SEND Support in School: The Graduated Approach Explained

SEN support is the help a school organises from its own resources for a child who needs something additional to, or different from, what the class usually receives. The graduated approach is the cycle schools are expected to use to run that support: assess what the child needs, plan the help, do it for an agreed period, then review whether it helped and adjust. The cycle repeats, usually term by term, and each round should leave a written record. This is general information about how the system is designed to work in England, not advice about any individual child. Your school's own arrangements and the official guidance on GOV.UK are the sources that govern in practice.

Assess means the teacher, often with the SENCO, gathers what is known: classroom observation, school work, any earlier plans and what parents share about home. Plan means agreeing the support in writing: what will be done, by whom, how often, and what change everyone hopes to see. Do is the ordinary weeks where the plan actually happens in class or in small groups. Review is a set point, commonly at the end of a term, where the adults compare what happened with what was planned and decide to continue, change or stop each element. The value of the cycle is that nothing is supposed to drift: support that is not working gets noticed at review rather than running unchanged for years.

Schools record SEN support in different formats, and names vary: support plan, provision map, pupil passport or individual plan are all in common use. Whatever the heading, a useful record usually shows the child's strengths, the areas where support is focused, the specific help being provided, who provides it and how often, and the date of the next review. Parents should be part of the conversation, and schools are expected to meet parents of children receiving SEN support several times a year. If you have never seen the record, asking to see it is a normal, reasonable request, and preparing for a SENCO meeting covers how those conversations usually run.

Parents hold information nobody else has: what mornings look like, which strategies calm or overwhelm at home, what a child says about school at the kitchen table. The graduated approach assumes that knowledge feeds the assess stage, and that parents hear the outcome of each review. Practical ways families take part include bringing two or three dated examples rather than general impressions, asking what will be tried next and for how long, and writing down what was agreed before leaving the room. Where support at this level is not enough even after cycles of review, families sometimes hear about the next layer of the system, the EHC needs assessment, which sits with the local authority rather than the school.

Picture, purely as an illustration, a term of twelve weeks. In week one the plan is agreed: three short small group sessions a week, instructions repeated one to one at the start of each lesson, and a home school notebook travelling in the bag. Weeks two to eleven are the do stage, ordinary school weeks where those things simply happen. Week twelve is the review: the teacher brings examples, the parent brings notes from home, and each element is marked continue, change or stop. The numbers here are invented to show the rhythm of a cycle, not a standard any school is held to. Real plans vary widely in content and timing, because they are built around an individual child's school day.

The graduated approach works best as a rhythm rather than an event: plan, ordinary weeks, review, adjust. If you know which stage your child's support is in, when the next review falls, and where the current plan lives, you understand this layer of the system. Everything else is detail that your school and the official sources below can supply for your own situation.

One small extra habit helps this cycle along: after each review, write the next review date on the family calendar and one line about what changed in the plan, even if the line is simply that nothing changed this term. Reviews can feel repetitive when support is steady, and that is fine; a steady plan, checked on schedule, is the system working as intended. The repetition is the point, because it means small drifts get caught while they are still small and easy to put right.