Assess, Plan, Do, Review: the Cycle With a Missing Instrument
Every school in England follows the SEND Code of Practice, and at its centre sits a cycle: assess, plan, do, review. The law demands assessment and review. What it does not supply is an instrument for the first step, and for the largest category of need in the building, that gap has been left to the school.
An opinion is not an assessment
Where attention and executive function are concerned, most schools have nothing to assess with. Reading has tests. Literacy difficulties have screeners and a well-served pathway. But for the child who cannot hold instructions in mind, cannot get started, cannot finish, the assess step usually amounts to a teacher's observation, honestly made and impossible to act on.
“Jamie struggles to concentrate” is an opinion. “Jamie's selective attention sits in the bottom band for his age, here is the profile, here is what we tried, and here is the term-on-term change” is evidence. The difference between the two sentences is the difference between a worry list and a support plan.
The paperwork is about to get heavier
The 2026 white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, adds Individual Support Plans for children below EHCP level and a duty on schools to articulate how they identify and support need. Both need filling with something, and the something is exactly what the assess step currently cannot produce. The pupils waiting in the referral queue are the clearest case: they are precisely the children an ISP should catch in the meantime, and today they wait with no evidence being gathered at all.
Evidence as a by-product, not a job
The graduated approach fails in practice when it becomes data entry: when the SENCO is the person retyping observations into a tracker at nine in the evening. It works when the evidence writes itself. Assess: a whole cohort completes the Pebble Skills Check in one lesson, and every child gets a measured profile. Plan and do: each Student Report attaches practical strategies for the classroom and for home, and students train the flagged skills in Pebble Academy. Review: the next term's data shows what changed, in the same format, on the same screen.
Every score, flag and term-on-term change is graduated-approach evidence, produced by the cycle running, not by somebody typing it up afterwards. That is what we mean when we say the reports are written for the people who act on them: the cycle the law asks for, with the instrument it forgot.