SENCO End of Year Checklist: Everything You Need to Do Before the Summer Holidays

If you're a SENCO heading into June, you already know what's coming. EHCP annual review deadlines stacking up, transition planning for Year 6 leavers, provision maps that need reviewing, and a September that's arriving faster than it feels. The summer term is consistently one of the most demanding points in the SENCO calendar - and it's the one where things are most likely to slip if you don't have a clear system in place.

This end of year checklist for SENCOs covers everything you need to get done before the summer holidays, so you can close the year with confidence and set yourself up for a clean September start.

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1. EHCP Annual Review Deadlines - Know Exactly Where You Stand

Managing EHCP annual review deadlines is one of the most time-critical tasks a SENCO faces in the summer term. Every child with an EHCP must have their plan reviewed at least once a year, and missed deadlines are one of the most common compliance failures Ofsted and local authorities identify in schools.

Before anything else, produce a clear list of every EHCP annual review due before the end of July. For each one, you need to know:

• Has the annual review meeting been scheduled and completed?
• Have written contributions been gathered from parents, teachers, and external agencies?
• Has the annual review paperwork been submitted to the local authority within the required two-week window?
• Is an EHCP amendment needed, and has it been formally requested?

For phase transfer pupils - particularly Year 6 pupils moving to secondary - EHCP annual review meetings should ideally have already taken place, with the updated plan ready to support transition. If any are still outstanding, prioritise these immediately.

Managing EHCP annual review deadlines across a whole school is much harder when the information is spread across emails, spreadsheets, and shared drives. Senflow's EHCP tracker gives SENCOs a live, single view of every review's status - what's complete, what's outstanding, and what's overdue - so nothing slips in the final weeks of term.

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2. SEND Transition Planning - Primary to Secondary and Beyond

SEND transition planning in the summer term is one of the areas most likely to fall through the gaps, because it involves coordinating across schools and settings rather than just within your own.

For Year 6 pupils with EHCPs moving to secondary school, good transition planning means:

• Ensuring the receiving secondary SENCO has a full copy of the EHCP and any supporting documentation well before September
• Reviewing whether the EHCP needs amending to reflect the new placement or any changes in need
• Arranging transition visits and involving the young person and their family in the process
• Liaising with the local authority where a change of named school is involved

For pupils moving into post-16 provision, the statutory deadline for annual reviews is 31st March - but if there is still planning work outstanding, it needs to be completed now.

Don't forget internal transitions either. Pupils moving between key stages, or joining a new class with a different teacher in September, need clear handover information so that support is in place from day one - not week three.

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3. SEND Provision Map Review - What Worked, What Didn't

The end of the summer term is the right moment to conduct a thorough SEND provision map review. This isn't just good practice - it's the evidence base that demonstrates your school is delivering on its SEND obligations.

A meaningful end of year provision map review should ask:

• Did pupils receiving SEND support make measurable progress against their targets?
• Were interventions delivered consistently throughout the year, or did they drift?
• Which interventions had the greatest impact, and which should be reconsidered for next year?
• Is the current level of provision sustainable given next year's staffing and budget?
• Are there pupils on the SEND register who may need additional or different support from September?

Senflow makes end of year provision map reviews significantly faster - because intervention records, session notes, and progress data are all held in one place throughout the year, rather than having to be assembled retrospectively from multiple sources.

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4. SEND Register Audit - Update Before You Break Up

Before the end of term, every SENCO should complete a SEND register audit to make sure the register accurately reflects your current school population and is ready for the new academic year.

Your SEND register audit should cover:

• Are all pupils currently receiving SEND support correctly recorded on the register?
• Are there pupils who should be added following new assessments or emerging needs identified this year?
• Are there pupils who have made sufficient progress and no longer require SEND support, whose status should be reviewed?
• Is the register compliant with your school's data protection and GDPR obligations?

An accurate, up-to-date SEND register is the foundation of everything else - provision mapping, EHCP management, reporting to governors and leadership. If it's not right, everything built on top of it is unreliable.

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5. Compliance Records and Evidence - Get It in Order Now

If Ofsted or your local authority were to review your SEND provision tomorrow, would your records clearly demonstrate what has been done, when, and why? This is the question every SENCO should be able to answer confidently - and the summer term is the right moment to make sure the answer is yes.

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Good SEND compliance records mean:

• Every EHCP annual review is logged with dates, attendees, outcomes, and any actions taken
• Intervention records show what was delivered, by whom, and with what impact
• Decisions about a pupil's SEND support are documented with clear reasoning at the time they were made - not reconstructed afterwards
• Any communication with parents, local authorities, or external agencies is recorded and accessible

Retrospective documentation is always harder and always less convincing than records maintained as a matter of course. Senflow keeps this evidence building automatically throughout the year - so when inspection comes, it is already there.

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6. Prepare for Incoming SEND Pupils in September

The SENCOs who start September calmly are almost always the ones who did the groundwork in June and July. If you have SEND pupils joining your school in September - whether transferring in with existing EHCPs, arriving from other settings, or newly identified - getting ahead of this now makes an enormous difference.

For incoming pupils with EHCPs:

• Request transfer documentation from the previous school as early as possible - don't wait until August
• Read the EHCP before September so you're not encountering it for the first time in week one
• Brief relevant teachers and support staff on what provision needs to be in place from day one
• Confirm with the local authority that your school is correctly named on the plan

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7. Look After Yourself This Summer Term

This doesn't appear on most SENCO checklists, but it should.

The SENCO role carries an enormous amount - statutory compliance, case coordination, emotional support for families, and often a full teaching timetable alongside it. The summer term asks more of you than any other, and burnout in July helps nobody.

If the workload feels unmanageable, be honest with your headteacher now rather than later. And if the systems you're working with are making your job harder than it needs to be - fragmented information, manual tracking, chasing paperwork that should already be organised - the end of the year is exactly the right moment to ask for something better.

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Managing Your SEND End of Year Workload with Senflow

The thread running through every section of this checklist is the same: visibility. Knowing what's outstanding, what's been completed, and what needs to happen next - across every EHCP, every review, every intervention, and every transition.

For most SENCOs, that visibility is the hardest thing to maintain. SEND management software like Senflow is built specifically to fix that - bringing your EHCP annual review tracking, provision maps, SEND register, interventions, and compliance records into one place, so the end of year picture is always clear rather than something you have to piece together under pressure.

If the summer term has felt harder than it should, it might be worth exploring what a proper SEND management system could do for your school before September.

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‍Start a free 30-day trial at senflow.co.uk

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Good luck with the final push. You're doing important work, and the children in your school are fortunate to have someone doing it as carefully as you.

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