Sharing your child’s IEP and reports with a new teacher
What to hand over when your child gets a new teacher, teacher aide or therapist, what usually gets lost, and one way to stop re-explaining every year.
Every year, most children with extra support needs meet at least one new adult. Usually a new classroom teacher. Sometimes a new teacher aide, if the child has one. Depending on the child and the school, it might also be a new SENCO or learning support coordinator (the person who coordinates learning support at a school), a new RTLB (a specialist teacher who works across several schools), or a new therapist. Each of them wants to do right by your child, and each of them starts without the history.
What they usually get, if anything, is a folder. Last year’s IEP (the Individual Education Plan, a written plan some schools and families agree for the year), perhaps a funding application from a few years back, a psychologist’s report, a page of notes from the previous teacher when there was time to write one. What they don’t get is the part that matters most: what actually works. The way you say goodbye at the gate. The fact that he can do the maths but not with the noisy heater on. That she will tell you she is fine and then need a quiet hour at 3.30.
So parents fill the gap, and they do it well. We rewrite the email in February. We sit through the first meeting. We explain our child from the beginning, again, and most of the time the new person is grateful for it. It works. It is just a lot to carry, and it doesn’t have to be carried alone.
Here is what we have learned about making that handover lighter, from a few years of doing it ourselves. Every school and every child is different, so take what fits and leave the rest. If the letters are new to you, there is a plain glossary; this guide should make sense without it.
Write a one-page profile, in your words
Not a diagnosis, a description. Who your child is, what helps, what doesn’t, what a good day looks like and what an early warning sign looks like. Keep it to a page. A new teacher is far more likely to read one page in the first week than forty.
Keep the documents together, and keep them current
The IEP if there is one, the most recent reports, the medication plan if there is one, the letter from the paediatrician. If they live in six email threads and a drawer, the new teacher gets whichever ones come to mind that day.
Ask about the goals, not just the plan
If your child has an IEP or a similar plan, it will have goals in it. Ask each new person which two or three they are working on this term, and how you will both know if it is working. That turns a document into a conversation. If there is no plan, the same question still works: what are you hoping to see this term?
Make the handover a habit, not an event
The best transitions we have seen were not one big meeting in Term 1. They were a short note every few weeks, from whoever saw something worth recording, that the next person could read later.
None of this needs software. A shared folder and a one-page document, kept up to date, will do most of it.
If you want to read further
This guide is our experience, with some help from the pages below. None of it is required reading; they are the ones we kept coming back to, mostly the Ministry of Education’s own, and they will always be more current than we are.
- What are IEPs? Parent to Parent’s plain explanation of what an IEP is and when one is usually made. The one we send other parents first.
- Supporting your child if they need extra help with their learning The Ministry of Education’s page for parents on the kinds of support that exist and where to start asking. Useful for knowing the names of things.
- Your rights to state-funded education Community Law’s summary of where the law sits, including what it does and doesn’t guarantee. We hope you never need it; it is good to know it is there.
Written and looked after by the two parents who run Champ. If something here is out of date, or you know a better way, hello@champ.kiwi.