Preparing for the September 2029 ISP deadline: a 12-month plan

September 2029 is the statutory deadline for the new ISP standard. Every SEN Support pupil in England — around 1.7 million children — must have an Individual Support Plan in the new five-section format, co-produced with parents, on a structured review cycle. Schools that prepare in 2026 and 2027 will hit the deadline comfortably. Schools that wait until 2028 will struggle. Schools that wait until 2029 will fail.

This article is a 12-month plan you can run in any 12-month window between now and August 2029. It assumes you're starting from a typical position: some IEPs, some EHCPs, some pupils with no formal plan, and a SENDCo who already has more than enough to do.

The plan is deliberately modest. It doesn't expect you to overhaul everything at once. It picks small, sequenced moves that compound over a year into being properly ready.

Month 1 — Audit

Before you change anything, you need to know what you're starting with. Spend the first month auditing.

Map out your current SEND cohort. How many pupils are on SEN Support? How many have an EHCP? How many are flagged as needing additional support but have nothing formal in place? Pull the numbers from your MIS.

For pupils on SEN Support, look at what currently exists for them. An IEP from last year? An IEP from three years ago? A pile of intervention records but no formal plan? Nothing at all? Categorise each pupil into one of those buckets.

Then look at your existing tooling. What's in your MIS? What's in spreadsheets? What's in shared drives? What's in someone's head? Be honest. Most schools find that 30–40% of their SEND data isn't in a system at all.

Outputs of month 1:

• A list of every SEN Support pupil and their current plan status
• A map of where each piece of SEND data lives today
• A short note on the biggest pain points in your current process

Month 2 — Pilot a small group

Pick 10 pupils across a range of needs. Write an ISP for each one in the new five-section format, by hand or using a template. Don't try to fit your existing data into the new structure — start fresh, using the assessment as the starting point.

The point of this month isn't to produce 10 perfect ISPs. It's to find out where the friction is. You'll discover:

• Which sections are easy to write because the data is to hand
• Which sections require digging through five systems
• Where the parent voice is missing
• Where outcomes are vague because they always have been
• How long the process actually takes (typically 30–60 minutes per ISP from scratch)

Track your time. Track the parent contact. Track which data sources you used. By the end of the month, you have ten worked examples and a clear-eyed view of what tooling you actually need.

Month 3 — Define your standard

Now you've piloted the format, define what "good" looks like for your school. Write a one-page guide that covers:

• The five-section structure (you can lift this from our ISP guide)
• Your school's preferences for outcome wording, RAG criteria, and review rhythm
• Who's responsible for what (SENDCo writes the plan; class teachers contribute observations; pastoral team feeds in soft data; parents co-produce)
• How parent voice is captured (form, meeting, portal — pick a default)
• How the audit trail is recorded

This document becomes your school's "ISP standard operating procedure." It's the reference for staff training, for new SENDCos, and for inspection conversations.

Month 4 — Train the staff

ISPs aren't just a SENDCo job. They depend on contributions from class teachers, form tutors, the pastoral team, and learning support assistants. Train them.

A 90-minute INSET session can cover:

• What an ISP is and why it's changing
• The five sections and what each one contains
• What teachers contribute (observations, evidence of provision, outcome RAG)
• What pastoral teams contribute (parent contact, behaviour patterns, wider context)
• How co-production works
• How to flag a pupil who might need an ISP if they don't already have one

Don't try to make every staff member an ISP expert. They don't need to be. They need to know what they contribute and when.

If you've got a busy CPD calendar, INSET probably isn't until autumn. Plan for it. The earlier the staff training, the longer the cohort has to absorb the change.

Month 5 — Co-production rhythm

Pick a co-production rhythm and try it on your pilot group of 10 pupils.

The rhythm we'd recommend (from our co-production article):

• Start of cycle: structured prompt to parents (3–4 questions)
• Mid-cycle: short update (half a screen)
• Pre-review: signal what'll be discussed
• At review: parent contributes (in person, by phone, in writing, by video)
• Between cycles: open channel for issues

For the 10 pilot pupils, run this rhythm for one full term. Learn what works for your families. Adjust.

Outputs of month 5:

• A co-production rhythm that works for your school
• A small set of templates (prompts, update emails, review formats)
• Parent feedback on the rhythm itself

Month 6 — Pick your tooling

By now you've worked with the new format for half a year. You know what you need from a tool. Time to pick one.

Three honest options:

Stay with what you've got. If your current MIS or provision-mapping tool can be made to fit, great. Most can't fit the full ISP standard, but for some smaller schools the existing toolset plus disciplined templates might be enough.

Add a SEND-specific tool. Provision Map, Senflow, SENDCo View, or one of the others. Each has different strengths. The criteria to evaluate against:

• Does it support the five-section ISP format?
• Does it support termly APDR cycles?
• Does it support structured parent co-production?
• Does it integrate with your MIS?
• Does it support costed interventions?
• Does it generate EHCP evidence packs?
• Does it have field-level permissions?

Build your own in spreadsheets. Some schools will try this. We'd advise against it — at scale, the audit trail and co-production requirements become impossible to maintain in Excel.

Don't pick the tool in month 1 — that's premature. Don't pick it in month 12 — that's too late. Month 6 is about right: you've worked with the format enough to know what you need, but you've got time to onboard before the rollout.

Month 7 — Roll out to a wider cohort

Take your tooling, your standard, your rhythm, and your trained staff, and roll out to a bigger group. Aim for 30–50 pupils — say a quarter of your SEN Support cohort.

This is where you'll find the second-order problems. The 10-pupil pilot revealed the obvious frictions. The 30–50 pupil rollout reveals the scaling frictions. Things like:

• Class teachers can manage observations for 5 ISPs but struggle with 15
• The parent portal works for digitally-fluent parents but needs a fallback for others
• The SENDCo's Tuesday afternoon block isn't enough to keep up with the volume
• The pastoral team's link to the SEND data isn't strong enough

These are good problems. They're the ones you need to solve before September 2029. Better to solve them in 2027 with 30 pupils than in 2029 with 200.

Month 8 — Mock inspection

Halfway through the year. Run a mock inspection against the new Ofsted SEND framework.

You can do this internally with your governing body's SEND link, or you can engage an external consultant. Either way, the brief is the same: pretend it's an Ofsted inspection focused on SEND. What would they find?

The mock should look at:

• ISP quality across the cohort
• APDR cycle evidence
• Parent co-production evidence
• Outcome tracking and RAG history
• Intervention costs and outcomes
• The graduated approach for pupils not yet at ISP stage

The output is a list of weaknesses. Prioritise them. The stuff that comes up here is exactly the stuff a real inspection would find — and you've now got 12+ months to fix it.

Month 9 — Address the weaknesses

Take the mock inspection findings and work through them. Some will be policy fixes (write the procedure, train the staff). Some will be tooling fixes (configure the system differently, add a workflow). Some will be capacity fixes (the SENDCo needs more time, or different time).

Don't try to solve everything. Pick the three biggest gaps and fix them. The smaller gaps can wait.

This is also a good month to bring your Bursar and Head into the planning conversation if they haven't been involved already. The funding model changes (the £1.6bn Inclusive Mainstream Fund) need their attention. The intervention cost data you've been building feeds their financial reporting.

Month 10 — Full cohort rollout

Roll out to all SEN Support pupils. By now you've piloted with 10, scaled to 30–50, addressed the weaknesses, and trained the staff. The full rollout should be the last big step.

Realistic expectations:

• Some pupils will have very thin ISPs at first because their data history is thin. That's fine. The plan compounds over cycles.
• Some parents will engage immediately; some will need persistent outreach. Document what's tried.
• Some staff will adapt quickly; some will need more support. The standard operating procedure helps here.
• The first full cycle will take longer than later cycles. The data setup is the heaviest lift.

By the end of month 10, every SEN Support pupil should have an ISP in the new format, even if it's a v1 ISP that gets stronger at the next review.

Month 11 — First full review cycle

The first review cycle for the full cohort. This is the test.

Run the cycle as designed:

• Start of term: prompts to parents
• Mid-term: updates
• Pre-review: signal what'll be discussed
• Review meetings (in person, by phone, by portal)
• Outcomes RAG-rated
• Reviews recorded
• Changes for next cycle defined

Track the time it takes. The first full cycle for the full cohort is when you'll find out whether the SENDCo workload is sustainable. If it isn't, you have time to add capacity (more SENDCo time, an assistant, better tooling) before the deadline.

Month 12 — Stabilise and document

The final month is about making the new way of working sustainable.

Document what works. Update your standard operating procedure with the lessons learned. Train new staff who joined during the year. Update governors on the position. Communicate to parents that this is now business as usual.

Set up the rhythm for the next academic year. Termly cycles aligned with school terms. Annual reviews scheduled. Inspection readiness maintained.

If you've followed the plan, by the end of month 12 you have:

• Every SEN Support pupil on a structured ISP
• A working co-production rhythm with parents
• Termly APDR cycles delivering changes
• An audit trail that evidences everything
• Tooling that scales
• Staff who know what they're doing
• A picture of intervention costs and outcomes
• An EHCP evidence pack workflow that's manageable

Whether you started this 12 months from September 2029 or 30 months from it, the plan gets you ready. The sooner you start, the more cycles you compound, and the easier the deadline gets.

What we built

SENDCo View is built to support exactly this transition. The five-section ISP, the termly APDR cycle, the parent portal for co-production, the costed intervention log, the EHCP evidence pack generation — all in one platform. Founding schools get lifetime access for £599 and direct input on what we build next.

See the founding school programme →

If you'd like the full 12-month plan as a PDF you can share with your SLT, download the guide. It includes printable templates for ISP, APDR review, parent co-production prompt, and a mock inspection checklist.