A clear, simple guide for families.
Part of the AISK — a free library of practical SEND guides · Read, share and print freely · sendexpertsathand.co.uk/aisk
Starting school, or moving to a new setting — how to build the bridge long before the first day.
Starting school is one of the biggest changes your child will ever be asked to make, and it asks a lot of you too. The questions start early — from family, from friends, sometimes from your child. The first-day photograph appears on everyone else’s timeline. It can feel as though everybody else is ready and you are the only one quietly worrying.
When a transition is planned well, everyone feels better. Your child arrives somewhere that already knows who they are. You arrive knowing who to talk to and what happens next. And the school begins with a real picture of your child, rather than a blank page.
Support the child or young person, and the child’s parents, in order to facilitate the development of the child or young person and to help them achieve the best possible educational and other outcomes, preparing them effectively for adulthood.
SEND Code of Practice 2015, paragraph 1.1
Many settings begin thinking about transition in May or June. That is late to start, and it puts all the weight on a handful of visits in the final weeks of term.
It helps to think of transition as a bridge, rather than a one-off event. A bridge that carries your child safely to the other side needs firm foundations, and those foundations are laid long before the other side is even in sight. Everything you already do at home — the routines, the little bits of independence, the practising and the trying again — is bridge-building. It counts, even when it doesn’t feel like preparation.
A big transition asks your child to rebuild almost everything at once: a new environment, new routines, new adults whose way of communicating they have to learn, and sometimes a new trusted person to build a relationship with from scratch. Spreading that work across months rather than weeks makes it very much smaller.
There has been a lot in the press about “school readiness”, and it is often aimed squarely at children — as though readiness is something a four-year-old either has or hasn’t got. A more useful way to look at it is that we need ready children, ready families and ready schools. All three matter, and only one of them is your child’s job.
It also helps to aim at skills for life rather than skills for starting school. These are the six areas worth growing all year round, whatever term you are in.
| Skill for life | Why it helps at school | Ways to build it at home |
|---|---|---|
| Communication | Asking for help, joining in, being understood by adults who don’t yet know them. | Name feelings out loud. Offer two clear choices. Leave a long pause for the answer. Agree words, signs or cards your child can use when talking is hard. |
| Physical development | Coats, shoes, cutlery, pencils, PE kit, stairs, carrying a lunch tray. | Playdough, threading, cutting, climbing, digging, big arm movements. Let them do the zip, even when it takes four minutes. |
| Resilience | Coping when something goes wrong, and having another go. | Let small things be difficult. Use “you’re still learning that one” language. Name the wobble, stay nearby, and don’t rush to fix it. |
| Independence | Toileting, handwashing, lunch, looking after their own belongings. | Do it with them, then beside them, then near them. Step back one notch at a time rather than all at once. |
| Regulation | Managing noise, waiting, changes of activity, and busy spaces. | Keep routines predictable. Practise calming strategies when your child is calm, not mid-meltdown, so they are already familiar when they are needed. |
| Self-esteem | Believing they belong there, and that they are good at things. | Notice effort rather than outcome. Be specific — “you kept going with that”. Give real jobs and real responsibility at home. |
You are not doing this alone
Children aren’t born with instruction books. Ask your child’s current setting what they are working on and how you can mirror it at home — most are delighted to be asked, and a consistent approach across home and setting is worth far more than either of you doing it brilliantly on your own.
You are the expert on your child. Wherever possible, look around settings during the working day rather than at an evening open event — you learn far more from seeing a school in full flow than from an empty, tidy classroom. Ask to speak with the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCO), and write your questions down beforehand so you leave having asked them.
Notice the answers, and notice the manner of them too. A setting that says “we’d want to meet your child before we answer that” is often telling you something good.
A free and impartial service for families of children with SEND: SENDIASS
Every local authority in England has to provide a SEND Information, Advice and Support Service, usually shortened to SENDIASS. It is free, confidential and impartial, and it runs at arm’s length from the people who make SEND decisions — so it is neither the council’s voice nor the school’s.
Preparing for a transition is one of the things they advise on, alongside SEN support in mainstream schools, preparing for meetings, and EHC needs assessments and plans. You do not need a diagnosis, an EHC plan, or a dispute to contact them — early questions are exactly what they are there for. Search your local authority’s name plus “SENDIASS” to find yours.
Once school places are announced and the destination is known, the job becomes making sure your child arrives already known. A One Page Profile does this better than almost anything else.
A One Page Profile is a single-page, person-centred summary — an approach developed by Helen Sanderson — capturing three things: what people appreciate about your child, what is important to them, and how best to support them. Done well, anyone meeting your child for the first time gets a genuine sense of who they are within about thirty seconds: not a diagnosis, not a list of difficulties, but a person.
Alongside it, share copies of any Individual Support Plans, developmental summaries and reports. If your child has a greater quantity of need, ask for additional transition meetings, specific adjustments, and a settling-in plan of their own — one that is additional to, and different from, the plan their classmates will follow.
Where it lives matters
A One Page Profile only does its job if people can actually see it — with your child’s key staff, somewhere quick to reach, and shared with any new adult as part of their induction. Keep a current copy yourself too. Because these profiles usually contain special category data under UK GDPR — sensory information, and sometimes medical or allergy detail — a staff-only area is the right place for it. A classroom wall or corridor visible to other parents and visitors is not, however well-meant the display. Ask the school about their own data protection policy, as practice varies.
Predictability is much easier to build when your child can see where they are going before they get there. The most useful things — a video tour, photographs of the adults, a recorded story — are all things the school is best placed to make, rather than something to film on your phone while you are visiting.
There is a practical reason for that. Filming inside a setting captures staff and other people’s children, and that raises data protection questions which aren’t yours to resolve. Asking the school for something they have made, own and share deliberately avoids all of it.
It is worth making the ask a generous one. Something produced because it helps children with SEND will help every new starter — clarity and predictability are good for a whole cohort, not a special arrangement for one child. Framed that way, it is a much easier yes.
During COVID, settings became very good at exactly this kind of thing — recording stories and tours that families could reach from anywhere. A video tour of the new classroom, watched on repeat across the summer holidays, does the same job as everything else in this guide: it builds predictability well before your child has to rely on it for real.
Wash it in your usual laundry liquid and softener, so it smells like home rather than like a shop. Then let your child wear it during the holidays — not once for a photograph, but often enough that the feel of it is old news by September.
If the uniform turns out to be genuinely overwhelming — a label, a collar, a waistband, a particular fabric — ask about reasonable adjustments. This is not asking for a favour, and it is not making a fuss. A regulated child who attends happily every day is a far better outcome than a child who arrives each morning already flooded with cortisol because of what they are wearing.
Decide early whether your child will have a school lunch or one packed from home, because the two need practising in quite different ways.
If it is a packed lunch, have a few practice runs at home — eating out of the lunchbox, sitting at a table, within a similar stretch of time. Teach your child to ask an adult for help opening their food or drink. Better still, for the sake of their independence, pack things they can open by themselves: it is a small change at your end that removes the need to ask at all.
If they will be eating from a tray, there are two separate skills hiding in that — expressing a choice from the catering options, and then carrying a plate a short distance without mishap. Both are worth a go at home, and both are much easier learned in a quiet kitchen than in a full dining hall.
Ask the school what has worked for children with similar needs in previous years, and what they think you could do at home to help. They will have seen this before, and the answer is often something small you would never have thought of.
Walk or drive it several times before it has to happen under pressure. The first time your child makes that journey shouldn’t be the first morning, when everyone is anxious and running to a clock.
Be careful about promising your child they will have an amazing time. If the first week turns out to be hard, a promise like that becomes one more thing they have to make sense of.
What helps far more is confidence — in the school, in the adults, and in your child’s ability to manage. Children read our uncertainty very accurately, and how you speak about the setting will shape how your child feels walking into it. So if you have worries, take them to the school rather than airing them at the kitchen table.
The same goes for the gate. Try not to compare your child with anyone else’s, and try not to be drawn into conversations at drop-off or pick-up where other families are disparaging the school. It is easy to get swept along, and it rarely leaves anyone feeling better.
Your concern is your child. If you have a worry about provision or staffing, take it to the school — they cannot do anything about a concern they don’t know you have.
| When | What helps most |
|---|---|
| All year round | Building the six skills for life. Keeping routines predictable. Staying in step with your child’s current setting. |
| Choosing a school | Daytime visits. Questions written down in advance. A proper conversation with the SENCO. |
| Once the place is confirmed | Ask for a transition meeting. Share reports and plans. Start the One Page Profile together. Request extra visits if they’d help. |
| Summer term | Visits to the actual classroom, meeting the actual adults. Ask the school for a video tour and photo pack. Agree the settling-in plan in writing. |
| Summer holidays | Videos and photo packs on repeat. Wash and wear the uniform. Practise the route and the lunchbox. Shift bedtimes gradually rather than the night before. |
| First half term | Keep home simple and low-demand. Expect tiredness and big feelings at pick-up. Check in with the school early, rather than waiting for a problem. |
About the first-day photograph
You do not owe anyone a picture of a beaming child in an oversized blazer. If the morning is hard, take the photo the day before, or in the kitchen, or not at all. A brilliant transition is measured in how your child feels by half term, not in how the first morning looked on somebody’s timeline.
This guide is one of a series produced by SEND Experts at Hand to help families support their child with confidence. You may also want the guide on what an Individual Support Plan is. For advice tailored to your family, book a 1:1 advice session.
The Academy of Inclusive Skills and Knowledge is a free library of practical SEND guides, written by SEND Experts at Hand for families and the practitioners who work alongside them. No sign-up, nothing to pay.
Also in the AISK for families: plans, meetings and paperwork · starting school and other transitions · communication · regulation and behaviour · sleep · days out, holidays and celebrations · making sense of the SEND system
SEND Experts at Hand offers 1:1 advice sessions for families — assessments, meetings and funding panels, without the jargon. A free introductory telephone consultation is arranged by email.
sendexpertsathand.co.uk/contact
Independent SEND consultancy for education settings and families.
