The graduated response consists of four steps. Assess, plan, do, review.
It helps understand child or young person’s needs to allow support to be put in place and ensure they progress. It also ensures that parents and carers are kept actively involved and informed throughout the whole process of planning.
Your school’s graduated response should be clearly and accessibly set out in their SEND Information Report, which must be reviewed and updated annually and published on your website.
Identify and plan for suitable provision
There are a number of approaches to help identify and then plan for suitable provision where a child may need additional support.
- Use the SEND indicators tool.
- Follow our ordinarily available SEND provision (pdf format, 2 MB) document
- Make use of guidance and procedures pages.
It is good practice to review the indicators for all relevant areas of need to make sure that support is tailored appropriately.
Using assess, plan, do and review
The purpose of this approach is that whilst it begins at assess, it is cyclical and requires continuous review and refinement, all the while taking into account the needs of the individual child or young person.
Assess
Complete a clear analysis of the child or young person’s strengths and needs. Learning gaps may not always be an indication of a special educational need but identifying and addressing them is still important.
Include progress and attainment over time and other information from the school/setting’s core systems such as information on attitudes and behaviours.
Observation and assessments need to monitor the impact of any previous interventions or actions using comparisons to age-related expectations and other data sets where relevant.
Assessments will often need to go beyond academic or age-related reviews. The early help strengths and needs form can be used to identify if there are other factors impacting on the child or young person’s development.
Plan
This person-centred planning approach actively keeps the child or young person at its heart.
An individualised support plan identifies clearly defined actions, goals, timescales and arrangements for review and subsequent assessment.
- Everyone involved in the process should input into the plan and the support needed.
- A date should be agreed to review the plan.
The support plan should be a dynamic document, used by all staff, that informs what happens in the classroom or setting.
The plan should:
- Reflect the needs of the child or young person.
- Provide a clear understanding of the support that will be put in place and why.
- Support effective information sharing, progression and monitoring and articulate specific outcomes (targets/goals).
- Evidence the assess, plan, do, review cycle.
- Support the child or young person to become more involved in their own learning and goals.
- Help families understand how their child or young person will be supported and how they can help them at home.
- Provide evidence for funding applications and referrals to external support services.
Do
Evidence-based interventions should be provided if appropriate. The school or setting should make full use of available resources.
The SENDCO can help find solutions to ensure the child or young person’s needs are met effectively.
Once a plan is in place, it will be implemented consistently and given time to take effect. This might include checking in with the child or young person to monitor and make adjustments as required, in collaboration with others.
Access more information on a range of strategies, adaptations and personalisation. [link to more info]
Review
Reviews should be structured and focused and held at least three times a year. On-going, formative and responsive assessment in real-time would continue in addition to this.
Everyone involved, including parents and carers and the child or young person should decide together:
- Whether the SEND support is having a positive impact
- Whether the outcomes have been, or are being, achieved
- Whether new outcomes need to be identified
- Whether support needs to continue or different support needs to be tried
If a child is not making progress
- Consider involving appropriate specialists, for example, health visitors, speech and language therapists.
- This decision should be taken with the child or young person’s parents.
- For early years settings all referrals for specialist support should be made through the single point of request for involvement (SPORFI) with parental consent.
Useful information
For transition to a new school – transition pack for practitioners.
For additional templates, guidance and support, visit the SEND support pages.
This guidance ensures that you are able to meet the requirements to assess, plan.