The clocks the paperwork runs against #
SEN administration is deadline-shaped, and the deadlines are statutory. Where a school or a family asks for an education, health and care needs assessment, the local authority is on the clock.
16 weeks
The local authority must tell the family whether a plan will be made
GOV.UK, SEND extra help
20 weeks
From receiving the request to issuing the final plan
GOV.UK, SEND extra help
15 days
At least, for parents to comment on a draft
GOV.UK, SEND extra help
Around that sit annual reviews, each with its own timetable, and the graduated approach in the SEND code of practice, which is itself a cycle with a review point built into it.
What the paperwork actually is #
| Document | Who reads it | Where the content comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Support plan or pupil passport | Teachers, teaching assistants, the family | Assessment, teacher input, previous plan |
| Evidence pack for an assessment request | The local authority panel | Everything above, plus attendance, attainment and external reports |
| Annual review paperwork | The local authority, the family, professionals | The plan, plus progress since the last review |
| Provision map | Leadership, governors | Every plan, aggregated |
| SEND information report | The public. Required on every maintained school website | The school's own policy and provision |
Read down the right hand column and the pattern is obvious. Five documents, five audiences, one underlying set of facts about a child, re-entered by hand each time because no two of those formats agree.
The Workload Reduction Taskforce named this directly in January 2024: item 2 on its list of administrative tasks that should not require a teacher is reformatting data or re-entry of data into multiple systems, and item 22 is keeping and filing paper or electronic records.
Where it goes wrong #
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The evidence is scattered at the moment it is needed
An assessment request needs attendance data, attainment data, the current plan, teacher observations and reports from outside professionals. Those live in five places and are assembled under time pressure.
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The review calendar exists in one person's head
Annual reviews come round on individual dates set by individual plans, so there is no single term in which they all happen. Without a rule that surfaces them, they surface when somebody remembers.
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The version that matters is not always the current one
When a plan exists as a document rather than as a record, the copy a teaching assistant is working from can be two revisions behind the one the SENCO wrote.
Which parts run on rules #
Assembly and tracking. Everything that carries the word "judgement" stays with people, and this is the cluster where that line is least negotiable.
Assembly and tracking
- Knowing which reviews are due in the next half term without anybody checking
- Pulling the standing evidence for a request from the systems that already hold it, so the SENCO adds the professional content rather than retyping attendance figures
- Producing the provision map from the plans instead of alongside them
- Making sure everyone working with a child is looking at the current version
All of that has a fixed trigger, fixed steps and a fixed output.
Stays with people
- What a child needs
- Whether the provision is working
- Whether to request an assessment
- What to say to a parent who has been waiting
- How to word a report that a family will read at one of the hardest points of their year
Professional judgement, and the training that goes with it.
The data question #
SEN records contain health information and detailed assessments of a named child, which is about as sensitive as school data gets. The school is the data controller for all of it, and the DfE's own guidance on data protection in schools covers both sharing personal data and procuring educational technology.
Where SEN records sit and who can reach them is a decision to make deliberately, and a good reason to be sceptical of anything that wants to hold them somewhere new.
The cost of admin time calculator will put a figure on the assembly work across a year. The nearest sibling page is attendance returns and reporting, which is one of the systems every SEN evidence pack has to reach into.