children’s charity for PE and school sport. For more than twenty years it has given teachers one simple tool for inclusion: STEP. When a pupil can’t access an activity, change the Space, the Task, the Equipment or the People. [9, 10] STEP runs through its free TOP Sportsability resources, and through the activity cards and training that Activity Alliance and local School Games organisers use.

Since 2025 the Trust has led Inclusion 2028, a Department for Education-funded programme. Its aim is to “improve the choices and chances of children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND)” by creating “inspiring, accessible and meaningful” PE, school sport and physical activity. [10] It is delivered with Activity Alliance, nasen, ParalympicsGB and Swim England. It works through a network of Lead Inclusion Schools that train teachers locally, and it aims to reach more than 8,000 schools, 10,000 teachers and 240,000 pupils with SEND. It also plans 600 new after-school clubs and leadership roles for 1,500 pupils who will create activities for their peers. [11, 12]

Launching the programme, the Trust’s chief executive Ali Oliver said: “Too many children, particularly those with additional needs, are either missing out or still face barriers to inclusion.” [11]

What the Trust expects of anyone working in school PE comes down to three things:

• Plan every activity so it can be changed with STEP.
• Give teachers the confidence and know-how to make those changes.
• Give pupils with SEND real choices, including the chance to lead.

What Activity Alliance expects

Activity Alliance is the national charity for disabled people in sport and activity. Its inclusive PE activity cards pair STEP with the Activity Inclusion Model. This model describes four ways to include a pupil: [13, 14]

• Open: everyone does the same simple activity.
• Modified: everyone does the same activity, in different ways.
• Parallel: groups do different versions of the same activity.
• Specific: a separate activity designed for a pupil or group.

The cards’ central message is that “making PE inclusive and accessible benefits everyone”. [13]

Activity Alliance also asks providers to follow its Ten Principles, which it developed with disabled people in its Talk to Me research. They include “Me, not my impairment” (talk about the benefits of being active, not the disability), “Include me”, “Listen to me”, “Welcome me” and “Show me”: put disabled people in the pictures and stories. [15, 16]

Its 2025 research with young disabled people says what they want: activities that are fun, that they can do with friends, with both disabled and non-disabled children, and that include quieter options. The biggest barriers were low confidence, not wanting to go alone and fear of not fitting in. [2] In Activity Alliance’s words, disabled children “should never be left on the sidelines.” [17]

Oak National Academy, the DfE-backed curriculum body, adds a C to STEP for Communication (C-STEP). It asks teachers to say “try this” or “can you do this?” rather than “just do this”, because “just” makes a hard task sound easy. It also asks them to show skills at full and half speed, to celebrate how pupils think, feel and connect as well as how they move, and to ask pupils what helps them. [18]

How we’ve adapted it to skip-hop

The principle behind all of this, and behind everything we do, is simple. We adapt skipping to the child’s needs. We never expect the child to adapt to ours. This is how that works on the site.

A ladder with a rung for everyone

The Skipping Awards are eight colour Awards followed by Bronze, Silver and Gold. The very first, the White Award, starts before a rope even turns: walking along a rope on the floor, jumping a still rope, jumping a wiggling “rope snake”. Pupils move up when they are ready, not when their year group says so. That makes the Awards “parallel” by design: a whole class can skip together, each pupil working on their own next step.

An adapted pass is a pass

The Awards ask for every skill to be shown “with control”. For some pupils, control looks different: a seated side swing, a jump while holding an adult’s hand, a crossing of a long rope timed with a helper’s call. On each Award’s assessment tracker, the teacher can mark a pupil as adapted and note what changed. The printout, the class evaluation and the certificate say “passed with adaptations”. The pupil passes. Nobody is told they failed because their body works differently.

“Make it work for everyone” on every skill

Every skill page now carries a free box of adaptations sorted by Communication, Space, Task, Equipment and People. Each box also has a seated or no-jump version of the skill. A few examples:

• Double bounce: swing the rope over, let it rest at the toes, then jump it. A beaded rope makes a sound on the floor that tells the skipper when to jump. Seated, a pupil can turn the rope at the side of the chair to a count.
• Side swing: fully accessible from a wheelchair as it stands, and a skill in its own right.
• Under the Moon: an adult can run under with the pupil, holding hands. A wheelchair user can wheel under the rope if the turners stand wider and make a high arc.
• Double Dutch: a buddy taps the skipper in. Turning Double Dutch well is a skill worth recognising on its own.

Every role counts, but nobody is parked

Turning a long rope, counting and calling are real skills, and the Purple Award tests turning. But we are careful: a role should be a choice, not the place a disabled pupil always ends up while everyone else skips.

Beat your own score

Competition can put children off when it’s done badly. The Blue Award asks pupils to set a 30-second score and then beat it. Pupils compete against themselves first. The Virtual Skipping League works the same way: pupils skip for 30 seconds, the teacher types in the scores, and classes compete fairly across the country.

Teachers who feel confident

Confidence is a big barrier for many teachers, which is why Inclusion 2028 puts so much into training. Each Award’s assessment guide has its own section on adapting for pupils with SEND. When skip-hop teaches the teachers on a training day, adapting skills is part of the day.

All of this is set out in one place on our SEND and inclusion page.

Why we want every child involved

skip-hop exists to get whole schools skipping, and “whole” means every child. There are three reasons we hold to that.

Children want to be active with their friends. Young disabled people told Activity Alliance they want to take part with friends, and with disabled and non-disabled children together. [2] A long rope in the playground does exactly that. One pupil turns, one counts, three jump, and the rhyme carries everyone along.

Inclusion makes the lesson better for everybody. A tape line on the floor helps the pupil with a visual impairment, and it also helps the five-year-old who has never jumped a rope. Breaking a skill into steps helps the autistic pupil and the nervous one. A slower, heavier rope helps anyone learning something new. As Activity Alliance puts it, inclusion “benefits everyone”. [13] In FE Week, one practitioner put it well: “Inclusion does not mean everyone is doing the same thing at the same time all of the time.” [19]

Skipping is one of the easiest activities to adapt. It needs a rope and a small space. It can be done standing, sitting or lying down, alone or together, fast or slow, in silence or to a rhyme. The Dorset School Games skipping challenge already suggests doing it from a wheelchair, lying on the floor, or with a helper moving a pole under the chair. [20] Few activities bend so easily around the child.

What next

We don’t claim to have every answer. Teachers and pupils will find adaptations we haven’t thought of, and we want to hear them. If you teach a pupil whose way of skipping we could learn from, tell us in the comments below. You can also send feedback from any skill page or Award page when you’re signed in with your school account.

The test we set ourselves is the one the curriculum set years ago: no barriers to every pupil achieving. Every child should have a rope, a next step and the chance to be celebrated.

Lee’s tips for pupils who are struggling

For Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 pupils who are still learning, and pupils with SEND who are struggling to coordinate their arms and feet, skip-hop coach Lee Collinson-James uses face-to-face partner skipping: you turn the rope, they just jump. Read Lee’s suggestions for teaching SEND pupils and young skippers.