Call it the archive-dump problem: a school sends everything, but the receiving adult still cannot tell what is current, what works or what happens next.
The folder arrived. The support did not.
That gap is the thing worth fixing. Most handover advice concentrates on getting information moved, and moving information is the easy part now. The harder part is making sure what arrives can be used by an adult who has never met the child, in the ten minutes before the class comes in.
The transfer route and the handover are two different things
The school-to-school service is the Department for Education's secure route for sharing pupil information between schools and local authorities. It includes transfers through the common transfer file, with published instructions covering naming protocols, encryption and compressed files [1].
That route matters. It is not a handover.
The special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) Code of Practice is statutory guidance for schools and other bodies in England, but it does not turn a data transfer into a usable working brief [2]. A file can move safely and still leave the next teacher unsure which strategy works, what has already failed, or who owns the next review.
Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted)'s thematic review says local area partnerships need robust information-sharing arrangements when a child is at risk of leaving or has left a school roll, including at key transitions such as moving to secondary school [3]. The practical lesson is simple: transfer the record by the route provided, then hand over the working picture yourself.
The three-question SEND handover test
Three questions. If the receiving adult can answer all three from what you sent, without ringing you, the handover works. If they cannot answer one of them, that is the part to fix.
What is current?
Not what has ever been true about this child. What is true this week.
Which plan is the live one. Which adjustments are running now and which were withdrawn in March. Which access arrangements apply. What is due to expire.
The failure mode here is quiet. Three versions of the same plan travel together, all plausible, none dated in a way that settles the argument, and the receiving special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) spends a morning working out which one to believe.
What works?
This is the part that is hardest to write down and the part staff most want.
Two or three strategies that have made a real difference, with enough context to reproduce them. The seating that stopped the incidents. The instruction phrasing that gets a response. The five minute check that keeps the afternoon on track.
Include what did not work. A handover that lists only successes risks sending the next school back through the same dead ends, and the pupil pays for that experiment twice.
What happens next?
A handover is not finished when the file is sent. It is finished when a named person owns the next step.
Who is chasing the outstanding referral. Who is the family's contact from now on. When is the first review, and what is it reviewing. If those answers are missing, you have not handed anything over. You have forwarded it.
The one-page handover checklist
One page, three headings, written for someone in a hurry.
Current
- The date the record was last checked, and who checked it
- The one document that is the current plan, named so nobody has to guess
- Adjustments running now, listed separately from adjustments that have been stopped
- Exam access arrangements, where they apply
- Anything time limited that expires this term
What works
- Two or three strategies that have made a difference, with the detail needed to repeat them
- What has been tried and did not help
- Pupil voice, in the pupil's own words rather than a summary of them
- What parents or carers asked for that changed the plan
- The professional advice that shaped the current provision, with its date
What happens next
- The named owner of the next step at the sending school
- Who should own it at the receiving school
- The next review date, and the question that review has to answer
- Any referral in progress, and who is chasing it
- The early signs that tell staff the plan is slipping
If a section runs past its space, that is usually a sign it has drifted into history rather than provision.
Send less, on purpose
Most bad handovers come from anxiety rather than carelessness. Staff worry about leaving something out, so they send everything, and everything is a way of sending nothing.
An archive dump does three things to the receiving school. It hides the useful page inside years of noise. It costs the receiving SENCO the time they would otherwise have spent preparing staff. And it describes the pupil by their worst term rather than their current provision, which shapes how adults meet them on day one.
Selective transfer is the discipline. Keep the current record, the reasoning behind it, and the next step. The archive still exists. It stays where it is, available if someone asks, and it does not travel as a substitute for thinking.
The two moments that test it
Phase transfer. Year 6 to Year 7 is the obvious one, and the one schools plan for. The risk here is volume. Thirty handovers land in one fortnight at a school that is also inducting a whole year group, so anything that takes more than a few minutes to read gets skimmed. Brevity is not a courtesy at transfer, it is what makes the document get read at all.
Staff change mid-year. This is the moment nobody schedules. A class teacher leaves at half term, a teaching assistant (TA) moves to another year group, a SENCO takes on a second site. There is no transfer file involved and no external prompt, which is exactly why support drifts. The same three questions apply inside your own building, and they are usually easier to answer badly there, because everyone assumes the knowledge is still in the room.
There is a third case that deserves more attention than it gets. Where a pupil is on a part time timetable, placed in alternative provision, or moving between settings, more adults hold pieces of the plan and fewer of them see the whole of it. Ofsted's thematic review of children with SEND who are not in school looks at what happens to these children when their education sits outside the ordinary pattern [3]. Continuity for that group depends almost entirely on whether the working picture moves with them, because the routine prompts that catch a normal transfer do not fire.
Usually a records problem, not a goodwill problem
Ask why a handover was thin and you rarely find anyone who did not care. You find fragmentation.
The current plan is on the shared drive. The most recent parent agreement is in an inbox. The educational psychologist's advice is in a paper file in a locked cabinet, and the reason the timetable changed in January lives in the head of someone who is now on maternity leave. Nobody is at fault and there is still no single dependable version of the truth.
That is the constraint worth removing, because it decides how good the handover can be before anyone starts writing it. MeritDocs keeps SEND documents in one searchable place, with review dates visible, filtering by pupil, controlled versions so it is clear which plan is current, and straightforward export when a record needs to leave. When the live record is easy to find, the three questions take minutes to answer. When it is not, the handover is really an act of reconstruction, done at the busiest point in the year.
MeritDocs can also provide guided setup at no extra cost, so a school can test the process against real records rather than buying into a theoretical workflow. Staff still decide what is current and what should travel.
Run the test this term
Do not start with a policy. Start with three pupils.
Pick three whose support is complex enough to matter, and hand their records to a colleague who does not know them. Give that colleague five minutes and the three questions. What is current, what works, what happens next.
Whatever they cannot answer is your actual handover problem, and it will be the same problem for every other pupil on the register. Fix that one thing before transfer season, rather than writing a longer pack in July.
MeritDocs gives schools a 28-day free trial to test that record workflow, including the point where the selected information needs to be reviewed and exported for another setting.