An Individual Education Plan — sometimes an ILP, or an individual learning plan — is a school document. It names what your child is working towards, what the school will do about it, and when it will be looked at again.
It is worth understanding two things before your next review meeting. What a good one looks like, and what the most common weak one looks like, because they are surprisingly easy to tell apart once you know the test.
The test: could this target be failed?
Read each target and ask whether there is any version of next term in which it would clearly not have been met. If there isn't, it is not a target. It is a sentiment.
- "Will improve focus during lessons"
- "Will develop greater independence"
- "Will engage more with peers"
Against:
- "Will start a written task within two minutes of instruction, in four out of five observed lessons"
- "Will move from the corridor to his seat without adult prompting, three mornings in five"
- "Will join a structured playground game once per break, twice a week"
The second set is checkable. That is the entire difference, and it is what converts a review meeting from an exchange of impressions into a conversation about what happened.
What a plan should also name
- Who does what. Not "the school will provide support" — which person, doing which thing.
- How often. A frequency, not "as needed".
- Where. In class, withdrawn, or both.
- What evidence will exist. What will someone be able to show you at the review.
- The review date. Actually in the diary.
Two plans is worse than one
Where a family also has outside therapy, the common failure is two sets of goals running in parallel — the therapist's and the school's — with nobody reconciling them. The child gets pulled towards different targets by different adults, and the effort divides rather than compounds.
Outside support should work to the school's IEP rather than beside it. If a provider tells you their programme is separate from what the school is doing, that is not specialisation. It is a coordination problem you are about to pay for twice.
At the review meeting
Bring the previous plan and ask four questions, in this order:
- Which of these targets was met, and what is the evidence?
- For any that were not — what changed as a result of that?
- Is the provision listed here what actually happened, week to week?
- What is different in the next plan because of what we have just discussed?
The fourth is the one that matters. A review that never results in a change to the plan is not a review; it is a meeting. If the same targets reappear a third time unchanged, the plan is not the thing being worked to.
If the plan is thin
Say so once, in writing, specifically, and constructively — offer a rewritten target rather than a criticism. Most SENCOs are writing dozens of these under real time pressure, and a parent who arrives with a usable sentence rather than a complaint tends to get it adopted.