A clear guide for settings.
Part of the AISK — a free library of practical SEND guides · Read, share and print freely · sendexpertsathand.co.uk/aisk
Transition as a bridge, not an event — how to build one that carries every child.
Most of what we do around transition is about the small, daily ones — the moves between activities, rooms and adults that happen so often they become invisible. The big transitions are a different order of thing.
Moving from one room to the next, from one setting to another, or into school doesn’t just interrupt a moment in the day. It asks a child to rebuild almost everything at once: a new environment, new routines, new adults whose communication code they must learn from scratch, and sometimes a new key person to build trust with all over again. For children with SEND, that rebuild is rarely straightforward and almost never quick.
Bigger transitions need a greater degree of planning, consideration and preparation — and they need it long before the summer term.
SEN support should include planning and preparing for transition, before a child moves into another setting or school.
SEND Code of Practice 2015, paragraph 5.47
The same paragraph expects the outgoing setting to pass information to the receiving one, and expects parents to have agreed beforehand what is sent.
Two things are worth drawing out. First, transition planning is not an optional extra bolted onto the end of a child’s time with you — it is named as part of SEN support itself. Second, information-sharing is a co-produced act: parents agree what travels, rather than being told afterwards what was sent.
If a child has an EHC plan
Where a child with an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan is transferring into school, the plan must be reviewed and amended in time for the receiving school to plan and, where necessary, commission provision — with 15 February of the transfer year as the latest date for transfers into or between schools. Diarise it in the autumn term, not the spring.
In many settings, transition thinking begins in May or June. It is worth reframing that entirely.
A bridge that carries a child safely to the other side needs firm foundations, and those foundations are laid long before the other side is even in sight. If transition is treated as an event, everything rests on a handful of visits in the last weeks of term. If it is treated as a bridge, the visits become the final span of something that has been under construction all year.
School readiness has had a great deal of attention recently, much of it aimed squarely at children — as though readiness were something a four-year-old either has or hasn’t got. Our view is that it takes ready children, ready families and ready schools. All three, or none of it works.
The Department for Education’s April 2026 package is a useful lever here, not least because it says something similar. Its guidance for settings and schools sets out three building blocks for a smooth start: strong relationships with families; close partnership working between schools, nurseries and childminders; and early identification of children’s needs, including SEND. The accompanying campaign for families is deliberately about everyday skills — communication, independence, confidence — rather than academics or uniforms.
Worth having to hand
For your practice: “Getting children ready for reception: supporting effective transition” — search GOV.UK for the title, or find it under Department for Education publications, April 2026.
For families: the Best Start in Life “Preparing for school” pages, which include the “Steps for School” song and simple everyday activities. A link in a newsletter costs you nothing and gives families something concrete to do.
The national conversation is a helpful prompt, but it is worth being clear that the target is broader than Reception. We are building skills for life, and they happen to be the same skills that make starting school survivable. These were the six areas we focused on when managing a nursery — and the six we were most grateful for when receiving children as a Reception teacher.
| Skill for life | What it buys the child in Reception | How you build it all year round |
|---|---|---|
| Communication | Being understood by adults who don’t yet know them, and asking for help before distress sets in. | Model and teach requesting. Embed signs, symbols and cards so a child has a route to communicate that doesn’t depend on speech. |
| Physical development | Coats, shoes, cutlery, pencils, trays, stairs — the physical reality of a school day. | Gross motor before fine motor. Climbing, digging, big arm movements, dough, threading — and time built in for children to do things slowly for themselves. |
| Resilience | Coping when something goes wrong, in a setting with far fewer adults per child. | Let manageable things be difficult. Name the struggle, stay close, resist rescuing. Praise the persistence rather than the product. |
| Independence | Toileting, handwashing, lunch, managing their own belongings. | Withdraw support one notch at a time — with, then beside, then near. Audit where adults are still doing things children could do. |
| Regulation | Managing noise, waiting, transitions and busy spaces without tipping into crisis. | Predictable routines, warnings before change, and calming strategies practised when a child is calm rather than introduced mid-crisis. |
| Self-esteem | Arriving believing they belong there and that they are capable. | Specific noticing rather than blanket praise. Real jobs, real responsibility, and roles that let a child be the competent one. |
Remember that you are not doing this alone. A newsletter or blog telling families what you are working on, and giving them ideas for the same skills at home, tops up their own knowledge of child development and gives a consistent approach across both settings — the same principle the DfE guidance is reaching for with its first building block.
This is the piece that most often gets left to chance, and it is the one that pays back hardest. Most settings feed into a handful of schools. Treating those as ongoing professional relationships, rather than as recipients of a form each June, changes what transition can be.
Where a school is hard to reach, your local authority early years team or SENCO network is usually the shortest route in. And it is worth framing the ask generously: anything built because it helps children with SEND will help every new starter, which makes it a much easier yes.
When places are announced, the job becomes making sure no receiving team has to start from nothing. Alongside Individual Support Plans, developmental summaries and reports, a One Page Profile does more work per page than anything else you can send.
Developed by Helen Sanderson, it is a single-page, person-centred summary capturing what people appreciate about a child, what is important to them, and how best to support them. Done well, anyone meeting that child for the first time — a supply teacher, a new key person, a member of a medical team — has a genuine sense of who they are within about thirty seconds. Not a diagnosis, not a list of difficulties, but a person.
Children with a greater quantity of need will require more than the universal offer: additional transition meetings, specific adjustments, and a settling-in plan of their own — additional to, and different from, the one their peers will follow. Plan for that explicitly rather than hoping the standard arrangements stretch.
Two things routinely catch settings and families out at transition, and both are far easier to handle if they are raised early.
The Disability Access Fund (DAF) is an annual lump sum paid directly to the early years setting for each eligible child — if they receive Disability Living Allowance and are taking up a government entitlement funded place. Its stated purpose is to help settings make initial reasonable adjustments and build their capacity to support disabled children. The DfE minimum for 2026–27 is £975 per child; check your own local authority for the local figure and process.
Three features of DAF matter specifically at transition:
SEN inclusion funding follows a similar logic — it cannot be used for children with SEN in Reception, although it can support a child below compulsory school age who has deferred entry. Beyond that point, support for more complex needs comes through the high needs block, which is a slower route. It is one more reason to have EHC plan paperwork settled well before February.
The Equality Act 2010 duty to make reasonable adjustments is anticipatory. It is not triggered by a particular child arriving and struggling. It requires thought in advance about what disabled children are likely to need, and it applies to prospective pupils — so it is live from the point a school knows a child is coming, and arguably before that.
The duty has three strands, and one of them works differently for schools than it does for you:
That asymmetry matters when you are advocating for a child who uses a wheelchair or a walking frame. Arguing that a school must install a ramp is arguing on the wrong ground. Asking what the accessibility plan already says, whether teaching can be timetabled into an accessible room, and what equipment and staff support can be provided as auxiliary aids is arguing on the right ground — and tends to get further.
Where a child has physical or medical needs, an on-site access review with the receiving school is worth considerably more than a form. Look together at:
Section 100 of the Children and Families Act 2014 places a duty on governing bodies, academy proprietors and pupil referral unit management committees to make arrangements for supporting pupils with medical conditions, with statutory guidance setting out what that looks like. For a child with complex medical needs or epilepsy, three points are worth raising early:
You are often the people who know precisely what training the receiving staff will need, because you have already had it. Saying so — early, and in writing — is one of the most useful things a setting can do for a child.
Identify anything needing capital funding, a contractor or specialist training in the spring rather than in August. Lead times are the reason adjustments are missing in September far more often than unwillingness is.
No guide can prepare you for every eventuality, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. Children arrive with combinations of need nobody anticipated. Something will always come up that is not in anyone’s plan, however carefully that plan was made.
What families are really trying to work out, when they meet you, is not whether you have the right forms. It is whether you will be open when you don’t know something, curious about their child rather than their diagnosis, willing to adapt when the first approach doesn’t work, and prepared to work as a team — with them, and with whoever comes next.
Get the documentation right, absolutely. But children don’t thrive because of documentation. They thrive, and they belong, because of the people around them. That attitude is what carries a transition when the planning runs out.
This guide is one of a series produced by SEND Experts at Hand to help settings and families work with confidence. You may also want the guide on completing a One Page Profile, and the family-facing version of this guide, how to have a brilliant transition to school. If you would like to discuss support for your setting, get in touch.
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 settings: Individual Support Plans and reviews · One Page Profiles and co-production · transitions into school · behaviour and regulation · governance and inclusion oversight · making sense of the SEND system
SEND Experts at Hand offers staff training, consultancy, SENCO support and help with statutory processes and funding — from inside the system. A free introductory telephone consultation is arranged by email.
sendexpertsathand.co.uk/settings
Independent SEND consultancy for education settings and families.
