In September your child will meet adults who have never met them. Whatever the school knows about your child lives in a file, in the memory of a teaching assistant who may have moved on, and in the head of a teacher who now has a different class.
The handover is the thing that decides how the first term goes, and it is the one part of this you can influence directly, right now, in August.
This guide covers England.
Why the first weeks matter more than they should
Everyone in the building is new to each other in September. The routines that kept your child regulated last year were often invisible: a particular adult on the door, a seat by the window, five minutes before the bell. None of that necessarily survives a timetable change, and none of it is written down anywhere unless someone wrote it down.
In our experience the first weeks are when a child forms a view about whether school is survivable this year. Getting the information across before term starts is worth more than three meetings in October.
The new teacher does not start from zero, legally
Worth knowing before you write anything, because it changes the tone of the ask.
The duty on schools to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 is anticipatory. It applies to the responsible body of a school (section 85(6)), and Schedule 13 frames it as a duty owed to “disabled pupils generally” (paragraph 2(3)(b)(ii)), not to one child once they have run into a barrier. A school is expected to have thought ahead. So sending information in August is not you doing the school’s job for it. It is you making the school’s existing duty easy to discharge.
One thing to be clear about, because it decides whether this argument is available to you. The reasonable adjustments duty follows disability, not the SEND label. Not every child with special educational needs meets the Equality Act definition of disabled, and some disabled children have no SEND paperwork at all. If your child meets that definition, this duty is yours to point at.
If your child has an EHC plan, the special educational provision in Section F is a duty the Local Authority must secure (Children and Families Act 2014 section 42(2)), and that duty does not lapse over the summer. What is owed is what the plan actually says. If the plan specifies term-time provision, the point is that it has to be in place from the first day back, not that it runs through August. The duty falls away only where you have made suitable alternative arrangements yourself (section 42(5)).
The statutory attendance guidance (last updated 9 July 2026) has a chapter on pupils whose attendance is affected by ill health or by their special educational needs and disabilities. Paragraph 59 says that for pupils with SEND, schools are expected to work in partnership with parents to develop specific support approaches for attendance, including, where applicable, ensuring the provision outlined in the pupil’s EHC plan is accessed. The same paragraph expects schools to establish strategies for removing in-school barriers, including support or reasonable adjustments for uniform, transport, routines, access to support in school and lunchtime arrangements. It also expects formal reasonable adjustments under section 20 of the Equality Act 2010 where a pupil has a disability, agreed by and regularly reviewed with the pupil and their parents.
You are not asking a favour. You are handing over the information that makes all of that possible.
The one-page profile
The single most useful document you can produce is one page. Not five. One, because one gets read in a staff meeting and five gets filed.
What works on it:
| Section | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| What people like and admire about me | Written in your child’s voice, or with them if they can. This is not decoration. It changes how an adult reads the rest of the page. |
| What is important to me | The things that make a day work. The specific ones, not the general ones. |
| How best to support me | The practical list. What to do, what not to do, what helps in the first ten seconds of a wobble. |
| What you might see, and what it means | The translation page. “When he goes quiet and still, he is not being rude, he has stopped processing. Give him a minute and no questions.” |
| Who to contact | You, how, and the best time. |
Two rules that make the difference. Be specific. “Struggles with transitions” tells a new teacher nothing; “needs a two-minute warning before any change of activity, given verbally and with the visual timer” tells them exactly what to do. Be short. Every sentence you add reduces the chance the whole thing gets read.
What to actually send, and to whom
One email, before the first day, to the SENCO and the new class teacher or form tutor, with the profile attached. Copy the school office so it lands in a system rather than one inbox.
Keep the email itself to four short paragraphs: who your child is, what changed over the summer if anything, the two or three things that matter most in week one, and an offer to talk.
Ask for three specific things:
- Confirmation that the profile has been shared with everyone who will teach or supervise your child, including cover staff and lunchtime staff. Lunchtime is often where it goes wrong, and lunchtime staff are often the last to know. The attendance guidance names lunchtime arrangements explicitly at paragraph 59, so this is a reasonable thing to ask for in writing.
- Who your named contact is this year, and how to reach them.
- A short meeting in the first fortnight, not the first term.
If your child has an EHC plan, ask one more: which parts of Section F are in place from day one, and which need arranging. A therapy that starts in November is a fact you would rather know in September.
The transport question people forget until it is too late
If your child’s travel arrangements are changing, or you have applied for home to school transport and not heard, chase it in August. Applications and appeals both take time, and the first week of term is the worst possible moment to discover the answer is no.
If your young person is moving into sixth form or college, the position is genuinely different after compulsory school age. For a young person of sixth form age there is no individual entitlement to free transport equivalent to the duty owed for eligible children of compulsory school age under Education Act 1996 section 508B. What your Local Authority has instead is a duty to publish a post-16 transport policy statement, on or before 31 May in the year in which the academic year begins (section 509AA(7)(a)). Find yours and read what it commits to.
From 19 the law changes again. For adult learners, meaning people who are neither children nor of sixth form age, the Local Authority must make such arrangements for the provision of transport as it considers necessary, and any transport provided under that duty must be free of charge (Education Act 1996 section 508F). Worth knowing that sixth form age is not the same as being under 19: a young person who began a course before turning 19 stays of sixth form age until they finish that course (section 509AC(1)). Where there is an EHC plan, it strengthens the argument that arrangements are necessary.
Checking what the school actually holds
If you want to see what is in your child’s file before term starts, there are two different routes and they run on different clocks.
| Route | Which schools | Time limit |
|---|---|---|
| The educational record | Schools maintained by a Local Authority, other than nursery schools, plus special schools that are not so maintained (regulation 5(1)). Mainstream academies and free schools are outside it. | 15 school days |
| A subject access request | Any school | One month from the point the school has what it needs to identify the request, extendable by two further months for complex or numerous requests |
Two things the table cannot show. First, the subject access clock pauses while the school is waiting on you to narrow a broad request, so send it as specific as you can (UK GDPR Article 12A(5), and Article 12A(6) gives a large amount of information about one person as the example, which is exactly a whole school file). Second, cost differs. Inspecting the educational record is free, but the governing body may charge for a copy, up to the cost of supply (regulation 5(3)). A subject access request is normally free.
Note that a school day means any day on which there is a school session at that school (Education Act 1996 section 579(1)), so “15 school days” excludes school holidays. Asked in August, that clock effectively starts in September, which is one more reason to ask now rather than later.
What to do with the summer that is left
A few things that help more than they look like they should.
- Ask for photos. A photograph of the new classroom, the new teacher and the route to the toilets is worth a hundred reassurances. Many schools will send them if asked in August.
- Ask about a visit. Ten minutes in an empty building during the inset day removes an enormous amount of unknown.
- Write down what worked last year while you still remember it. By October you will not.
- Do not over-prepare your child. Two or three concrete facts (who, where, what happens first) beat a fortnight of discussion.
And keep the year, not just the memory
The reason the handover is hard every September is that a year of information lives in your head, and your head is also holding everything else.
The fix is to stop relying on memory. A dated note on your phone after anything that matters, written the same day, turns a year of information into a year of evidence you can hand over, quote at an annual review or attach to an appeal.
Your week one plan
- Write the one-page profile. One page, specific, in your child’s voice where you can.
- Email it to the SENCO and the new teacher, copying the office, before the first day.
- Ask for the three things: confirmation it has been shared with everyone including lunchtime and cover staff, your named contact, and a meeting in the first fortnight.
- If there is an EHC plan, ask which parts of Section F are in place from day one.
- Chase transport now, not in September.
- Ask for photos of the room, the staff and the route.
Where to get free help
Every Local Authority must arrange for children, young people and parents to be provided with advice and information about special educational needs (Children and Families Act 2014 section 32). That is your local SENDIASS. The SEND Code of Practice says the information, advice and support offered should be free, accurate and confidential, and provided at arm’s length from the Local Authority (paragraph 2.8), and in practice they are free. Contact publishes free guidance on starting and changing school. Our free course, SCOPE, covers the school conversations.
Sources: Equality Act 2010 section 20, section 85(6) and Schedule 13 paragraph 2(3)(b)(ii); Children and Families Act 2014 sections 32 and 42(2) and (5); SEND Code of Practice, January 2015, paragraph 2.8; Department for Education, “Working together to improve school attendance”, statutory guidance, last updated 9 July 2026, paragraph 59; Education (Pupil Information) (England) Regulations 2005, SI 2005/1437, regulations 3 and 5; UK GDPR Article 12A as inserted by section 76 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, in force 5 February 2026 (SI 2026/82 regulation 2(h)); Education Act 1996 sections 508B, 508F, 509AA(7)(a), 509AC(1) and 579(1) (all legislation.gov.uk and gov.uk).