Making the most of your EP: Planning Meetings

It's the first of September. The flipflops have been safely stashed away ready for next summer and you're back in your black slacks and knitted cardie. The classroom is beautifully organised with every drawer labelled and there's a general buzz in the air about what the new academic year might bring.

If you hold the role of SENCo in your school, your summer 'to do' list might have also included printing out Pupil Profiles, emailing anxious parents and ordering every fidget toy you could find in the ESPO catalogue.

With children due into school imminently, your next tasks are likely to be around supporting their transition back into school, helping them to become acclimatised to their new classroom/teacher/timetable and meeting with your Educational Psychologist (EP) to plan how best to use their time over the coming months.

So what are our top tips for utilising your planning meeting time as best as possible?

1. Come prepared

As SENCo, it's your job to be aware of and co-ordinate the support that's put in place for the SEND children in your school. In some settings, this might involve you meeting regularly with the children on your SEND register. You may even be personally responsible for implementing the provision they receive. However, in larger schools, especially secondaries, it's never going to be possible for you to know every single detail about every single child who may require additional support at some point during their time in your setting.

That's OK!

To compensate for this, before the planning meeting, make sure you've spoken to the appropriate people to gain that additional bit of insight around the children who have been brought to your attention. Speak to the staff who have raised concerns. Take a look at the child's folder. Maybe even complete a brief lesson observation so you're a little more 'up to speed' on the difficulties that are presenting or the questions the school may have that they'd like answering.

There's no expectation for you to be the 'expert' on that child, but it's important that you come to the planning meeting feeling confident about the advice you might be seeking from your EP.

2. Don't get too bogged down in detail

Planning meetings can be an intervention in themselves. Rather than a simple referral process, where names are shared and the EP must then go away and 'work their magic', planning meetings provide a space for collaboration and consultation, allowing professionals to talk about difficulties that may be arising and explore possibilities and alternatives for support. Through discussion, we love it when you 'bring the child to life' - please don't just read off a stream of behaviour data added by their Head of Year!

During the planning meeting, be guided by your EP. In some cases, they may have lots of questions to ask you. In other cases, the conversation may remain quite minimal. Remember that the planning meeting is just the first (anonymised) step to seeking support and so, often less is more! Here, your EP is likely to require a simple overview of concerns, focusing on the four main areas from the SEND Code of Practice.

3. Remain open-minded

Often we are asked 'how long does it take to assess one child?'. The unhelpful response here would always be 'how long is a piece of string?'. That being said, through experience, we are usually able to place some rough timeframes around the work that we do.

However, to make the most of your EP during planning meetings, try to steer away from the traditional school of thought where we can neatly slot individual children into boundaried periods of time. Instead, consider ways of meeting multiple children's needs using the same amount of time.

Could this be done through:

• Small group intervention;

• Whole class observation;

• Staff training;

• Policy development?

There are so many options available when working with your EP, so come with an open mind and see where the conversation takes you!

To help prepare for your termly planning meetings, Golden Thread Psychology have created a handy checklist for SENCos, which you can download for free by clicking the link below.

25.08.25 Planning meeting checklist.pdf

Download PDF • 187KB

We look forward to a productive term ahead working with you!

Interested in purchasing an annual contract through Golden Thread Psychology? Drop us an email at hello@goldenthreadpsychology.co.uk and a member of the team will be in touch!