When ‘keeping an eye on it’ stops being enough

Every setting has a child like this. Staff have noticed something for a while: his play is different, his language hasn’t moved on since autumn, transitions end in tears more days than not. Everyone agrees they’re “keeping an eye on it”. And that phrase, kindly meant, can quietly absorb months of a child’s life while nothing actually changes.

The graduated approach exists to stop that drift. It’s the process the SEND Code of Practice expects every early years setting to run, and when it’s done well it turns vague worry into visible progress. The trouble is that plenty of practitioners were never really taught how to run it. They inherited a template, a folder, and an anxious sense that EHC paperwork is a dark art.

You don’t need a diagnosis to act

Let’s clear up the biggest misconception first. Nothing in the graduated approach waits for a diagnosis. If a child needs something different from what you’d usually provide, the duty to identify and support starts now, with what you can see. Waiting for a paediatrician’s letter before adjusting your practice gets it backwards, and children can wait a very long time for that letter.

Early identification is mostly careful noticing: structured observation, comparing what you see against typical development, and talking to parents early and honestly. That first conversation with parents is often the hardest step, and it goes better when you bring specifics (“here’s what we’ve observed at group time over three weeks”) rather than labels.

Assess, plan, do, review, and actually mean it

The cycle at the heart of the graduated approach is simple to name and easy to hollow out. The version that works looks like this: assess what’s actually going on, plan support with a clear intended outcome, do it consistently across the week (not just when the key person is in), and review honestly, including the possibility that the plan didn’t work and needs changing.

The written plan matters less than people fear and more than people treat it. A good support plan or one-page profile is short, specific and changes what adults do on Tuesday morning. If a visitor to the room couldn’t spot your plan in action, it’s a document, not a plan. Our The Graduated Approach in Practice course walks through running this cycle properly in an early years setting, including bringing in outside professionals, understanding funding routes and making sense of your Local Offer.

Parents belong inside the cycle as well, not just as recipients of its conclusions. Their views and their knowledge of the child should shape the plan from the start, and in practice the plans that work are nearly always the ones where home and setting are doing complementary things rather than parallel ones.

When it’s time to ask for more

For most children, good setting-level support is enough. For some it isn’t, and that’s when an EHC needs assessment request enters the picture. Here’s the thing practitioners consistently underestimate: the strength of that request rests almost entirely on the evidence the setting has been gathering all along. Cycles of assess, plan, do, review with dates and outcomes. Records of professional involvement. Evidence that support was tried, sustained and reviewed.

A request built on that foundation stands up. A request that says, in effect, “we’re very worried about this child” without the trail behind it is far more likely to stall. Which is the quiet lesson of the whole graduated approach: the everyday paperwork you keep in March is what gets a child the right support next year.

That child in your setting, the one everyone has a feeling about? He doesn’t need anyone to watch him more. He needs someone to start the cycle. This week would be a good week.