If you've been watching the SEND reform consultation closely, and most SENCOs and school leaders have, you'll know that Individual Support Plans are one of the headline changes. But knowing they're coming and knowing what to do about them are two different things.
The government has confirmed that schools will have a statutory duty to produce, maintain and share an ISP for every child with identified SEND. That duty arrives via an updated SEND Code of Practice during Phase 1 of the reforms (2026–2028), ahead of the fuller legislative changes expected from 2029. The clock is already ticking. Schools building their understanding now will handle the transition far better than those waiting for the deadline.
Why ISPs? The Problem They're Trying to Solve
SEND records in England are inconsistent and fragmented. A child might have a one-page profile in one school, an IEP in the next, and a provision map that lives in a spreadsheet that nobody else can access.
Information about a child's needs routinely fails to travel with them when they move between year groups, schools or education phases. The result is that children lose support at exactly the moments they need it most. Families re-explain their child's needs over and over again. Teachers in new settings have to rediscover strategies that a previous teacher had already worked out. The system is exhausting for everyone involved — and it fails pupils.
“The ISP is essentially the government's answer to a question the sector has been asking for years: why doesn't what we know about a child follow them through school?”
Liam Wheldon, CTO — ProvisionIQ
ISPs are designed to fix this by creating a standardised, digital record that stays with the pupil, is developed in partnership with parents, and updates as needs and provision evolve. The aim isn't just better documentation. It's continuity of support.
Who Gets an ISP?
The current two-tier system (SEN Support and EHCPs) is being replaced by a new four-tier model. ISPs apply to children in the middle two tiers: Targeted and Targeted Plus support. Children in the Specialist tier who hold an EHCP will also have an ISP, but it sits alongside the EHCP rather than replacing it. The EHCP continues to govern statutory entitlements; the ISP describes what's happening day to day in the classroom.
One of the most important details: a formal diagnosis is not required. If a child has identified barriers to learning and is receiving support, an ISP is needed. This is a significant shift from the current culture in which formal documentation often only follows formal assessment. Under the new model, provision comes first.
What an ISP Must Contain
ISPs won't be free-format documents that each school designs differently; that would recreate exactly the inconsistency problem they're meant to solve. Based on the consultation, each ISP will need to address four core areas:
Core ISP content (as proposed)
- Barriers to learning — The specific difficulties or needs that are affecting the child's access to education.
- Provision in place — What the school is putting in place to address those barriers, using evidence-based interventions aligned with the National Inclusion Standards.
- Reasonable adjustments — Changes being made to environment, curriculum, routines or delivery to enable access.
- Intended outcomes — What the school is working towards, reviewed at least annually.
For children at Targeted Plus, the ISP will also incorporate input from external professionals: speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and educational psychologists, accessed through the government's new Experts at Hand service. This multi-agency input needs to be reflected in the document, not just referenced verbally in a review meeting. The exact platform and template are still being developed by the DfE through user research with schools, local authorities and families. What is confirmed is that ISPs must be digital, must travel with the child between settings, and must be accessible to parents in real time.
What This Means for Your School
The statutory duty doesn't arrive until September 2029. The schools that wait until then to think about it will be the ones scrambling.
For SENCOs
Your role in relation to ISPs is quality assurance and strategic oversight, not sole authorship. The expectation is that you lead on how ISPs are initiated and reviewed, establishing consistent standards, ensuring the evidence base behind provision choices is sound, and coordinating professional input. You will be central to making annual reviews purposeful rather than purely administrative. But you are not expected to write every ISP yourself. That would simply recreate the current workload problem under a different name.
For class teachers
Every teacher is a teacher of SEND. This is one of the clearest messages running through the White Paper. Class teachers will have a direct role in both creating and updating ISPs, and critically, in ensuring that what an ISP says shapes day-to-day classroom practice. An ISP that's reviewed once a year and then filed away is not what this reform is trying to achieve. It should be a live reference that influences planning and provision continuously. Ofsted will be looking at whether the provision described in ISPs is actually being delivered.
For school leaders
Inclusion will now appear in Ofsted report cards. Inspectors will look not just at whether ISPs exist, but at their quality, whether provision matches what's documented, and whether parents have been genuinely involved. Leaders need to think about the governance and assurance structures around ISPs: how you know they're being implemented, how you respond when they're not, and how you resource the whole-school capacity to do this sustainably. The Inclusive Mainstream Fund (averaging around £48,000 per secondary school per year) is specifically designed to support this infrastructure.
The System Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly Enough
Most of the sector conversation around ISPs has focused on content and compliance: what goes in them, when they're due, who's responsible. These are important questions. But there's a more fundamental one that schools need to answer before any of that: where will ISPs live, and how will they connect to everything else?
Right now, the average SENCO is managing a SEND register in one place, provision maps somewhere else, review paperwork in another system, and communication with families through email threads that nobody else can easily access. The ISP mandate, if approached as just another document to add to this ecosystem, will create more work, not less.
The potential of ISPs, the thing the DfE is actually trying to achieve, is a single, coherent, living record that connects needs, provision, outcomes and professional input in one place, accessible to everyone who needs it, updating as things change. That only works if the system behind it is designed for it. A well-designed platform should mean that generating review-ready evidence, sharing updates with parents, and tracking provision across a cohort takes less time than the current patchwork — not more.
“ISPs done well aren't extra work. They're what the work should have been all along — joined up, visible, and actually useful to the people doing the teaching.”
Liam Wheldon, CTO — ProvisionIQ
This is the lens through which ProvisionIQ approaches the ISP requirement. Not as a compliance task, but as an opportunity to build the kind of intelligent SEND management infrastructure that makes every part of the system work together rather than in parallel: ISPs, provision mapping, annual reviews, Ofsted evidence, and family communication.
Where to Start Now
Legislation arrives in 2029. But the groundwork is worth laying now. Here are four practical things worth doing before the end of this academic year:
- 1Audit your current SEND records. How are you recording barriers, provision and outcomes today? How consistent is that across the school? Where are the gaps a new ISP system would need to fill?
- 2Map what travels with a pupil when they leave. When a child moves to a new setting, what do you send? What do you receive when a new pupil arrives? The ISP is designed to solve a transition problem. Understand what that problem looks like in your context.
- 3Talk to your class teachers about what they actually need. What information about a child's SEND would change their practice if they had it accessible and up to date? This shapes what a good ISP should do, and tells you how to design your approach to whole-school engagement.
- 4Review your parent engagement for SEND. ISPs are co-produced with families. If your current approach to family involvement in SEND support is limited to annual reviews, there's work to do before ISPs become statutory. Start building those habits now.