National Inclusion Week 2026: what to do in the other 51 weeks

What National Inclusion Week is, and when

National Inclusion Week is an annual UK campaign run by Inclusive Employers, who founded it in 2013, encouraging employers to focus on inclusion in the workplace. In 2026 it falls across the week beginning Monday 14 September, running to Sunday 20 September, and the theme is “Build Trust. Navigate Change.”

It is genuinely useful as a focal point. It gives internal communications a reason to exist, it gives people permission to raise things they might not otherwise raise and it gets senior attention for a subject that usually struggles for it. None of that is trivial.

The difficulty is not the week. It is that for a large number of organisations, the week is the entire programme. A panel, a lunch-and-learn, a set of posters and a LinkedIn post from the chief executive, and then the calendar moves on. Employees are perfectly capable of spotting the difference between a week of activity and a change in how they are managed.

Why the week is worth planning properly

The case for inclusion no longer needs making at the level of stated position. Policies exist, statements exist and there is always something to post during the week.

What has not followed is capability at the layer where it matters. Acas and YouGov surveyed 1,000 GB employees in February 2026 and found that only 32% say their employer effectively trains managers to identify and make reasonable adjustments for neurodivergent colleagues. 35% say the training is ineffective. And 32% do not know, which is arguably the more revealing answer, because it describes an organisation where the subject has simply never come up in a way anybody noticed.

In March 2026 Acas went further and warned publicly that employers are failing to support neurodiversity at work. That is a fairly direct statement from a body that does not usually make them. The question a week of activity has to answer is no longer whether an organisation has a position on inclusion. It is whether the person who allocates your work, chairs your meetings and writes your appraisal knows what to do differently on the Monday after.

A few days’ planning that leaves something behind

The most useful thing an inclusion week can do is act as a deadline for a decision that would otherwise never get made. With days rather than weeks to go, here is what that looks like in practice.

• Pick one process and fix it during the week. Recruitment is a good place to start: cut the essential criteria down to what is genuinely essential, and delete anything asking for a “people person” or “excellent communicator” unless the job truly requires it. Both phrases put off capable candidates who read the criteria literally and decide they do not qualify, and neither is usually a real requirement of the job.
• Book the manager training rather than the panel. A panel reaches the people who already care. Training reaches the people whose behaviour is the actual variable, and it is the specific thing the Acas data says is missing.
• Make one thing standard, permanently. Agendas circulated in advance. Written summaries after meetings. Cameras optional and said out loud. Each of these removes the need for somebody to ask, and having to ask is where a lot of adjustments quietly die.
• Redesign onboarding. The first fortnight carries the most unwritten rules and the least context, so a mismatch between how someone works and how the team works does more damage there than anywhere else. It is also cheap to fix and it rarely reaches the top of anyone’s list.
• Set a date in November to check it stuck. Put it in the diary during the week itself, while there is still momentum and while somebody senior is still paying attention.

One process changed permanently beats five events that change nothing, and it is considerably less work. If you want the detail on the manager side, our inclusive manager’s neurodiversity playbook works through the six ordinary situations where this is either practised or quietly not, starting with the one-to-one and the moment somebody tells you.

How to tell in November whether it worked

Inclusion weeks are rarely evaluated, and in the organisations we work with, when they are they get evaluated on the things that are easy to count: attendance at the panel, views on the intranet post, engagement on the LinkedIn piece. Those measure whether the week happened. Nobody was in any doubt that the week happened.

Put a date in November now, while there is still momentum, and ask four questions instead.

• Is the thing we changed still changed? Ask someone outside HR to show you, rather than checking whether the document was updated. Processes revert quietly and the paperwork rarely notices.
• Has anyone used the adjustments route since? If the answer is nobody, that is not evidence that nobody needed it. It is usually evidence that the route is still hard to find or still feels risky.
• Can a manager tell you what they would do? Pick three at random and ask what happens if someone on their team discloses tomorrow. Vague answers in November mean the week reached the intranet and not the management layer.
• What did we book for the rest of the year? The clearest signal of whether a week was a programme or an event is whether anything is in the diary after it.

None of that requires a survey, and all of it can be done in an afternoon. The point is to have the conversation while there is still time to act on it, rather than the following September when the planning starts again from the same place.