In short: a special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) decision log should record the issue, people involved, decision, reason, owner and next review so support does not depend on one person's memory. Keep it short enough to use and specific enough to explain what changed.
Why schools need a SEND decision log
SEND work creates decisions all day. A support plan is changed. A parent raises a concern. A teaching assistant reports that an adjustment is not working. A review meeting agrees a new intervention. A pupil moves class, school or key stage.
The decision is usually recorded somewhere. The trouble starts when nobody can tell where, or when the record says what happened but not why.
A SEND decision log is a short, chronological record of important decisions about a pupil's support. It should show the date, the issue, the people involved, the decision, the reason, the action and the review point.
It is not a diary of every conversation. It is the part of the record that helps the next member of staff understand how the school got from one position to the next.
What belongs in the log?
A decision log is useful when a decision affects provision, access, communication, risk, attendance, assessment or transition.
Examples include:
- changing the support in a SEN Support Plan
- agreeing a reasonable adjustment
- deciding to seek advice from an outside professional
- responding to a significant parent concern
- changing the approach after an intervention review
- agreeing a reintegration step after absence
- recording why a planned action was delayed
- preparing a handover to a new teacher or school
Routine classroom activity does not need a separate entry every time. The test is whether someone coming to the record later would need to understand the decision.
The seven fields that make a decision log useful
1. Date and source
Record when the decision was made and where it came from. This might be a review meeting, parent conversation, staff discussion, assessment or external advice.
The source matters because it stops a later reader treating a working hypothesis as a formal decision.
2. The issue
Describe the problem in plain language. Avoid writing only "concerns discussed" or "support reviewed".
A better entry might say: "Pupil is completing less independent work since moving to a larger class and is leaving tasks before the first step is explained."
That gives the reader something to work with.
3. The decision
State what the school agreed to do. Use an active sentence.
For example: "For the next four weeks, staff will give the first instruction separately, provide a visual first step and review completed work every Friday."
A decision is not the same as a suggestion. If something is still being considered, label it as an action to explore rather than recording it as settled provision.
4. The reason
Explain why the decision was made. Link it to evidence where possible, such as work samples, attendance patterns, pupil voice, parent feedback or an assessment.
This does not need to be a long essay. One or two precise sentences are usually enough.
5. The people involved
Record who contributed to the decision and who owns the next action. Include the pupil and parent perspective when it was part of the discussion.
Do not turn this into a list of everyone copied into an email. Include the people whose information or responsibility affected the decision.
6. The next action
Every decision should lead to a clear next step. Name the owner and use a date.
"special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) to check in" is weak. "SENCO to review the pupil's work sample with the class teacher on 18 September" can be followed up.
7. The review point
Set out when the school will decide whether to continue, change or stop the approach. Without a review point, temporary support has a habit of becoming permanent by accident.
A simple decision log template
Schools can start with this structure:
The template should be short enough that staff use it. If completing an entry takes twenty minutes, people will avoid it or copy old wording.
Where decision logs go wrong
The first mistake is treating the log as a second support plan. It should not repeat the pupil's whole history. It should point to the current plan and explain the decisions that changed it.
The second mistake is recording conclusions without the route taken to reach them. "Support to continue" tells the reader very little. "Support to continue because the pupil now starts independent work within two minutes in four of five observations" is much stronger.
The third mistake is leaving actions without owners. A decision can be perfectly reasonable and still fail because nobody knows who was meant to do the next part.
The fourth mistake is storing the log away from the documents it explains. A decision in one spreadsheet, a plan in a shared drive and a parent update in an inbox do not create one dependable record.
How to fit it into the school week
Do not ask staff to write a decision log entry for every minor interaction. Set a threshold.
A new entry is needed when:
- provision changes
- a review produces a new action
- a parent or pupil raises a concern that changes the plan
- an outside professional gives advice that affects support
- a risk, attendance or transition decision is made
- a planned action is missed or delayed
The SENCO can review new entries during the weekly SEND meeting. That meeting should check whether decisions have an owner, whether review dates are approaching and whether the current support plan needs updating.
The teacher or staff member closest to the event should write the first factual account. The SENCO should not have to reconstruct every decision from memory at the end of the week.
Why a central record matters
A decision log only works if the right people can find it. Staff changes expose this quickly. A new SENCO, supply teacher or class teacher needs to understand what is current without reading every email from the previous term.
A decision log can sit alongside the documents it explains rather than becoming another isolated spreadsheet.
That is especially useful during handovers. The receiving member of staff can see the recent change, the reason for it and the next review point. They do not have to guess whether an old plan is still live.
The same record also helps with parent communication. When the school can see what was agreed and what happens next, updates become clearer and less dependent on whoever happens to answer the phone.
A five minute quality check
Before closing an entry, ask:
1. Could a colleague understand the issue without asking me what I meant? 2. Is the decision clearly separated from the discussion? 3. Does the reason point to evidence or a person's view? 4. Is the next action owned by one named person? 5. Is there a date for review? 6. Does the current support plan need updating too?
If the answer to the last question is yes, update the plan. A log should explain the current record, not become a hiding place for changes that staff need to see.
The takeaway
A good SEND decision log is not more paperwork for its own sake. It is a short chain of evidence that connects concern, decision, action and review.
Schools should use it for decisions that affect a pupil's support and keep it linked to the current SEND workflow. MeritDocs connects the decision log to the plan, provision, review context and approved record, so responsibility can move from one person to another without losing the reasoning.
Patchwork files can survive when the same people stay in the same roles. Staff change. Pupils change. The record has to survive both.
Keep the action side of the log genuinely trackable
A decision log records why something changed. The action side records who now carries it. Those are different jobs, and they fail in different ways. When a review agrees several things, split them into separate rows rather than one combined line. A row that reads 'TA to trial visual prompts and SENCO to chase the educational psychology referral and class teacher to update the parent' hides three owners and three deadlines behind one tick box.
Give every row a single named owner, a due date rather than 'ongoing', and a status that carries meaning. 'Open', 'blocked', 'done' and 'carried forward' tell a reader more than a colour. For a blocked action, record the dependency and who will chase it. The cause may be inside or outside the school.
Use a weekly check for routine follow-through, without delaying urgent pupil-support or safeguarding action. Look for rows past their date, and rows that have quietly moved from one person to another. A reassigned action is where detail leaks out, so record who now owns it and when the handover happened. When an action is finished, note the date and the evidence that closed it, not just the word 'complete'. Keep completed rows in the record under the school's retention policy rather than deleting them, and do not rewrite the original reason for a decision to match how it turned out. See how to set up a live SEND tracker for reviews, interventions and follow-ups.
Why an action log on its own is too thin
An action log answers who will do what. A SEND decision log must also preserve what was decided, what evidence was considered and when the decision will be tested. Without that context, an apparently tidy action can survive while the reason for it disappears.
For example, “Teacher to add visual timetable” is an action. “Following the pupil’s report that unstructured transitions are the point at which lessons break down, trial a visual timetable at the first lesson transition for four weeks; class teacher owns delivery and SENCO reviews attendance and pupil feedback on 18 October” is a decision record. It tells the next colleague what to do and how to judge whether it helped.
The action-to-decision conversion
When a meeting produces an action, add four checks before closing the record:
- What problem or question triggered the action?
- What evidence or views informed the decision?
- What would count as a reason to continue, change or stop it?
- When and by whom will that judgement be made?
If the group has not made a decision yet, record the open question instead. Do not write a confident action to make an unfinished discussion look complete.
A useful boundary with meeting minutes
Meeting minutes explain what was discussed. A decision log preserves the small number of decisions that change provision, communication, ownership or the next review. It should not become a second copy of every conversation.
Use the ICO records-management guidance as a practical reminder to identify what a record is for, keep it accurate and make its maintenance deliberate. The SEND-specific judgement remains with the school and the people involved in the pupil’s support.
MeritDocs can keep the decision, supporting document and review date in the same searchable SEND record, so staff do not have to reconstruct the decision from email threads. It does not decide the provision for the school.
Sources
Relevant guidance: Department for Education (DfE) and Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), SEND code of practice: 0 to 25 years; Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), records management framework.