Special Education Editing and Proofreading Services

Special education runs on a document that most of the people bound by it have never been taught to write. An individual education plan is simultaneously a teaching tool, a legal record of what a child is entitled to, evidence in any dispute with an authority, and the thing a supply teacher reads for ninety seconds before a lesson. Written well it directs support that works. Written as most are — a list of aspirations with no baseline, no method and no way of knowing whether anything happened — it protects nobody and helps no one.

We edit what schools, specialist provisions and support services produce — individual education plans and support plans, education health and care plans and their draft contributions, annual review documentation, provision maps and costed provision documentation, referral and assessment requests to authorities, advice and reports from teaching and support staff, parent-facing explanations of the process and their rights, transition planning between phases and to adulthood, behaviour support and risk reduction plans, teaching assistant guidance and deployment documentation, staff training material, appeal and mediation documentation, and reporting to governors on provision and outcomes. Our editors check that a target can be taught towards and evidenced.

The plan target is where these documents succeed or fail, and the failure is a target that cannot be worked on. "Will improve social interaction with peers" gives a teaching assistant nothing to do on Monday and gives an annual review no way to say whether it was achieved. We write these so each target names an observable behaviour, the conditions under which it should occur, and the standard that counts as met — will join a structured playground game with one adult prompt on four of five days; will ask for help using his card rather than leaving the room, in maths, unprompted, twice a week; so the baseline is recorded, because progress cannot be evidenced from a starting point nobody wrote down; so the method is attached, since a target without a strategy is an expectation placed on the child rather than a plan for the adults; and so the person responsible and the review date are named. Plans written this way also do the legal job, because a specification of provision that is quantified and specific is the standard an authority is held to.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including plans and records about identifiable children. We are editors rather than teachers, educational psychologists or legal advisers, and we offer no view on assessment, provision, entitlement or any decision about a child. What we can do is make plans specific, parent material clear, and reports readable by the people who must act on them.