Individual Support Plans

What is proposed

The Schools White Paper Every Child Achieving and Thriving proposes that schools, nurseries and colleges carry a new legal duty to produce an Individual Support Plan for every child with a special educational need.

Three features distinguish it from what most schools currently keep:

• Digital by design. The proposals specify digital plans, not a document format left to the setting.
• No diagnosis required. A child does not need a formal diagnosis to have an ISP, which decouples support from a diagnostic pathway that is itself a bottleneck.
• Universal within SEND. Every pupil with identified need, not only those at a particular tier.

ISPs would form the baseline of a tiered model, with EHCPs becoming the highest tier underpinned by Specialist Provision Packages for children with the most complex needs.

Why this is a systems question

Most SEND paperwork in UK schools today is a document: a pupil passport, a one-page profile, a provision map in a spreadsheet. Documents are fine for describing a plan and poor at four things a statutory digital plan will need to do.

1. Show delivery against specification. A document says what should happen. It does not record what did.
2. Update without a rewrite cycle. A plan reviewed termly by editing a Word file is a plan that goes stale between reviews.
3. Feed other systems. Classroom adaptation, exam access arrangements and reporting all need what the plan says, and re-keying it introduces error.
4. Aggregate. “How many pupils have a plan naming this intervention, and how many received it?” is unanswerable across 200 documents.

A digital duty means the fourth question becomes routine — for the school, for the local authority, and potentially for inspection.

What schools can do now, without guessing the detail

The specification is not final, so building to it precisely would be premature. But four things are safe to do now and useful regardless of how the detail lands:

• Record provision as delivered, not just as planned. The single highest-value change, and the one that takes longest to accumulate history for.
• Move plans out of documents and into structured fields. Need, outcome, provision, frequency, staff, review date. Structure survives a format change; prose does not.
• Baseline every pupil with SEND against their own starting point, so progress is measurable in small steps.
• Timestamp identification. When was the concern raised, when was support in place. This is already an inclusion evidence question.

How Edves supports this

• Structured plan records — need, outcomes, provision, frequency, responsible staff, review cycle — rather than a free-text document.
• Provision delivery logging, so specified and delivered provision can be compared per pupil and in aggregate.
• Review scheduling with prompts, so plans do not silently expire.
• Plan-driven classroom adaptation, feeding lesson planning so what the plan says reaches the teacher without re-keying.
• Small-step progress against pupil-level targets, reportable alongside cohort data.
• Aggregate reporting across the SEND cohort by need, provision type, year group and delivery rate.
• Role-scoped access and audit logging, since plans contain sensitive category data — see UK GDPR.

The capacity problem nobody should minimise

A plan for every pupil with identified SEND, reviewed and evidenced, is a significant increase in documented work — landing on SENCOs who in many schools are already carrying a teaching timetable.

Software genuinely reduces the marginal cost per plan by pulling from data the school already holds and by making review a check rather than a rewrite. It does not make the duty small, and a vendor claiming otherwise is selling you something. The schools that will cope are the ones treating this as a staffing and workflow question with a software component, not a software purchase.